Asus PG191

Ditch the gaming modes and you're left with a reasonable monitor with the best inbuilt audio we've heard.

We’ve not been too impressed by ASUS monitors in the past – while build quality has always been impeccable, it has consistently been behind the pack in terms of image quality. With the promise of a new ‘gaming’ monitor with built in subwoofer, our interest was significantly piqued enough to give it another chance.

Turning off the damn preset modes as usual and returning to a neutral colour temperature, we ran through our usual DisplayMate tests, the screen capable of showing a decent 2 black through 253 white, and unfortunately also some patchy uneven blocks in the gradients towards the darker end of the scale.

The vertical viewing angle at the default colour settings is nigh on abominable, with prevalent colour shifts within a five degree range. With a directly perpendicular-to-vision setup, the whites turn red at the top and completely blow out at the bottom. Thankfully this can be mostly overcome by using a custom colour profile and completely ramping the brightness, proving once again that presets are not only for idiots, they’re programmed by idiots.

The touch sensitive buttons respond well – too well in fact, as it’s all too easy to turn the bastard thing off or access menus you don’t want to when attempting to adjust the tilt of the panel, thanks to the poor placement of the touch sensitive buttons down the side.

On the sound side, it doesn’t take much to drive the poor little speakers into clipping and crackling as expected, but thanks to the built in subwoofer this is without doubt the single best built-in monitor speaker you’ll hear once you’ve tweaked the equaliser settings manually. Yes, we said it’s decent, and it’s attached to a monitor. Of course it’s not a patch on having a separate proper speaker set, or a decent set of headphones like the AudioTechnica ATH-A900s, but if you have to minimise clutter it’s not too bad a solution.

Gaming was excellent, with Quake 4 revealing rich colours and the 2ms response time covered motion well.

The PG191 is quite a good attempt from ASUS, but there are better alternatives out there.