Today we're looking at a monitor from a brand we've never used earlier, but one that gets heavily requested: Viotek. They're popular on Amazon and make some of the cheapest gaming monitors you can go, then nosotros're interested to see how they stack up and whether it'southward worth buying this sort of monitor over a meliorate known brand option.

The monitor we take to review today is the Viotek GN32LD. This FreeSync display is 31.5-inches in size, and packs a curved 1440p VA LCD that tops out at a 144 Hz refresh rate. Information technology's priced at $470 through Amazon, which is around the mark of some other budget brands similar Pixio and MSI that accept monitors based on the same panel, but it's a lot cheaper than the Asus ROG Strix XG32VQ or Samsung C32HG70 for example.

When testing out budget-oriented monitors we're e'er wary of a few things: is the build quality any practiced, and is the display defective in whatever way? To address that second indicate first, our retail monitor shipped with no issues whatsoever, then no dead pixels, and Viotek offers a full replacement if your monitor arrives with a dead pixel so it's not something to be overly concerned nigh.

Equally for build quality, the GN32LD is fine. It'southward non particularly amazing, and I certainly wouldn't form it as a high-end construction, but it's fine for a gaming monitor. The base of operations of the three-pronged stand up is metallic, but otherwise the stand's colonnade and the rest of the monitor use grey-ish plastic with a few cerise highlights. The plastic used on the pillar feels peculiarly inexpensive equally it uses a really basic terminate, though it's a bit amend on the rear of the display itself.

Overall, Viotek is using a gamer design which I tend not to prefer, there'south a lot of strange angles and vents that it probably could have done without. There'south as well 2 RGB LED strips on the rear which add zilch to the design, I mean yous're not even able to see them during standard performance and their RGB support is bones. Plus the RGB clashes with the red highlights so overall it's a bit of a strange choice.

The stand up is sturdy and does support both height and tilt aligning, although its height conform is quite limited. There's no swivel supportn – not that swivelling is that important – and there'southward too no cable management hole, which once again is a fleck of a nit option.

My biggest outcome with the pattern is the OSD controls. Viotek have gone with four buttons along the bottom edge of the panel, which makes navigating through the OSD a pain compared to a directional toggle. All monitors should use directional toggles with menus of this complication, no exceptions.

However the OSD itself includes a lot of features you'd likewise find on monitors from other brands, and so you're not missing out on much going with the cheaper Viotek choice. The OSD includes things like a low blueish light style, crosshairs for adulterous, a super resolution feature, and even picture in picture show, along with the usual epitome quality controls.

The array of inputs on the GN32LD is basic: DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, plus an sound output jack. The monitor supports FreeSync with low framerate compensation, and so yous get the adaptive sync beyond the unabridged refresh range upwardly to 144 Hz. And I even so think the combination of resolution and refresh charge per unit the GN32LD provides – it's a 2560 x 1440 monitor after all – is perfect for virtually gamers with reasonably high-end hardware, information technology gives a great mix of smoothness and clarity.

The Samsung VA panel used features a 1800R curvature, I'm more a apartment panel kind of guy with sixteen:nine monitors but at 32-inches in size the curve isn't that bad. Plus correct now there aren't many options for monitors of this size and specs that aren't curved, and then you're pretty much stuck with it anyhow.

Let'southward talk a bit more about the panel and see how our exam information matches up to Viotek's claims. For brightness, they list 280 nits of typical effulgence and I measured a peak of 365 nits, which is going to exist too brilliant for most desktop users. The contrast ratio falls a little brusque of Viotek'due south claims though, at a bear upon nether 2500:1 compared to its rated "3000:1" value, although as this is a VA panel we're nonetheless getting that nice high contrast ratio. It's also good to see this contrast ratio held throughout the brightness range.

New to our exam suite is response time testing, ane of the most heavily requested metrics. We've bought some of the fastest tools available to test response time and gone about testing some of the monitors we had on manus, and over time every bit nosotros do more monitor reviews we'll go a larger set of information for some sweet comparisons. But the good news is we tin now provide this key metric that tells us a lot about smearing, ghosting and how suitable this monitor is for gaming.

So, Viotek claims a 3ms grey-to-greyness response time using overdrive, but in my testing using the "high" response time setting – the highest setting available and the optimal setting for this monitor – I recorded simply an eight.2ms average greyness-to-grey response, which is quite deadening but inside a normal range for VA panels. Equally we know, VA is ane of the slower LCD technologies and that's on testify in this result.

It might also be useful to know that on average, ascent times were significantly longer than fall times, almost double across our test points, and mid-grey transitions (for case, twenty% white to 80% white) are particularly sluggish. I also recorded a fifteen.1ms blackness-white-black transition fourth dimension, which shows you the time required to make the largest luminance transition, in example you were wondering.

The important matter to note here is that both the average greyness-to-grey response and rise times in general actually took longer than the refresh window. This is a 144 Hz monitor, and then the frame is updated every 6.94ms, except this console just transitions in, on average, 8.2ms. This ways that in some cases you might not be getting a true 144 Hz refresh because the crystals themselves merely tin can't transition fast plenty to show a completely new epitome at that rate. While you don't get any noticeable overshoot, smearing and ghosting are concerns due to the long response time.

However this isn't an issue with this Viotek monitor specifically, rather all monitors that employ the same Samsung VA panel will have response times roughly equal to what I've shown here. So don't think you lot're getting a faster display if y'all buy the MSI or Asus monitors instead; they still use the same console and so they are also faced with the aforementioned inherent limitations of the VA technology. As for Viotek's 3ms response time claim, non exactly authentic to say the least.

The good news is the GN32LD exhibits excellent input lag of just a few milliseconds, so while transitions aren't especially fast, the monitor processes its inputs quickly and gets on with the chore. And yes, we take the ability to test input lag now as well, which we've normalized for the tools we're using to give an estimate of the brandish's processing time. And unlike some lag testing tools out at that place, our custom solution works at the display's native resolution and refresh rate.