Asus MG279Q FreeSync Gaming Monitor Review

1. Introduction2. Asus MG279Q3. On Screen Display Menu System4. Asus MG279Q Analysis5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

The Asus MG279Q is a 27-inch AHVA In-Plane Switching 144Hz monitor that supports AMD FreeSync technology for stutter and tearing-free gaming. With a flicker-free WQHD (2560×1440) panel, a 4ms response time, 178 degree viewing angle, and a quoted specification that includes 350-nit brightness and 1000:1 contrast ratio, plus 100 per cent sRGB coverage, the MG279Q could have everything it takes to be a display that’s great for both gaming and non gaming use.

In a perfect world, we’d have a display that offered every single one of the latest technologies without any restrictions. Our wish list includes adaptive-sync technology that works perfectly at a wide range of frequencies (regardless of GPU vendor), an IPS panel for great luminance and viewing angles, but with an ultra-low response time. How about 4K resolution, great colour reproduction, a wide range of inputs and maybe a curved screen as well, and while we’re at it, perhaps make it OLED, not IPS.

But we don’t live in a perfect world, and while such a screen may one day be possible, for now, manufacturers face various issues that make it impossible to bring such a dream display to market.

The biggest issue with OLED technology is (still) cost, and while IPS displays look really good, they simply can’t hit the ultra quick refresh rates offered by TN panels, making ghosting more noticeable.

Both competing adaptive-sync technologies (G-Sync for Nvidia cards, FreeSync for AMD) currently have a few limitations of their own. For starters, the vendor lock-in is an issue. If you have an Nvidia card and a G-Sync display (or vice versa), jumping ship to a different GPU vendor at a later date means you wont be able to use your display in adaptive-sync mode any more, although it will still work normally of course.

Nvidia’s G-Sync module introduces another limitation – it currently only supports a single DisplayPort input, so on many models, you can’t connect an HDMI device, or a secondary PC. There are some exceptions however.

FreeSync also has limitations. The range of FreeSync frequencies supported by most current displays is narrower than with G-Sync, from 40Hz to 144Hz, rather than 30Hz to 144Hz. That means that if your in-game frame rate drops below 40 FPS, your display’s refresh will no longer be locked to your graphics card, and you won’t see the FreeSync effect any more. Notably, as of writing, FreeSync does not work with Crossfire multi-GPU setups either (although support is promised in a future AMD driver release).

Neither technology is perfect then. It’s also worth mentioning the overwhelming majority of adaptive-sync displays are based on TN panels rather than IPS.

Apparently, IPS simply cannot currently offer a 144Hz adaptive-refresh rate. There aren’t many IPS FreeSync displays on the market, but one in particular, LG’s 34UM67, a 21:9 ultra-wide IPS display, only offers FreeSync between 48Hz and 75Hz.

Asus has had to work within these restrictions when designing the MG279Q, and has done a great job of mitigating some of them. Firstly, although they’ve chosen an IPS panel, the FreeSync frequency range it supports is better than competitors. In FreeSync mode it goes from 35Hz up to 90Hz – quite an improvement on LG’s 34UM67, for example.

The improvement at the lower bound could be more useful. If you’re running a demanding modern game (think Grand Theft Auto V or The Witcher III for instance) at the display’s WQHD native resolution at the highest detail with anti aliasing turned on, a real monster rig is needed for frame rates above 90fps. Although it depends on your settings, there’s a good chance it will drop below 40fps in some scenes.

Less demanding games will have no problem hitting 90fps though, and some people will turn a game’s detail settings down to enjoy high frame rates. Others do indeed have a PC capable of running today’s games at these resolutions with high image quality settings and great frame rates. For the vast majority of users though, it’s the improvement at the lower bound that will make a difference. In theory at least.

Bear in mind, outside of FreeSync mode, the MG279Q still goes all the way up to 144Hz, which means the display and GPU are not synchronised. In games you may still see some tearing, but it’s still better than a standard 60Hz display that resorts to V-Sync above 60fps. And in this way it will work with Nvidia cards all the way up to 144Hz as well.

While it’s an IPS display, it has a 4ms refresh rate, which is just about as good as it gets. It also has a wide range of display inputs and a few features borrowed from Asus’s flagship G-Sync display, the ROG Swift PG278Q, such as a navigation joystick and a stand that supports pivot and height adjustment.

Asus MG279Q features:

• 27-inch, WQHD 2560 x 1440 resolution display with IPS technology provides wide-viewing angles, and clear, vivid visuals
• 144Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync™ technology for seamless visuals and smooth gameplay.
• ASUS-exclusive Ultra-Low Blue Light, Flicker-Free, GamePlus, and GameVisual technologies provide a comfortable gaming experience.
• Ergonomically-designed stand with full tilt, swivel, pivot, and height adjustment for comfortable viewing position.

The Asus MG279Q ships with a range of cables and accessories. Asus includes an HDMI and DisplayPort cable, a USB uplink cable and a power cable.

You also get a setup guide, software CD and warranty information. An included red cable management accessory has to be attached to the rear of the stand manually.

The stand comes connected to the display panel out of the box. The base needs to be attached manually.

The stand easily slots into the base, and then is easily secured by tightening a small screw underneath it.

Asus allows the MG279Q to be rotated on the spot using a circular section at the bottom.

Removing the stand is straightforward, used if you want to connect the MG279Q to an external monitor arm via its 100mm VESA mounting holes.

This is by undoing a small black lock on the lower edge of the display panel.

The panel can be swiveled round into portrait mode.

And tilted between -5 and 20 degrees. The MG279Q can also be raised and lowered.

There’s a good range of digital video inputs located underneath. There are two HDMI 1.4 ports supporting MHL connections from Android devices, a full-sized DisplayPort 1.2 connector and a MiniDP connector. The MG279Q notably lacks support for HDMI 2.0.

Each input is clearly labelled, which is handy for any user who isn’t up to date with exactly what each connector looks like.

To the left you can see a pair of fast charging USB 3.0 inputs, along with an uplink connector, and a 3.5mm audio output jack to the right, used to send audio from any connected devices to an external sound system or headphones, bypassing the internal 2w speakers.

Finally on the left of the panel is the IEC power connector, and at the lower right-hand section of the panel is a Kensington lock.

On the right-hand side of the display are five chunky buttons along with a red joystick for moving through menus and adjusting settings in the on-screen display.

Having a joystick is a highly useful addition since the OSD is chock full of settings to adjust the picture and the gaming performance of the MG279Q.

The hotkey buttons work as shortcuts to some of the more common settings in the OSD.

The lower-most button is for power, putting the MG279Q into standby mode or turning it on.

The next button up labelled with a small ‘G’ is the GameVisual setting, which provides six preset colour modes. The default is ‘Racing’ but there are other gaming-related settings as well as sRGB and Cinema modes.

Above this is a “GamePlus” button that enables either an on-screen timer or a crosshair, for an extra edge in FPS titles (or you could call it cheating). This is a popular inclusion on many gaming monitors these days.

There’s a choice of two crosshair styles in either red or green.

We played through some Battlefield 4 multiplayer with the on-screen crosshair enabled, to see if it would help us lay some serious smackdown on other players.

In some cases, we found it to be a distraction. Not every gun in every FPS game fires directly to the very centre of the screen.

Using the joystick you can move the crosshair around to compensate for this though.

The next button up lets you choose the active display input. Above this is a cancel button.

Right at the top is the joystick, which brings up the main menu when pressed, allowing for much finer tuning of the display. The FreeSync setting is located within these menus and has to be enabled first to run the MG279Q in adaptive-sync mode.

Press the joystick and the main menu appears. A list of submenus are on the right-hand side and by default you’ll see a menu with the same GameVisual presets that can be accessed via the hotkey.

Move down to a lower menu and you can adjust the BlueLight setting. Some people’s eyesight is highly sensitive to the blue spectrum, causing fatigue after extended use when the display is set to full brightness.

Plenty of displays now let you dim the display and reduce the blue output via a single setting.

At level 1 to 3, the brightness and colour temperature can be adjusted, while at level 4 the MG279Q complies with TUV Low Blue Light Certification.

The next menu is for colour adjustment, with settings for the brightness, contrast and colour temperature.

The image menu contains settings for Sharpness, Trace Free, ASCR (Asus Smart Contrast Ratio) Vivid Pixel and the all-important FreeSync setting.

Sharpness and ASCR are disabled when the monitor is in Racing or sRGB modes. Trace Free is a blur-reduction technology, and Asus states the MG279Q is the only FreeSync monitor that supports this.

To test the gaming performance of the Asus MG279Q we used a gaming PC with an AMD Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290X Radeon graphics card and an Intel Core i7 4790k CPU, running Windows 7.

To enable FreeSync in games, the setting in the Image menu of the monitor’s OSD needs to be turned on, along with a setting in AMD’s Catalyst Control Center (buried at the bottom of the page in Digital Flat Panel properties).

When you start a game with FreeSync enabled and the MG279Q connected, you’ll have additional refresh rate settings, with an option for 90Hz. If you choose a refresh rate above this, you’ll see a warning that FreeSync mode has been disabled.

You can check FreeSync is enabled at any time by opening the MG279Q’s OSD and looking at the refresh rate in the top right.

For all the talk about adaptive-sync technology, it’s remains a subtle effect in use. Motion feels smoother and animation looks better, but it’s most noticeable when you go back to standard fixed-refresh gaming.

To test how good the MG279Q is as a display in general, we used a Spyder4 Colorimeter, measuring the screen’s brightness, contrast levels and so on without calibrating it to see how it performs out of the box, then calibrated it and measured its colour levels again.

Its out-of-the-box image quality is excellent.

379 nits is an excellent brightness level, but the 770:1 contrast ratio is truly spectacular, with a black point of 0.49 at 100 per cent brightness.

It hits a gamma level of 2.1 exactly.

While offering 100 per cent sRGB and 79 per cent Adobe coverage.

And best of all, a Delta E under 1. This would have been unheard of a few years ago, but is now possible with some modern panels.

The only minor downside to the image quality is the brightness uniformity, which varies between 8.1 and 15.3 per cent across the display. Not an issue for a gaming screen though.

We also tested the monitor’s presets to give some idea of what happens to the image quality. The sRGB mode does noticeably dim the screen, as confirmed by our results.

After calibration, the picture quality remains roughly the same.

Adobe overage improves slightly.

Brightness levels remain the same

As does colour accuracy.

Finally at 100 per cent brightness we measured power consumption of 37.8 watts, which is fairly efficient for a 27-inch WQHD display.The MG279Q bears more than a few similarities to the Asus ROG Swift PG278Q, a feature-packed 27-inch TN panel, but also one of the most expensive G-Sync displays. The MG279Q shaves about 20 per cent off its cost, while still offering most of the features, as well as a shift from TN to IPS panel technology.

With online prices currently hovering around £500, it’s still fairly expensive though and this price point is roughly the entry level for many 4K displays.

Clearly, regardless of whether you use an AMD or Nvidia card, an adaptive-sync monitor is a considerable investment.

It follows that anyone who is willing to splash out on a high-end gaming screen is likely to own a similarly high-end PC, with a top-end graphics card. The 90Hz limit of FreeSync on the MG279Q could prove to be an issue, then. But it’s an unfortunate compromise of having IPS panel technology, with its superior viewing angles and so on. Although it seems neither Asus nor AMD is at fault here, and as it stands, the FreeSync range it supports is better than some other IPS panels.

Besides AMD FreeSync, as a general gaming screen, the MG279Q is definitely a winner. It has an easy-to-use OSD filled with gaming-related options, low ghosting levels, and 144Hz refresh rates, two HDMI ports for games consoles and two DisplayPort inputs for multiple PCs.

HDMI 2.0 is notably missing and there’s no PIP/PBP mode either, a feature some users might miss. It can be useful if you want to keep an eye on a second PC’s Windows installation while playing a game, for example, and is offered by many competing monitors.

The screen quality is superb though, when uncalibrated its Delta E result below 1 is excellent, and the contrast and brightness levels are some of the best we’ve seen.

The brightness uniformity isn’t quite up there with panels aimed at colour-accurate use, although that’s not too important for a gaming screen.

We think the combination of great picture quality and superb gaming performance easily makes the MG279Q the best IPS FreeSync display on the market, and one of the best IPS gaming screens in general.

Is it better than displays with TN panels that can hit 144Hz in FreeSync mode? It depends. If you’re desperate for the absolute best FreeSync performance up to 144Hz, then the MG279Q might not be your first choice.

TN panels are better than they once were, with improved viewing angles, and IPS screens generally no longer suffer from the serious ghosting issues of early models. To the naked eye though, IPS does seem to have an edge, so having that panel technology in a screen designed for gaming does make a difference.

FreeSync is only one part of the offering with the MG279Q. It also offers great picture quality, a fantastic range of features and a very well designed OSD.

Buy from Overclockers UK for £479.99 inc vat.

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Pros:

• FreeSync gaming monitor with IPS panel technology
• Can hit 144Hz when not in FreeSync mode
• Great picture quality, with superb brightness and contrast
• Improved frequency support than most FreeSync displays

Cons:

• FreeSync limited to 90Hz at the upper end
• No HDMI 2.0
• No PIP mode

Kitguru Says : The MG279Q is a great IPS gaming display, regardless of whether or not your PC supports AMD FreeSync.

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