Today we're looking at a monitor from a brand we've never used earlier, but one that gets heavily requested: Viotek. They're popular on Amazon and make some of the cheapest gaming monitors you can get, so we're interested to run into how they stack up and whether it's worth buying this sort of monitor over a better known make option.

The monitor we accept to review today is the Viotek GN32LD. This FreeSync display is 31.5-inches in size, and packs a curved 1440p VA LCD that tops out at a 144 Hz refresh rate. It'southward priced at $470 through Amazon, which is around the mark of another budget brands like Pixio and MSI that have monitors based on the aforementioned panel, but it'south a lot cheaper than the Asus ROG Strix XG32VQ or Samsung C32HG70 for example.

When testing out budget-oriented monitors we're ever wary of a few things: is the build quality any expert, and is the brandish lacking in whatever way? To address that second bespeak first, our retail monitor shipped with no issues whatsoever, so no dead pixels, and Viotek offers a total replacement if your monitor arrives with a dead pixel and so it's non something to exist overly concerned about.

As for build quality, the GN32LD is fine. It's non particularly amazing, and I certainly wouldn't class information technology every bit a high-end structure, just information technology's fine for a gaming monitor. The base of the 3-pronged stand is metal, only otherwise the stand's pillar and the rest of the monitor use grey-ish plastic with a few reddish highlights. The plastic used on the pillar feels especially inexpensive as information technology uses a really basic cease, though it's a bit better on the rear of the display itself.

Overall, Viotek is using a gamer design which I tend not to prefer, there'south a lot of foreign angles and vents that it probably could have done without. There's also two RGB LED strips on the rear which add nothing to the design, I mean you lot're not even able to encounter them during standard functioning and their RGB support is bones. Plus the RGB clashes with the red highlights then overall it's a scrap of a foreign choice.

The stand is sturdy and does support both peak and tilt aligning, although its elevation arrange is quite limited. In that location's no swivel supportn - not that swivelling is that important - and in that location's also no cablevision direction pigsty, which over again is a flake of a nit pick.

My biggest consequence with the design is the OSD controls. Viotek take gone with four buttons along the bottom edge of the panel, which makes navigating through the OSD a hurting compared to a directional toggle. All monitors should use directional toggles with menus of this complexity, no exceptions.

However the OSD itself includes a lot of features yous'd also discover on monitors from other brands, and so you're not missing out on much going with the cheaper Viotek option. The OSD includes things like a low blue low-cal mode, crosshairs for adulterous, a super resolution feature, and fifty-fifty picture in picture, along with the usual image quality controls.

The array of inputs on the GN32LD is basic: DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, plus an audio output jack. The monitor supports FreeSync with low framerate compensation, so y'all get the adaptive sync across the entire refresh range up to 144 Hz. And I still think the combination of resolution and refresh rate the GN32LD provides - information technology's a 2560 x 1440 monitor after all - is perfect for most gamers with reasonably high-finish hardware, it gives a great mix of smoothness and clarity.

The Samsung VA panel used features a 1800R curvature, I'yard more a apartment panel kind of guy with 16:ix monitors merely at 32-inches in size the curve isn't that bad. Plus right now there aren't many options for monitors of this size and specs that aren't curved, so you're pretty much stuck with it anyway.

Let's talk a bit more about the console and see how our test data matches upward to Viotek's claims. For brightness, they listing 280 nits of typical brightness and I measured a acme of 365 nits, which is going to be as well bright for well-nigh desktop users. The dissimilarity ratio falls a little short of Viotek's claims though, at a bear on under 2500:ane compared to its rated "3000:1" value, although as this is a VA panel we're still getting that nice high dissimilarity ratio. It's also good to meet this contrast ratio held throughout the brightness range.

New to our test suite is response time testing, one of the most heavily requested metrics. We've bought some of the fastest tools available to exam response time and gone well-nigh testing some of the monitors we had on manus, and over time every bit we do more monitor reviews we'll become a larger set of data for some sugariness comparisons. But the good news is we can now provide this key metric that tells us a lot about smearing, ghosting and how suitable this monitor is for gaming.

So, Viotek claims a 3ms greyness-to-grey response time using overdrive, merely in my testing using the "high" response time setting - the highest setting available and the optimal setting for this monitor - I recorded just an 8.2ms boilerplate gray-to-grayness response, which is quite slow only within a normal range for VA panels. As we know, VA is one of the slower LCD technologies and that's on bear witness in this consequence.

It might also be useful to know that on average, ascent times were significantly longer than fall times, almost double across our examination points, and mid-greyness transitions (for example, 20% white to lxxx% white) are particularly sluggish. I also recorded a 15.1ms black-white-black transition time, which shows yous the time required to make the largest luminance transition, in case yous were wondering.

The important thing to note here is that both the average grey-to-grey response and rising times in general actually took longer than the refresh window. This is a 144 Hz monitor, then the frame is updated every 6.94ms, except this console just transitions in, on average, 8.2ms. This means that in some cases you might not exist getting a true 144 Hz refresh because the crystals themselves just can't transition fast enough to bear witness a completely new image at that rate. While you don't go whatsoever noticeable overshoot, smearing and ghosting are concerns due to the long response time.

Nevertheless this isn't an upshot with this Viotek monitor specifically, rather all monitors that use the same Samsung VA panel volition take response times roughly equal to what I've shown here. So don't recollect you're getting a faster brandish if you lot buy the MSI or Asus monitors instead; they nonetheless utilise the same panel so they are also faced with the same inherent limitations of the VA technology. As for Viotek's 3ms response time claim, not exactly authentic to say the least.

The good news is the GN32LD exhibits excellent input lag of simply a few milliseconds, so while transitions aren't especially fast, the monitor processes its inputs speedily and gets on with the job. And yep, we have the ability to test input lag now equally well, which nosotros've normalized for the tools we're using to give an estimate of the display'southward processing fourth dimension. And unlike some lag testing tools out in that location, our custom solution works at the display's native resolution and refresh rate.