Review on Acer Predator XB271HU Bmiprz: 2560x1440 WQHD with Built-in Speakers and HD Clarity by Joshua Norton

[Updated April 10, 2020] I bought this monitor in May 2018 and now I have no regrets. In fact, I'm considering buying a second one for a dual display. I think the random issues I had before might be related to the DisplayPort cable. I bought an expensive DP 1.4 cable here at Revain (mentioned as a suggestion in a viewer comment) and I never experienced any of the crashes I complained about in my original review. For me it was a fantastic monitor. So take the negativity below with a grain of salt. The problem was using a cheap DP cable or an older cable with insufficient bandwidth (including the one supplied by Acer). [Original Review] Well, first let me say that this is a really good monitor when it works properly, which it often does. The problem is that sometimes it crashes. I bought mine in May 2018. Unfortunately it took too long for me to send it back. If I could, I wouldn't replace G-Sync, and probably not any other Acer either. I would not recommend this monitor to anyone, nor would I buy one. Here's the problem. Operating a display with a preset refresh rate higher than 120 Hz may introduce random noise and artifacts. 144 Hz is usually sufficient. Running it at a setting of 165 Hz is often problematic. I can temporarily reproduce artifacts above 120Hz by changing overclocking profiles with MSI Afterburner. I even see it when navigating through the system BIOS at refresh rates above 120Hz. It's random. I may not see it for a few days or more than a week then it starts again. Setting the refresh rate to 120Hz or switching to HDMI (60Hz) fixes this. Sometimes turning G-Sync on and off fixes the issue. This is not related to the GPU clock speed as it is with a standard GPU (without overclocking). I've found that switching the MSI Afterburner profile allows artifacts to be reproduced. I was under the impression that the G-Sync hardware was causing random artifacts. In general, never expect anything special from a monitor's built-in speakers. This one is no exception to the rule. If the only thing that matters to you is the presence of sound, then they're certainly better than no speakers. For listening to speech audio, they are useful as a last resort. The sound of music and games is of poor quality. I was expecting that, so it's not a big deal. This may be disappointing to those who didn't expect it, which is the only reason I'm mentioning it here.