The best gaming monitors available in Australia

The monitor market is awash with fancy looking screens, and if you're not a gamer, the standard “biggest is better” logic of television could very well apply to you. However, if you are the sort of PC user whose life (or “lives”) can hinge on a millisecond moment in an intense online battle, well, your screen needs are going to be quite different from the average Joe.

Just as professional graphic artists have a speciality range of screens to meet their obsessive chroma accuracy needs, Gaming monitors are a sub-class designed to maximise the enjoyment of the most extreme forms of interactive entertainment. The DNA of a desirable gaming screen leans less toward size or insane 8K resolutions and more toward responsiveness and motion/fluidity. To not have this is to ruin the “there-ness” of fully inhabiting your on-screen avatar. Your gaming monitor also needs to know how to play extra nice with your dedicated graphics card, which can make this an expensive proposition indeed.

Much like trying a virtual reality headset for the first time, playing something on a monitor 144hz refresh rate is a see-it-to-believe-it experience. (It also kind of ruins the experience of having to go back to a regular monitor, too.) This striking IPS panel combines those all-important hertz with a 1440p resolution, and the end result is a very decent gaming screen at a great price. Other side benefits include a respectably wide viewing angle, decent contrast and color accuracy, and a wide color gamut.

That said, you should be aware of some shortcomings here and there. The 4ms response time is bordering the absolute limit of what a serious gamer would accept. Having 1440p resolution but no HDR stings a little as well. Be that as it may, this four-year-old set punches quite a bit above its weight. The benefit of being a little longer in the tooth is that you can scoop it up on the cheap.

Best budget gaming monitor

Asus TUF Gaming VG259Q

Honestly, it all depends on what your desk space is and what you're hoping to achieve with your games. If you're the hyper-competitive type who plays online a lot, you're going to want to steer your purchase towards high refresh rates and response times over resolution. Performance (and getting any edge you can in the heat of the moment) is your religion.

Conversely, if you're a sim gamer playing by your lonesome, you're going to favour bigger screens and bigger resolutions (possibly even a curved screen) to maximise the sense of immersion you're seeking. Heck, you might be better served by securing a bunch of more modestly performing, bargain-priced panels to link together to create your own wall-screen gaming battle-station.

Put simply, the refresh rate is the amount of times your gaming monitor refreshes or "redraws" the image on your screen every second. This specification is measured in Hertz, which is most commonly abbreviated to "Hz" in marketing. While a high refresh rate doesn't make a gaming monitor better per se, it can help reduce the motion blur caused by too many frames-per-second (fps) if your monitor can't keep up. Refresh rate is more important in a monitor or television used for gaming (opposed to one used solely for watching movies) as games produce content, more "images" on the fly, and a monitor with a high refresh rate will do a better job of keeping up.