I just tested this 600Hz gaming monitor, and it actually made me better at Counter-Strike 2

When you blink, it lasts 0.25 seconds on average. To blink in front of the Zowie XL2586X+ 600Hz gaming monitor would be to miss 150 frames of gameplay! This $999 24-inch gaming monitor is pure overkill in the best way possible.

If you were to look at the spec sheet of this 1080p screen, you’ll probably laud that price tag like I did. And being honest, this is aimed squarely at the esports crowd. There are far better options with a better balance of resolution and refresh rate, such as the 4K OLED gaming monitor.

But if being the best at competitive multiplayer gaming is critical, this is the smoothest picture I’ve ever seen on a screen. So smooth, in fact, it actually made me better at Counter Strike — to the point that I didn’t embarrass myself at the Intel Extreme Masters esports tournament in Katowice, Poland.

Meet the Zowie XL2586X+

What is it with monitors and weird names? Nonetheless, if you’re watching the IEMs online, you’ll notice that all the esports athletes are using these screens — packing the pro specs they need.

Now, outside of that bonkers refresh rate, you’d be hard pushed to not wince a little at the fact you paid nearly $1,300 for a rather dim 1080p monitor, but that’s not the point of it. I played a few rounds of Counter-Strike 2 to test this and it was at this moment that I realized the beauty of it.

No matter how quick my character was rotating and running to take down the enemy, the picture was crystal clear — no motion blur whatsoever. My mind was blown. And the secret sauce is Dynamic Accuracy 2 technology, which reduces screen shaking in-game, dramatically speeds up the backlight and is essentially the meeting point of the reactivity of CRT and picture sharpness of LCD.

This is made possible with a new dual backlight technology that makes the LCD panel softer on the eyes and more accurate too. All monitors show pictures by turning pixels on and off and moving the backlight reactively to them. At 600Hz, this would’ve simply been impossible with the usual backlight, so BenQ and Zowie had to invent this to make it possible. This does come at the expense of brightness and color though. 320 nits is dim and while Zowie talks about a 35% boost in color, this is still a dull picture.

But in the end, none of this matters. It’s an esports monitor — designed to get up close and personal (the side flaps block light sources, and that expanded angularity of the monitor pitch is built for it). Put simply, color gets in the way, managing high brightness gets in the way. You need to see every single frame, and this is the only way to do it at the moment.

Outlook

So let’s cut to the brass tacks. It’s probably not going to be a monitor that the vast majority of you reading this will buy. This is the byproduct of focussing all your efforts on one thing and compromising the rest.

But I can’t deny it — this screen is so cool. Its refresh rate is faster than the average human eye! Zowie is giving us a preview of just how fast the monitors of the future could be running for the rest of us, and I’m so in for it!

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