Viewsonic XG2401

Viewsonic XG2401

Editor Rating: Good (3.5)
Viewsonic XG2401 - Viewsonic XG2401
US Street Price$330.00
  • Pros

    AMD FreeSync anti-tearing technology. Speedy pixel response and refresh rate. Great gaming performance in our tests.
  • Cons

    Middling viewing-angle performance. Slightly skewed color accuracy. Weak speakers.
  • Bottom Line


When it comes to PC gaming, speed is king, and with the ViewSonic XG2401 ($329.99), you get plenty of it. This 24-inch gaming monitor boasts a screaming 1-millisecond pixel response and a speedy 144Hz refresh rate, and it uses AMD's FreeSync anti-tearing technology to deliver smooth gaming action. It offers lots of gaming presets and a fully adjustable stand, but it can't match the overall performance and features set that you get with our top pick for midsize gaming monitors, the BenQ XL2420G.

Design and Features
The XG2401's 24-inch Twisted Nematic (TN) panel has a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution and a 350 cd/m2 brightness level. The display has a matte, anti-glare coating and is housed in a black cabinet with 0.4-inch bezels and is supported by a black stand with red trim. The base has a Lazy Susan mechanism that lets you swivel the panel 175 degrees, and the mounting arm has a hinge that gives you 4.7 inches of height and 27 degrees of tilt adjustability. It also allows you to pivot the panel 90 degrees for Portrait-mode viewing. There are four VESA compliant holes for mounting the cabinet on a wall using an optional VESA mounting kit. The monitor's two 2-watt speakers are adequate for low-volume listening, but they lack the volume and bass response necessary to make you feel like you're in the game.

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You won't find any side-mounted ports on the XG2401. All of its ports are at the rear of the cabinet and include two HDMI inputs, a DisplayPort input, a USB 3.0 upstream port, two USB 3.0 downstream ports, and a headphone jack. The mounting arm sports a red hook where you can hang your headset. There are five buttons located in the center of the lower bezel that are used for power, selecting an input source, and accessing the settings menus.

Picture settings include Brightness, Contrast, Color Temperature (sRGB, Bluish, Cool, Native, Warm, and User), Sharpness, ECO mode, and Aspect Ratio. There are also a Blue Light Filter setting, six picture presets (Standard, Game, Movie, Web, Text, and Mono), a Black Stabilizer setting, and seven gaming presets, including two First-Person Shooter (FPS) presets, three custom Gamer presets, a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) preset, and a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) preset. However, you can't fine-tune colors like you can with the BenQ XL2420G's Hue and Saturation settings, or the 6-Axis Color settings that you get with the Acer Predator series of gaming monitors.

Viewsonic covers the XG2401 with a three-year warranty on parts, labor, and backlight. It comes with a DisplayPort cable, an upstream USB 3.0 cable, a Quick Start Guide, and a resource CD.

The XG2401 delivered very good gaming performance in testing. We used a Leo Bodnar Video Signal Lag Tester to measure input lag (the time it takes for the monitor to react to a controller command) and got a speedy 9.8 milliseconds. That's just shy of our two leaders, the BenQ XL2430T and the BenQ SW2700PT, both of which scored 9.5 milliseconds. The panel exhibited blur-free motion handling, with no visible ghosting on my Crysis 3 (PC) and Grand Theft Auto V (PS4) tests, and with AMD FreeSync-enabled, Crysis 3 looked incredibly smooth and fluid.

Although the XG2401's colors appeared rich and well defined, color accuracy was slightly skewed. As shown on the chromaticity chart below, red and blue colors (represented by the colored dots) are closely aligned with their ideal CIE coordinates (represented by the boxes), but green is on the outside edge of its box. However, this is fairly common with TN panels, and the XG2401's greens are not so out of whack as to cause tinting or oversaturated colors.

Viewsonic XG2401