Buying a gaming monitor? Don't make one of these mistakes

Tracking down the best gaming monitors is no simple task. As you can see from how we test gaming monitors, it involves a lot more than throwing a display on a desk and playing a couple of games. And even after years of reviewing them, I still see some common mistakes buyers make when shopping for a new gaming monitor.

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I&#;ve tested dozens of gaming monitors, and although a spec sheet might sway you in one direction, I can tell you with certainty that all gaming monitors aren&#;t built equally. Here are the biggest pitfalls to avoid.

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Thinking in resolution

Describe the monitor you have right now. I can almost guarantee you started with the resolution of the display because, for most people, that&#;s the most important spec to pay attention to. It&#;s important, for sure, but resolution is only part of the larger whole of your gaming monitor.

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What you should be thinking about when shopping for a gaming monitor is pixel density. All too often, I see buyers separate the size of the screen with its resolution &#; I want a 32-inch display, but I don&#;t need more than p. That monitor isn&#;t going to look very good, while something like a 27-inch, p monitor will strike a balance between size and sharpness that looks good.

I&#;m not saying you should ignore resolution, but you should always consider it in the context of your screen size. How many pixels are you getting for the resolution, and how large are those pixels given the screen size? In simpler terms, how many Pixels Per Inch (PPI) are you looking at with your monitor?

You can find PPI calculators online, and ideally, you&#;ll have a PPI of above 100. Go lower, and you&#;ll have a screen that looks blurry, and go higher, your display will look sharper, but you might be spending more than you need to. If you don&#;t want to fuss with the math, here are the screen sizes I recommend for the most common resolutions:

• p &#; 24 inches
• p &#; 27 inches
• 4K &#; 32 inches
• Ultrawide p ( x ) &#; 34 inches

These are hard numbers, but the main thing you want to avoid is buying a monitor that&#;s too big for a given resolution. Thinking this way can help you save some money, too. Something like the Sony InZone M9 is a 4K monitor that&#;s only 27 inches. The Cooler Master Tempest GP27Q is the same size, but it&#;s p. Jumping down nets you a monitor that&#;s half the price, has more local dimming zones, and a higher refresh rate, all while delivering a sweet spot of pixel density.

Ignoring your build

Your monitor is only one part of your gaming rig. It&#;s an extension of your PC, and you should think about it that way. In most cases, I see buyers dump their money into a high-end PC and pair it with a bargain bin monitor that only meets the bare minimum to be classified as a gaming display.

You want a monitor that will compliment your build and allow it to shine. This most commonly comes up in the resolution of your display. Maybe you went all-out on an RTX , but that means continuing to use a p display. In that case, you won&#;t get the full power of the GPU. Not only are you forcing it to a resolution it isn&#;t built for, but you could also run into a CPU bottleneck due to how powerful the GPU is. This can lead to strange situations where you&#;ll see higher performance rendering the game at a higher resolution, even if your display can&#;t take advantage of that resolution.

Thinking this way helps inform your upgrade decisions, too. If you&#;re already sitting on a powerful GPU but a lacking monitor, maybe it&#;s time for a monitor upgrade instead of buying a new graphics card. Similarly, if you have a 4K display but a PC that&#;s built for p, it might be time to swap components.

Going on the spec sheet

You can get a lot of information off a monitor&#;s spec sheet &#; so much, in fact, that you might think it&#;s enough to make an informed buying decision. It usually isn&#;t, which is why it&#;s always important to read monitor reviews for any display you&#;re interested in.

Spec sheets can just straight-up lie about key specs. For example, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 advertised 2,000 nits of peak brightness for a time, despite the fact that it didn&#;t get anywhere near that mark. Similarly, nearly all gaming monitors advertise fast response times without any context for what those response times mean.

The problem is that there is no standard for listing these specs. Each brand can decide how they want to measure and advertise their specs, so it&#;s hard to compare one display to another. Maybe the Odyssey Neo G8 can reach 2,000 nits of peak brightness, but maybe that&#;s for a single pixel for one second. That&#;s not the same as the brightness the monitor can reach for 3% of the screen after five minutes.

Monitor reviews bring other contexts like color accuracy and coverage, but most importantly, they allow us reviewers to verify, clarify, or expand on what the spec sheet says. In the case of response times, for example, a display may be fast but exhibit visual artifacts like inverse coronas or ghosting. Monitor reviews surface these issues that you otherwise couldn&#;t discern from a spec sheet.

Not understanding HDR

Short of budget gaming monitors, nearly every display you find on the market today will advertise some form of HDR. And most of them are terrible. I&#;ve written in the past about why HDR is such a mess on PC, but the short of it is that monitors are able to advertise HDR while delivering a terrible HDR experience.

Most advertising centers around the DisplayHDR certification, which is broken into several tiers. The vast majority of HDR monitors only meet the lowest tier, DisplayHDR 400. At this tier, the monitor may as well not support HDR at all. To even get HDR into the conversation, you should have a DisplayHDR 600 monitor, and even then, there can be problems.

If HDR is important to you, here are the things you should pay attention to:

• DisplayHDR certification tier &#; The higher the tier, the better.
• Local dimming &#; HDR requires a lot of contrast, so local dimming is a good way to make a scene more dynamic. The more dimming zones, the better.
• Contrast ratio &#; Displays with more contrast can generally push better HDR.
• Peak brightness &#; In order to achieve high contrast, you need either low black levels or high brightness. For most displays, higher brightness means a higher contrast ratio.
• Panel type &#; Some panels are better suited for HDR than others. For example, QD-OLED panels like you&#;ll find on the Alienware 34 QD-OLED provide exceptional HDR due to having perfect black levels.

Keeping with the last piece of advice, you can use the spec sheet to narrow down your search, but it&#;s always important to check individual monitor reviews.

That&#;s what to look for if you want HDR, but don&#;t need HDR. It&#;s better to have a solid SDR display than a mediocre HDR one, and a good HDR experience generally costs a lot of money. Again, most displays support HDR. You should just know how different that experience can be so you&#;re not disappointed.

Forgetting refresh rate

Refresh rate is a make-or-break spec for a gaming monitor. If you&#;re unfamiliar, the refresh rate of a display is how many times it can display a new image each second. So, a 60Hz refresh rate shows 60 images in a second, while a 144Hz one shows 144. Simple.

The problem is that your graphics card doesn&#;t care about your refresh rate. It will send as many frames as it renders to your screen, even if the screen isn&#;t ready for a refresh. That means if you&#;re using a 60Hz display and achieving 120 frames per second (fps), only half of those frames are showing up on your screen.

A proper gaming monitor should have north of a 100Hz refresh rate (most come with a 144Hz refresh rate). You can game on a 60Hz display, but it&#;s not ideal, and crossing that 100Hz threshold is what largely separates gaming monitors from regular monitors.

In addition to a high refresh rate, you&#;ll want to make sure the monitor supports variable refresh rate. Nvidia has G-Sync and AMD has FreeSync, but nowadays, you can generally use either regardless of what brand of GPU you have. VESA also has its Adaptive Sync standard, which works with either GPU.

A lot of options

There are a ton of options for gaming monitors, and it&#;s hard to know where to start. Sketch out what size, resolution, and feature you want, narrow down some options, and look up individual reviews to verify that your monitor will work as you expect. That&#;s the best way to find the display you want.

The biggest thing is to avoid the pitfalls that are common with gaming monitors, from misleading specs to vague HDR claims. Keep these tips in mind, though, and you&#;ll find the right gaming monitor for you.

Gaming PCs are some of the most expensive computers on the market, in large part because the best gaming PCs are loaded with pricey high-end components to make even the most demanding games run buttery-smooth at p or higher.

I know because I've been building and buying gaming PCs since I was a kid, and now I help oversee our coverage of all things computing here at Tom's Guide. Part of that work involves reviewing the latest gaming PC builds from major vendors like Acer, Alienware, Corsair, Dell, Maingear and more, so I've been lucky enough to go hands-on with a variety of different gaming PCs at prices ranging from under a thousand dollars to well over $5k.

Sometimes readers write in asking for help or advice on what PC to buy, and my response is typically to ask what they want to use it for and how much they can afford to spend. But recently someone wrote in with a trickier question about whether to buy a seemingly too-good-to-be-true gaming PC off Amazon from a vendor I don't recognize.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website 27-inch gaming all-in-one PC.

Ask us anything!

Do you have any questions you'd like to ask the experts at Tom's Guide? Please us at . 

I just had a question about a PC and monitor I am considering purchasing. I was wondering if I can send you the Amazon links and you could take a look and let me know what you think, I would really appreciate it if you could help me out as I am new and do not know much about PCs and monitors.

This was the pc I was looking at, and I was looking at this monitor to go with it.

Do these look good? Or or do you have any other suggestions? My budget for these is $750 with the PC and monitor together.

If you'd rather not click through the links the reader shared (or if they no longer work by the time you read this) we're looking at a simple HP 27h 27-inch 75Hz p monitor and a slightly customizable gaming PC from STGAubron.

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At time of writing, the monitor is discounted down to $159 from its list price of $299, while the PC can be purchased in 10+ configurations ranging from $399 to upwards of $1,100. So obviously there's real appeal here for someone who'd rather not blow more than a thousand bucks on a new PC just to play games.

Knowing exactly what's in the PC your buying is critical to getting a good deal, so don't trust a vendor that obfuscates those details."

And since I personally haven't had a chance to go hands-on with either product, I can't say for sure that it would be a bad idea to buy this combo off Amazon. It's possible you could get years of fun out of this hardware. Certainly the monitor is good enough for p gaming, and while it's probably not the brightest or most vivid display it at least supports AMD FreeSync, so you can count on variable refresh rate support regardless of whether you've got an AMD or Nvidia GPU.

But my experience tells me this STGAubron deal is too good to be true. If you're thinking of buying a cheap gaming PC off Amazon, I think there are a few things you want to look for before dropping hard-earned cash on a product you likely can't return.

In fact, that's the biggest and most glaring reason why I think buying a cheap gaming PC like this STGAubron off Amazon is a bad idea&#;you can't count on having reliable tech support or warranty coverage.

Amazon offers a basic 30-day return policy, but the PC needs to be either damaged/dead on arrival or in unopened boxes, so if you're unsatisfied with the way it runs games or you find it dies on you 2 months in, you're likely out of luck unless your PC vendor offers a warranty&#;and I can't even find a website for STGAubron, much less any details on what warranty (if any) they offer on their products.

Compare that to a known vendor like Acer, Dell or Maingear, who all offer at least 1-year limited warranties on their gaming PCs that you can easily find by just Googling them. These warranties typically cover the cost of returning or repairing the PC in the event a component like the hard drive or graphics card breaks, and they offer some peace of mind when you're spending this much money on a PC&#;especially if you're not comfortable repairing it yourself.

(Now, I can't vouch for whether these companies are easy to work with when returning products, or how well they honor their warranties, but at least they offer them!)

Even if you've been building PCs your whole life and the thought of having to crack into the case to diagnose what's wrong doesn't scare you, there are a couple warning signs that tell me a PC like this one is not a good investment.

See how this PC listing doesn't ever actually tell you what model of CPU you're getting? That's a huge red flag.

(Image credit: Future)

First and foremost, the Amazon page for this PC makes it hard to understand what specific components are in each build. Knowing exactly what's in the PC your buying is critical to getting a good deal, so don't trust a vendor that obfuscates those details. Even if you don't know the difference between Intel Raptor Lake 13th gen CPUs and AMD's Ryzen series CPUs, you can at least punch the name of the components into Google and look up reviews and comparisons of how well they perform (our sister site Tom's Hardware is a great resource for this) before you buy. 

But if a vendor like STGAubron doesn't tell you exactly what's in the PC you're buying, beware: Tomfoolery is afoot.

Second, the reviews of this PC are not great. You can't always trust user reviews on sites like Amazon since you never know if someone's being entirely honest, but in this case you just need to scroll through a few to see mixed messages about how reliable this PC is and whether it performs as advertised. Some customers seem happy with it, but even those who are often mention issues like failing Wi-Fi cards.

When checking user reviews of a product on Amazon, don't just read the first few &#; dig into the overall rating, check the ratio of star ratings (if there are a lot of 1-star or 2-star ratings, watch out) and read through the good and bad reviews before you buy.

(Image credit: Future)

This is a common issue when looking for great deals on gaming PCs, and while it sometimes pays to seek out a cheaper, less well-known vendor when you're looking for deals, a gaming PC is not something you want to skimp on if you don't know how it works or how to fix it if it breaks. 

Finally, I recommend you do a Google search of any PC before you buy to read reviews from multiple sources. We have our own catalog of gaming PC reviews I recommend you peruse, though we've never reviewed anything from STGAubron. 

That's partly because they've never reached out to offer us one for review, and after Googling the brand I think I know why: STGAubron seems to come under a lot of criticism online, and while there are some positive reviews to be found there are also quite a number of negative ones.

Also, that quick search turned up a Reddit post from earlier this year in which a user describes how two clients of theirs had bad experiences purchasing STGAubron gaming PCs off Amazon which arrived containing used components. While such tales should be taken with a grain of salt since we can't confirm their veracity, the fact that the user clearly explains how both STGAubron gaming PCs arrived packing components that had clearly seen better days (including GPUs which may have been previously used to mine cryptocurrency, something so damaging it's known to void warranties) is another huge red flag. 

The user goes on to claim that they did their own research and found STGAubron is in fact a shell company of a Chinese computer scrap recovery outfit, and that they may be building PCs out of used parts and reselling them. If that's true, it goes a long way towards explaining why this seemingly cheap gaming PC has very mixed user reviews and only vague details about what components are inside.

So while you could conceivably get one of these STGAubron gaming PCs and a cheap monitor like the HP 27h for less than $750, I think you'd be much better off waiting and saving up for a better gaming PC from a more reliable company.

Acer Predator Orion : $1,799 @ Acer.com
Acer's Predator Orion is a solid mid-range gaming PC that hits the sweet spot between price and p performance, delivering 60+ FPS in games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla despite its aging components.

For example, I like the Acer Predator Orion as a solid starter gaming PC because it's stylish, runs pretty quiet and can be had with components (including an Nvidia GeForce RTX ) good enough to run most games in p at 30-60 frames per second for under $2,000.

Obviously that's still more than double the $750 budget our reader allocated for their gaming PC setup, and it's definitely not cheap. But it's a solid deal for a great gaming PC, and I can vouch that you will get what you pay for. Plus, you get the added security of a warranty and tech support from Acer, which is more than I can say for this cheap STGAubron gaming PC off Amazon.

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