Acer's New UltraSpeed Nitro Gaming Monitors Go Up To A Blistering 600Hz
If you've been around the block a time or two, then you may recall the race to 1GHz between AMD and Intel (which, despite protests from Intel and its Pentium III silicon, AMD is largely credited with winning with its Athon 1000 Thunderbird chip way back in the day). Now some 25 years later, it seems another race is afoot, but in gaming monitors—will we ever seen a 1,000Hz (0.000001GHz, by the way) refresh rate? While we wait to find out, Acer is at IFA 2024 touting a new line of UltraSpeed gaming monitors, the fastest of which boasts a 600Hz refresh rate.
There are other questions in need of asking, such as where the point of diminishing returns lies, and how feasible is it to actually push super high refresh rates on today's GPU hardware. And just as the clock speed of a processor is but a single metric (albeit an important one), a monitor's refresh rate is not the only the specification that matters—resolution, panel type, color gamut, brightness, support for technologies like NVIDIA Reflex, and so forth all matter too.
All that said, Acer's new UltraSpeed displays are speed demons. Three monitors comprise the UltraSpeed lineup, none slower than 500Hz.
The fastest of the bunch is the Nitro XV240 F6, a 24-inch monitor with 1920x1080 resolution, 600Hz refresh rate, "up to a 0.1ms G-to-G response time," 100,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, and DispalyHDR 400 certification. It also features 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. Not too shabby for what's amounts to a TN panel.
Taking its place as the second-fastest of the bunch is the Nitro XV270 F5 with a 520Hz refresh rate. It's also a bigger monitor at 27 inches, and it trades a TN panel for an IPS screen, also with a 1920x1080 resolution. This one offers a 0.5ms GtG response time, 400 nits of peak brightness, a 100,000,000: dynamic contrast ratio, and HDR10 support.
Finally, the Nitro XV270U F5 is the 'slowest' but far from slow—it's a 27-inch WQHD (2560x1440) IPS monitor with a 500Hz refresh rate, 0.5ms GtG response time, 99% sRGB coverage, 250 nits brightness, 100,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratior, and HDR10 support.
All three monitors feature two HDMI ports and a DisplayPort input, though necessarily of the same type. Here's how it breaks down...
- Nitro XV240 F6: 2x HDMI 2.0, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x 2W speakers
- Nitro XV270 F5: 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 1.2, 2x USB 3.2, 1x 3.5mm, 2x 2W speakers
- Nitro XV270U F5: 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x 2W speakers
For the 600Hz model, you need to use the DisplayPort input to hit that refresh rate, with the HDMI port limiting the speed to 240Hz.
Acer says all three UltraSpeed monitors will be available in the first quarter of 2025, priced at $599.99 for the Nitro XV240 F6 and XV270 F5, and $799.99 for the XV270U F5.
