My Acer XV240YP has arrived and I have tested it for 3 days already. As a 165hz ips monitor, I find that it's price is tremendously cheap compared to it's performance. The design looks minimalist, with large round base, thin bezels (not the thinnest, just average-thin), and it has got a swivel stand that allows to adjust the monitor's height, turn 360°, rotate to 180°, and also tilt. The cable ports are at the bottom behind the monitor but there's no way of hiding the cables, so if you have ocd, better not get this monitor.

Colour-wise, out of the box the monitor will automatically set WARM as it's colour temperature setting and this can be switched to either normal (still quite warm), cool (whiter and bluish) and user manual set. I found that none is of my preference so I thought about setting manual colour temps, but as soon as I enabled hdr, I was literally mind blown. Everything just appear hugely contrasted and in high definition colour with auto colour set. Warmer white on cooler white background will appear to be of very different colour with hdr switched on, and if hdr is switched off, whatever manual brightness or colour settings I did won't be as good.

Black level is also adjustable, but IPS panel won't be as good as amoled in terms of black and colour saturation. I found that this monitor is nearly (95% similar) as white, blue and red compared to amoled panel, but green and black is pretty different when compared side by side. Green appear lighter (and yellowish) in this monitor, and black very slightly greyish or glowing. With hdr switched on I found that black becomes darker and glowing is reduced significantly. But green still appear lighter and less saturated even after manually adjusted. So just ignore this as this is actually the inevitable weakness of an ips panel.

This is a gaming monitor, so of course it has an overdrive software system to improve gaming performance. At normal overdrive settings I was able to get a about 5.6ms mprt at 165hz which is ok, because my curved 60hz samsung monitor only got 10.6ms mprt at 60hz max. I've seen a RM2k monitors did much worse. Overdrive like in any other monitor is actually just a software boost tho, I don't prefer to switch it on extreme due to it will cause ghosting. If overdrive is set to extreme, this monitor will disable freesync/ gsync.. this is still a bug/ bummer that it inherited from it's older brother, the VG240YP. But extreme overdrive is still shit anyway.

When gaming with this monitor, I found no issue with response time, sync, framerates and everything (I'm using gtx 1070ti btw). I was able to switch gsync on using displayport cable provided and it works flawlessly so far. HDMI do not support gsync, only freesync. But one problem to note. I had to unplugged and replugged in the displayport cable more than 5 times, switched off and on pc and monitor, due to that the monitor did not detected any signal coming from the displayport. Initially I thought that I got a faulty dp cable, but it turns out I just need to replug the cable several times so that the pins are perfectly aligned.. this issue is pretty common with dp cables btw.

Lastly, my final thoughts about this monitor is, if you are looking for the most budget friendly 165hz ips monitor, this is it. I bought this monitor for only RM650, cheapest I found compared to original price from Acer store at RM699. It will become cheaper as the model gets older though. But I bought this only after 2 months it was launched in Malaysia. The reason why I bought this monitor in the first place is because I found no other ips 144hz/165hz monitor at this price range. This is by far the cheapest in it's class famously branded monitor. I have tried the AOC G242U monitor but I dislike how purplish the monitor colour temperature looks, even tho the overdrive system setting in AOC is better than Acer. Plus, the AOC 24G2U is pricier by about RM200 and stocks is also very scarce.

Are you using windows 10? If you are how were you able to get HDR to work properly? The colors appear washed out when I enable 'Play HDR games and apps'.

In order to fully enjoy true HDR content, there are 2 things that will need to be enabled which are Windows 10 HDR mode and the monitor HDR mode. When Windows 10 HDR is disabled but with Monitor HDR enabled I can see everything is bright, crisp and satisfying to my preference although I am still not seeing any HDR effect, it's the colour of the pictures that meets my preferences. Choosing any preset picture and colour settings, or setting my own custom picture and colour preference, won't be as good as monitor HDR mode enabled. When monitor HDR mode enabled you basically can't choose any preset or custom picture/colour profile settings. This is what I mentioned in my earlier review. When monitor HDR mode enabled, this does not enabled HDR codecs in any HDR video content, unless windows 10 HDR mode is enabled. Hence, if I need to watch any HDR videos, I just need to go enable windows 10 HDR mode.

But when both windows 10 and monitor HDR mode enabled, everything except HDR content will appear dull and washed out because they are non HDR codecs. Anything non HDR will appear like that. So, if you are not watching any HDR videos/ content, just disabled windows 10 HDR mode while still enable monitor HDR mode.