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synthtel2
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Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:52 am

I bought one last week on sale for $400, on the heads-up on the front page. tl;dr: It isn't a hardcore gamer's monitor, and it isn't perfectly accurate (colors/gamma), but if you're trying for something pretty good at both on a budget it's awesome.

27", 2560x1440, 144Hz, and decent IPS or VA is roughly the featureset I've been looking for, and I've mostly just been waiting for it to drop to a reasonable price. The trouble is that the usual displays fitting that description all use the same AUO panel and have terrible quality control problems (especially the Acer). QC in this case mostly means backlight bleed, IPS glow, and white uniformity. This Nixeus uses the same panel, but is both cheap and by all reports much better at quality control than its competition at that price.

==== ==== ==== ====

144 Hz is the best thing since the return of mechanical keyboards. If I had to go back to either 60 Hz or a mechanical OS drive, I'd have to think very hard about which one. Aside from more fluid motion, the latency reduction is real, and it doesn't even take gaming for the benefits to clearly show up. Computer use is just that much more comfortable and responsive now.

This monitor does not have particularly quick response times, possibly due to overdrive issues. Others report that only overdrive=low works but it doesn't matter because low is the ideal setting. On this one, changing overdrive settings doesn't seem to do anything at all, and all settings allow a clear bit of blur that isn't there on an MG278Q (which is very similar but TN). If I liked my gaming twitchy and highly competitive, this would be a problem, but I mostly don't and it isn't. I also find it hard to believe that going from even this possibly subpar 144 Hz experience to TN + ULMB at 144 Hz could be half as big a difference as 60 -> 144 Hz itself.

I can't test Freesync due to having a GTX 960, but tearing never bothered me anyway. It does have a full 30-144 Hz Freesync range, which is a nice positive.

==== ==== ==== ====

I don't have anything resembling proper calibration hardware, so the following is all by eye using appropriate test patterns, such as these.

Gamma is just a touch bright across most of the range, meaning 2.1 to 2.15. Both the dark and bright ends may be slightly compressed, but not enough that I could reliably tell. There is a gamma adjustment in the OSD, but using it turns greys blatantly orange, so something's clearly broken. It only operates in increments of 0.2 anyway, so it wouldn't be terribly useful. Dark end compression may be fixable by setting color effect to photo instead of standard, but that looks like too aggressive a fix and causes an obvious artifact on gradients.

At one point I made my own full-screen gamma test pattern, which turned out to be very interesting for reasons other than just gamma. First, the nominal results: gamma is close to correct on the right half of the screen, but less so further left. The left side of the screen is very slightly cooler in color temperature than the right, independent of gamma. The gamma makes greys oh-so-slightly warm, possibly to compensate for gamma making greys cooler as the viewing angle increases.

Now, the first weird thing about this test pattern is that the portion with a white horizontal line every 8 pixels on a black background hurt my eyes, and the portion similar but with 4 pixel spacing somewhat less so. Pixel walk? Something like that. Lagom's pixel walk testing shows it does exist, but it's very subtle. Test patterns 6a and 6b over there both hurt my eyes in the same way, though, and pixel walk itself might be tougher to see just because this is 144 Hz. Something on those must have been a fairly impressive strobe. The second piece of weirdness is that I had the test pattern open for a while, and when I closed it, the fully white parts left fairly strong persistence on my dark grey desktop background (but not on black terminal windows). It went away in a couple of hours.

The first problem seems to be well fixed and the second seems at least substantially helped by turning contrast down to 40, at the expense of a touch more IPS glow relative to the image's brightness. This seems to have no other ill effects on image quality, and doesn't affect gamma etc.

The default color temperature (sRGB mode, RGB 128/128/128) seems a touch on the cool side. 6500K mode is pink. In user-defined mode, RGB 128/127/126 seems about right to me, though the margin is slim enough that I'm not sure why I would have a valid opinion. Custom PC Review's calibrated settings of 128/127/124 were clearly not right for my panel. A separate option called low blue ray is clearly just reducing blue pixel values as if adjusting color temperature, and it looks like garbage.

The leftmost ~1 cm of the screen and corners appear to get a touch less backlight than the rest. It's a fairly tiny effect, both as a percentage of screen area and as an amplitude, and it follows a smooth enough gradient. I can't distinguish any other white amplitude nonuniformities.

Only on grey tones, a very faint ~5 mm by ~10 cm horizontal line is visible out in the middle of the screen. I probably would never have noticed it if my desktop background's shade of grey weren't the perfect one to make it show up. The tones that make it show up are the same ones that make persistence show up, but it doesn't match up spatially with anything I do and doesn't go away.

It has no dead pixels.

Backlight bleed and IPS glow are both evenly-distributed and not excessively heavy. The net black level / contrast isn't going to win any competitions, but I've seen much worse, and this one is perfectly acceptable to me. The following picture was captured at ISO 1600, F2.8, and a quarter-second shutter - enough to make it look much worse than it does in person with any kind of reasonable room lighting. The white in the corner is one pixel of the cursor that's still on screen.

Image

Now, since I just spent a wall of text describing a lot of flaws in this monitor, I've got to reiterate that it's pretty good overall and I'm very satisfied with my purchase. Most of those flaws are somewhere between tiny and completely irrelevant. No TN panel can touch color accuracy like this. 144 Hz is the best. IMHO, both at once at 1440p for $400 could really only be damped by bad quality control, and here's one more datapoint saying it's at a non-problematic level.
 
DPete27
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:49 am

Thanks for the great write-up! I was really raking myself to get this monitor when it showed up on the front page, but had to pass. My "ideal" monitor was the Samsung C32HG70 except that the more I think about it, the more I feel that 32" may be too big (I have a 32" TV that I tested the other day and it just seemed like I had to move my head too much, like sitting too close to the front of a movie theater). That monitor is $560 at best and my intended budget is $400 or less, so when the EDG 27 showed up it was very enticing. Hopefully it goes on sale again during Black Friday week.

Sounds like a couple other TR gerbils took advantage of the sale. I wonder if they'll drop in and share their impressions.
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Welch
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Mon Nov 27, 2017 5:08 am

I pulled the trigger as well, it ships this morning and I'd assume take 2 days to arrive. Once I get it in I may do a video/pictures with a few of my thoughts.

Replacing a Dell ST2420L that I was gifted for Christmas of 2009 IIRC. Unfortunately I'm going to be driving it with my 2GB MSI 7850 Twin Frozr III, so no Freesync yet and I'm not even sure 1440p on lower settings will be kind to this card. It's what I've got for now though.
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Welch
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Thu Nov 30, 2017 10:37 pm

Synth, you have any issues with the bezel at the bottom of the screen not being flush with the panel? Mine seems to have a gap way outside what I'd expect.

If anything can be complained about with this monitor, it would be the basic fit and finish. It's most certainly not a top tier product in that regard. For instance I was struggling to understand why I couldn't connect the base of the premium stand to the arm of the stand with the 4 provided screws. I mean, it took me a good while thinking something didn't line up properly or I was doing something wrong because I could only get 2 of the 4 screws in and it would tilt toward those two screws. I suddenly got the idea that maybe... just maybe, the screws that were holding the VESA mount onto the display might have been switched with the ones for the base of the stand. Sure enough, someone in the factory put the longer screws in the display and bagged shorter ones for attaching the base, exactly backwards. I swapped them out and not issue. Not the most elegant solution for the mount. Also there seems to be a small/odd marking or deformation in the plastic bezel on the opposite side (left) of the display. It's all of those little things. In all reality though, unless I know to look there, or I'm turning my lights on and starting at the bezel I can't imagine I'd ever notice it. When I'm gaming the lights in the room go off anyway!

It looks really nice on my desk though, anyone coming in to my office would never look at it and wonder what piece of crap it was. It's only when you are putting it together that you notice little small things like the aluminum legs that are powder coated black, have the cast likes that can be somewhat rough, on the sides that aren't visible anyhow. It's not all polished and perfect like I'd expect from something like an Asus, Acer, LG, Samsung, ect.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

1600x | Strix B350-F | CM 240 Lite | 16GB 3200 | RX 580 8GB | 970 EVO | Corsair 400R | Seasonic X 850 | Corsair M95 / K90 | Sennheiser PC37x
 
synthtel2
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Fri Dec 01, 2017 12:29 pm

The physical construction doesn't give an especially premium impression, but mine doesn't have any of the issues you described or anything else I could name as particularly wrong in that area. Premium feel could be improved by making the bezel a bit sturdier and buttons less mushy, but those are both minor quibbles at maximum (neither is to the point of being a reliability hazard).
 
MOSFET
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Fri Dec 01, 2017 2:30 pm

synthtel2 wrote:
The physical construction doesn't give an especially premium impression


Seriously? Mine felt like army tanks (or something like that) compared to the 27" Acer VA panels that they replaced. The Nixeus stand weighs 10 times what the Acer monitor plus stand weigh, which is great - I didn't realize how much the Acers were waving in the wind. I kept waiting for the Acers' power buttons to fall into the monitor, as well, which actually happened to me at work with an old 2009-era Asus LCD. Don't think that will ever happen on these.
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synthtel2
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Fri Dec 01, 2017 5:54 pm

It's more that it doesn't stand out in either direction. It's clearly got what's needed for stability and reliability, but it's a few steps behind that on items less functionally critical. Apple would be ashamed to release this, but nobody else should be, especially given the price.

My other monitors have been cheapo AOCs or Viewsonics, and don't include any truly premium points of comparison. That said, my build quality expectations of ~$500 Asus/LG/Sammy products would be around this level, and my quality expectations of Acer products at any price are far below this.

Versus Asus/LG/Sammy, "build quality" may just encompass too much to be a singlular metric. I would expect any of them to look/feel classy and not have the sort of issues Welch described, but being physically built to last is far from guaranteed with any of them and purports are adding up that Nixeus really is a cut above in panel QC. Sammy probably has classier and more solid-feeling physical build than any of them (AFAIK), but then there's shoddy firmware and QC to worry about and the hardware doesn't seem to be more reliable to match the impression it makes. Who wins just depends what criteria you're judging on.
 
Welch
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Fri Dec 01, 2017 11:08 pm

I agree Syn, other than the expectation that the quality would be similar on an Asus or that the quality on an Acer in the same price range would be lower.

Without a doubt, the 3 year warranty is a big deal. It's a sad state of affairs when you buy a $600 monitor and it only has a 1 year warranty. 2 years is minimum in my mind to show you have more faith in your products. 3 is great as far as I'm concerned, so long as the company is good about supporting it.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

1600x | Strix B350-F | CM 240 Lite | 16GB 3200 | RX 580 8GB | 970 EVO | Corsair 400R | Seasonic X 850 | Corsair M95 / K90 | Sennheiser PC37x
 
Demetri
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Sun Dec 03, 2017 7:12 pm

I also bought one of these on a Black Friday deal. Zero problems with build quality; it's at least as good as the Samsung I have, although the vertical rotation should be tighter. Factory calibration was really good. I was worried about scaling with it being 1440P. At default Windows scaling, it's way too small and turns web pages into narrow strips going down the center of the screen. I would have resold it immediately if I had to keep it like that. At 125% scaling, it actually looks pretty good in most newer apps. Unfortunately, older ones will simply stretch out the window and make it look blurry. There are even a few modern ones, like Steam (really...) and Blizzard Launcher that don't support proper scaling. If I used a lot of older apps, that could have been a deal breaker. For games, it looks beautiful as long as you have a graphics card that can keep it fed. In Overwatch on a stock RX 580, I'm getting 120-144fps on High. Ultra drops it to 90-100. I'm only running an i5-4570S, so a processor upgrade should help that (waiting for Ryzen+), and I'll definitely be on the lookout for Vega 56 deals.

Overall I think this is an excellent monitor, and I'm hard to please. I tossed back an Eizo VA, and a couple high refresh TN panels because I thought the image quality/viewing angles sucked.
 
Welch
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Fri Dec 15, 2017 6:25 pm

I finally had to time to call Nixeus to let them know that the Bezel isn't flush and the odd mark on the bottom bezel along with the simple and stupid screws being mix matched between the base and VESA mount. They wanted to take care of it for me and offered to ship it for free back to them for repair. I didn't want to do without it for 2+ weeks (shipping to AK sucks) so they were just going to cross ship for me. Which was nice since I can confirm the new one didn't have any issues like dead pixel as this panel was flawless from my 10-15 minute testing.

Well within an hour or so the guy from Nixeus noticed that shipping to me was $84. So instead of having to pay that, fix it, send it back or cross ship, they offered me $100 refund through Newegg. Pretty badass considering I let the guy know it wasn't a big deal and such a minor imperfect in the first place.

So that brings my effective price down to $249 for this monitor. He made note that even with him working for the company, his pricing was the $349 I originally got it for.

I wasn't really going to hold the few little things against Nixeus as the panel looks and function flawlessly. This was simply icing on the cake and I'm hoping this is indicative of how they will go forward knowing I still have a 3 year warranty with them is boon over some more expensive name brands who still only give 1 year.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

1600x | Strix B350-F | CM 240 Lite | 16GB 3200 | RX 580 8GB | 970 EVO | Corsair 400R | Seasonic X 850 | Corsair M95 / K90 | Sennheiser PC37x
 
synthtel2
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Wed Jun 27, 2018 4:17 pm

As a minor update, the backlight is yellowing a bit. R/G/B 127/127/130 seems to be the right calibration now (still by eye), changed from 128/127/126. I've been running it mostly at 50 brightness, but with boosts to 90 in Planetside at night (when it can otherwise be a bit tough to see and in-game gamma adjustment just makes things washed-out). 80->100 brightness doesn't have very much visible effect, and it seems likely that they're pushing the backlight LEDs pretty hard by the time it gets to that range.

Given that effect, I'm now using 40 brightness in normal use and 70 at night in Planetside. In combination with the 40 contrast and presumably overall reduced backlight output, this is still enough to make black-on-white UIs annoyingly harsh, but sometimes feels a touch weak for white-on-black UIs (which I use everywhere possible). Too bright would be better than not bright enough, since I've got an overkill array of redshift one-shot hotkeys here to reduce brightness/blue as-needed. :lol:
 
astrix_au
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:50 am

synthtel2 wrote:
As a minor update, the backlight is yellowing a bit. R/G/B 127/127/130 seems to be the right calibration now (still by eye), changed from 128/127/126. I've been running it mostly at 50 brightness, but with boosts to 90 in Planetside at night (when it can otherwise be a bit tough to see and in-game gamma adjustment just makes things washed-out). 80->100 brightness doesn't have very much visible effect, and it seems likely that they're pushing the backlight LEDs pretty hard by the time it gets to that range.

Try these settings they seem to be perfect for me, the sRGB profile is set up just right but I totally turn off gamma as it messes things up and brings in other colour tints. I also use sRGB in Windows Colour Management.


Picture
Brightness: 65
Contrast: 40
Sharpness: 4
Aspect ratio: FULL
Ultra Vivid: OFF - Important
DCR: OFF

Color
Colour effect: Standard
Saturation: 50
Gamma: OFF - Important
Tempreture: sRGB - Most important



Let me know how it performs for you, just make sure you turn off gamma.
 
synthtel2
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Sat Feb 16, 2019 3:28 pm

You can see how it changes the individual R/G/B values when you set sRGB/5400/6500/9300, and sRGB is just 128/128/128. It'll be pretty close for one that just came out of the box (or even a touch too cool IME), but is way too warm for my backlight's current state. I'm running 126/127/132 at this point, with 30-35 brightness on the desktop and 60-65 in games.

Gamma is just plain broken and should never be enabled, yeah.
 
astrix_au
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Re: Nixeus EDG 27 thoughts

Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:48 pm

synthtel2 wrote:
You can see how it changes the individual R/G/B values when you set sRGB/5400/6500/9300, and sRGB is just 128/128/128. It'll be pretty close for one that just came out of the box (or even a touch too cool IME), but is way too warm for my backlight's current state. I'm running 126/127/132 at this point, with 30-35 brightness on the desktop and 60-65 in games.

Gamma is just plain broken and should never be enabled, yeah.


Yeah fair enough at least you can still change the contrast and brightness some other monitors lock that down as well in sRGB mode. If I try and do it manually I can't get it right, its' always just one difference off and changing one just increases the other for me so I couldn't get it to where I wanted it. Compared it to sRGB and for me sRGB won hands down.

I agree with you regarding the Gamma I also believe it's broken, it shouldn't affect the colour accuracy. My Benq XL2730Z with firmware V002 which is a 2560x1440p 40hz-144hz Freesync Au Optronics TN panel's gamma settings do not change the colours or affect the greys and whites so it's definitely bugged on the NX-27EDG. I wonder if the new updated version the NX-27EDGv2 will have fixed gamma.

I heard it does have a new PCB among other things like thinner bezels, Freesync over HDMI and extra Display and HDMI ports. It has two Displayport 1.2a and two HDMI 2.0 ports which is a nice extra redundancy.

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