Should you want to dispense with the stand and use your own (or wall mount it) that’s possible, too, since the screen has VESA standard 100mm mounting points but it would be a shame to miss out on such a stylish stand. Strong colour consistency and slight extension beyond sRGB, giving a ‘rich and natural’ image without potentially overbearing saturation The Lagom text appeared a blended grey throughout, with a slight red hue to the striping of the text. There were no clear flashes of saturated red, orange or green or shifts between these with a bit of head movement. This indicates a low viewing angle dependency to the gamma curve of the monitor, typical for an IPS-type panel.

Dell Alienware AW2521HF Review | PC Monitors

It's not just colour settings you get on the AW2521HFL, though. There are also specific Sharpness, Response Time and Dark Stabilizer settings, the latter of which artificially brightens the screen to help you spot things in the shadows. It's a feature often touted as a 'must-have' for competitive multiplayer games to give you that extra 'edge' online - especially when said games are often the ones that can make the most of the AW2521HFL's 240Hz refresh rate. However, I found that the screen's regular peak brightness and accompanying contrast ratio from the Gamer preset was more than enough to help me see everything that I needed to in-game. Note that there is always some disparity between how emissive objects (monitor) and non-emissive objects (printed sheet) appear. The representation of shades in this image depends on the camera and your own screen, it’s not designed to show exactly how the shades appear in person. It still helps demonstrate some of the relative differences between the original intended sRGB shade and what the monitor outputs, however. Full profiling and appropriate colour management on the application would provide a tighter match, our intention here is to show what can be expected in a non colour-managed environment. The Alienware AW2521HFL is an excellent monitor overall with better imaging results over the dark gray-colored Alienware AW2521HF. It fares considerably better in color accuracy and brightness with minimal tweaking, but the calibrated results are identical. The monitor’s agile pixel response time and FreeSync/G-Sync compatibility make it a compelling choice for competitive gamers.Warmer than factory defaults, but far from ‘Warm’ on our unit with a high colour temperature and cool tint to the image. Finally, note again that you can go to ‘Game Enhance Mode’ in the ‘Game’ section of the OSD to activate the ‘Frame Rate’ feature. This displays the current refresh rate of the monitor and will reflect the frame rate if it’s within the main variable refresh rate window (e.g. 80 – 240fps). Slight deviation from preferred ‘2.2’ gamma, without gamma settings in OSD. Some would prefer a wider gamut for extra vibrancy The Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition graphical benchmark looks very nice on the Alienware 25, with natural-looking colors in the green fields and blue skies. The colors could be a bit more vibrant, though, and while the picture is quite bright, fine details in shadows and dark objects occasionally appear a little muddy. The action is nice and smooth, with no noticeable motion artifacts.

AW2521HFL, no sound | DELL Technologies ‎AW2521HFL, no sound | DELL Technologies

The best thing about the Alienware AW2521HFL is its strong performance in motion handling. The monitor offers excellent control over blurring and ghosting which makes it great for fast-paced competitive titles. This model also has three overdrive settings to further clean up its image output, but we recommend staying with the Fast level. We also observed various episodes of the animated TV series Futurama. This further reinforces the idea of strong colour consistency, with large areas of individual shade. The monitor performed well here, without clear shifts in saturation or colour tone. Slight changes could be observed at the very edges for some shades, such as the purple of Leela’s hair gaining a bit of an extra red vs. blue hue to the purple – more pronounced if sitting close to the screen. Most shades appeared very consistent indeed, with any slight deviation due more to uniformity than any viewing angle related weakness. This contrasted starkly with competing TN models that would show an obvious ‘gradient’ of saturation vertically and VA models which show shifts from centre to bottom and sides. For a wide range of shades. The pastel shades of this movie were suitably varied and muted, whilst vibrant shades such as neon reds and greens appeared fairly eye-catching. Not to the extent seen on models with a more generous colour gamut, but enough to stand out and have the intended look overall. Reasonable contrast, in-line with expectation, strong gamma consistency and a pleasing luminance adjustment rangeAn obvious cool (blue) almost icy-looking tint due to very high colour temperature. Some shades brightened up just slightly due to gamma handling, but not by a huge amount. Strong consistency due to IPS-type panel, without the perceived gamma and saturation shifts associated with TN or VA panels.

Alienware AW2521HFL review | Rock Paper Shotgun Alienware AW2521HFL review | Rock Paper Shotgun

The video below shows the monitor in action. The camera, processing done and your own screen all affect the output – so it doesn’t accurately represent what you’d see when viewing the monitor in person. It still provides useful visual demonstrations and explanations which help reinforce some of the key points raised in the written piece. IPS glow’ eats away at detail, particularly near bottom corners. Screen surface imparts a bit of graininess to lighter content Dell claims the Alienware 25 can hit up to 99% of the sRGB color space. It comes close in our tests, but in Standard mode, the monitor only reaches 96.8% of the gamut, as shown in the sRGB color-space diagram below... Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test. The Alienware AW2521HFL is a FreeSync Premium gaming monitor, but its also compatible with Nvidia’s G-Sync Compatible mode. Its certification is delayed at this time, but it is pretty much guaranteed since the Alienware AW2521HF is already listed by Nvidia. Input lag sits at 3ms, so there is no need to worry about delays or de-synced instances. Thoughts on the Alienware AW2521HFLOur suggestions regarding use of VSync also apply, but you’re using Nvidia Control Panel rather than AMD Radeon Software to control this. The setting is found in ‘Manage 3D settings’ under ‘Vertical sync’, where the final option (‘Fast’) is equivalent to AMD’s ‘Enhanced Sync’ setting. You’ll also notice ‘G-SYNC Compatible’ listed under ‘Monitor Technology’ in this section, as shown below. Make sure this is selected (it should be if you’ve set everything up correctly in ‘Set up G-SYNC’). The image below is a macro photograph taken on Notepad with ClearType disabled. The letters ‘PCM’ are typed out to help highlight any potential text rendering issues related to unusual subpixel structure, whilst the white space more clearly shows the actual subpixel layout alongside a rough indication of screen surface. This model uses a ‘regular’ (medium) matte anti-glare surface. Strong glare-handling is provided due to significant diffusion of ambient light. This diffusion also affects light emitted from the monitor, with a negative impact on the clarity and vibrancy potential of the screen. The screen surface has a bit of graininess to it when observing lighter shades, a very slightly ‘sandy’ look to it, if you like. It doesn’t show strong graininess or a heavily smeared appearance, however. The surface texture is quite similar if not a touch lighter than the surface texture used on most high refresh rate ~24” Full HD TN models. As shown in the image above, the monitor uses the usual RGB (Red, Green and Blue) stripe subpixel layout. This is the default expected by modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS. As a Windows user you don’t need to run through the ClearType wizard, although you may still wish to adjust this according to your preferences. As a Mac user there’s no need to worry about text fringing from non-standard subpixel layouts. The subpixel layout and arrangement is normal and we had no subpixel-related concerns related to sharpness or text clarity on this model.

Alienware AW2521HF 24.5 inch Full HD (1920x1080) Gaming

A ‘gamery’ but in our view tasteful aesthetic, good ergonomics, competitive pricing and a relatively easy to drive resolution A sensitive camera and a utility called SMTT 2.0 was used assess the latency of the Dell Alienware AW2521HF. Over 30 repeat readings were taken to help maximise accuracy. Using this method, we calculated 2.63ms (under 2/3rds of a frame at 240Hz) of input lag. At 60Hz we measured a slightly higher but still reasonable 6.47ms. This figure is influenced both by the element of input lag you ‘see’ (pixel responsiveness) and the element you ‘feel’ (signal delay). It indicates a very low signal delay at 240Hz which even sensitive users shouldn’t find bothersome. Note that we have no way to accurately measure input lag with Adaptive-Sync active in a variable refresh rate and frame rate environment. The average contrast ratio with only brightness adjusted was 1054:1, a hair above the specified 1000:1 and as expected for the panel. With our ‘Test Settings’ we recorded a perfectly respectable 1063:1. The highest contrast ratio recorded on the table was 1107:1, using ‘Custom Color’ with all colour channels at their neutral position of ‘100’. The lowest contrast ratio recorded was 831:1, following the significant adjustments made for our ‘Relaxing evening viewing’ settings. The maximum luminance recorded in this table was 427 cd/m², whilst the minimum white luminance recorded was 33 cd/m². This yielded a 394 cd/m² luminance adjustment range with a good bright maximum and dim minimum. The image appears ‘rich and natural’ overall, with good variety. The gamma is slightly below target, brightening up some shades just a little, but the overall image balance is very respectable.

A Design Beamed From the Future

The monitor includes a range of ‘Preset Modes’; ‘Standard’, ‘FPS’, ‘MOBA/RTS’, ‘RPG’, ‘SPORTS’, ‘Game 1’, ‘Game 2’, ‘Game 3’, ‘ComfortView’, ‘Warm’, ‘Cool’ and ‘Custom Color’. The numbered ‘Game’ presets and ‘Custom Color’ are most flexible as they allow you to adjust the colour channels and saturation levels. The remaining presets make specific adjustments to those and can’t be manually altered. The numbered ‘Game’ presets can have unique ‘Brightness’ and ‘Contrast’ levels assigned to them as well, whereas this is set universally for the remaining presets. Many of the presets make further adjustments, such as ‘FPS’, ‘MOBA/RTS’, ‘RPG’ and ‘SPORTS’ adding a sharpness filter which can’t be disabled or counteracted effectively in the OSD aside from by selecting a different preset. These were briefly explored in the OSD video, but for the purposes of this table we’ll be looking at manual adjustments and settings we feel have more utility. All that being said, if gaming is where your priorities lie, then the AW2521HF is a great choice. It’s fast and responsive, and is compatible with both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia’s G-Sync technologies for tear-free gaming, which is a sensible move if you own a card from one manufacturer and think you might switch allegiance sometime in the future. It can also only reach 81.1% of the cinema-focused DCI-P3 color space. This isn't particularly high, and can result in dull colors when watching movies. The modest color space coverage of the Alienware 25 comes through in our 4K Costa Rica test video. The greens of plants and frogs look natural and reasonably well-saturated, but they could have appeared a bit more vivid. Details are sharp, and action is smooth, but colors aren’t quite as rich or as vibrant as they could have been with proper HDR processing, or simply a wider color gamut (like on the also-HDR-less Alienware 34).