Review on Enhanced Newsoul MDS-15608 Portable Monitor: 1920X1080, Frameless, Glossy Screen, Blue Light Filter, HDMI & IPS - Your Ultimate On-the-Go Computer Display by Ernest Caudle

I bought this monitor to take with me when traveling with my Xbox One X. I connect HDMI to HDMI for peripherals and USB to USB-C for power to one of the USB ports on the back of the Xbox. It only takes about a minute or two to install everything from my portfolio. Note: The HDMI cable that came with my monitor was quite short and stiff. I switched to a longer HDMI for my setup. I got this monitor for $120 from a special site that doesn't seem to exist anymore. For the price, this monitor is a godsend. Images look sharp and crisp, and they also have decently low input lag and an acceptable amount of ghosting in fast-paced games (just make sure you turn on overdrive or else the ghosting will be excessive). Since the Xbox One X, like so many other monitors of this size, can FreeSync, I was hoping that this one would also support this feature. I was very excited to see FreeSync as one of the settings. This is where the review gets pretty technical. Tl;dr - FreeSync will NOT work on these monitors. I even ordered a replacement to see if it worked, but it didn't work. You get black screens and the monitor resets every time the frame rate drops to 48 fps. After reading about this issue with other FreeSync devices, I connected the monitor to my PC and loaded the CRU (Custom Resolution Utility). I was able to manually change the monitor's FreeSync range from 48-60 FPS to 50-60 FPS. And voila, that completely solved my black screens issue! I was even able to check the OSD to make sure the display was between 50-60 FPS at my FPS and the monitor matched my frame rate without stuttering. So what's going on with these monitors is that they're programmed to handle FreeSync at up to 48 FPS, but the monitor can't really handle that, so when the FPS drops to that low, the monitor goes to one black screen reset FPS goes above 50 again. Well, every time you go from a game to the menu screen or press the "Xbox" button, your FPS drops to 48 and you get a black screen every time you try to to call up the menu. This gets very annoying. You'd better disable FreeSync on this monitor. This monitor has an anti-tearing feature that is not FreeSync. I discovered this by running a FreeSync windmill test on my PC. With FreeSync and Vsync turned off, there is absolutely NO screen tearing on this monitor and I can't figure out why or how it happens. I tested the same program on my other two FreeSync monitors and there was a lot of screen tearing when Freesync/Vsync was off. While screen tearing isn't a problem at all on this monitor, there are still slight stutters when you get below 60.FPS with FreeSync turned off. But for the most part, the gameplay is very smooth, apart from really intense graphical scenes. In summary, this monitor is a great monitor for the price. If FreeSync worked properly, this monitor would be perfect. I don't think it deserves a star rating for this as FreeSync was never advertised as running on this monitor. Eviciv has a monitor that looks exactly like this one that advertises FreeSync, sometimes I wonder if these Newsoul monitors are the same manufacturers that have broken FreeSync. This review has turned out to be a lot longer than I originally intended. All in all, paying $120 for this monitor to give it less than 5 stars would be wrong. If I had to pay full price for it, I would go with the version of Eviciv that FreeSync advertises.