Acer XB270HU

I was without gaming rig one year plus some months. I had various reasons then why to buy Apple laptop. I will cover these details in other article but I can say that my plans didn’t go that well. I decided to get Windows back. Wanted to play new games once again.

Usually when I know that I will buy new PC, I start to to discover what components is needed. So happened this time too. Expect I consulted some of my friends who does researching all the time. Luckily I decided to do this. I was going to end up with new FULL HD Nvidia g-sync monitor. Other components was approved as "a top pick" of my friends. But FULL HD as a resolution is not that much nowadays. And then g-sync helps if graphics card is drawn out of juice in heavy action games. So this kind of situation is not likely to happen with low resolution monitor and high end GFX. Friends then recommended me to have The Gaming Monitor Acer XB270HU. It has IPS, it has G-SYNC, it has low response times, it has low input lag, so it has evrrryhting! I decided to go with that.

Then I started to compare vendors where I should buy all these stuff. Due to price I ended up to order from webshop. This vendor has local store also but in other town, and didn’t want to drive there.

I received computer quite fast. Immediately noticed that computer was extremely well built. I added my spare SSD disk in. Actually ordered computer without hard drives. There was even power and SATA cables ready for hdd. Since well built computer includes serious cable management, this was very good surprise indeed! Then I was ready to install purchased Windows 10. Plug in USB stick to USB 3.0 port. BIOS was posted but then nothing? Just no signal. I rebooted computer several times, checked whether there is boot order options in BIOS. But not really anything which could help. Then I changed stick to 2.0 port. And installer started to work. Odd thing but I thought that 3.0 USB cannot boot. Installation went smoothly and later on that evening I applied patches and additional software, such as drivers etc.

Next day I powered computer no signal occurred again. After few boots I had picture and rest of that evening computer worked OK. However during week period of usage no signal issue came “enough often” that I decided to contact dealer. They said that contact Acer directly, since this is DOA case (Dead on Arrival) I get faster response from they. Acer told me to contact dealer (for the same DOA reason). So I then called dealer back. Told the news. Conclusion was that dealer will replace monitor. I just needed to send it back.

After they investigated monitor I got message that monitor was actually functioning OK. They could not reproduce incident after few days testing period. I will be charged 50 euros. Of course I was not happy of this situation. I wasn’t imagining this behavior. Error is still there. Well, not if in monitor, then somewhere else. Happily I managed to agree with the dealer that I will send main unit there as well for inspection.

This time outcome was good from customer point of view. There was replaced motherboard and Asus graphics card. Still I needed to pay that 50 euros for inspecting working monitor. Didn’t want to argue of that, so I paid it.

My experience with booting USB2/3 remained mystery. Haven't investigated since that episode that was it related to malfunction with MOBO or something else.

Performance of Acer XB270HU

Now when I had working monitor it has been really joy to play with it. Though it has slight light leak in upper top left corner but it does not bother that much. Especially now when I calibrated display. I had not calibrating device to use but I decided to go with TFTCentral settings and then downloading ics profile for that monitor. Results are indeed very pleasing compared to factory default settings.

Here are settings I use (taken from site mentioned above)

Brightness	59
Contrast	24
R, G, B	50, 45, 46

After these tweaks it is a good idea to check with Windows display calibration tool how it performs. For example I needed slight gamma adjustment from Windows slider. It also good to remember that displays are individuals. So same settings may not work on all displays. In my case TFTCentral settings was actually close enough.

Other internet sources hints that Acer has quite many light leak panels out there. However once you get good unit I can recommend this display. Maybe only drawback what I can find is that in this price range you might hope more input ports than just one display port.