
Front Shot
We instantly began hammering away at the monitor with a variety of games on our monitor testing station, which includes an Overclocked Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition that runs nicely at 4.2GHz using only air-cooling and slight voltage modifications. Not every game we had would run at the native 1680X1050 resolution, but the monitor resized itself, albeit with a momentary bit of a blurring to other resolutions. The games that did play at the monitor's maximum size looked great and the colors were bright and not bleeding into one another. Having a 5ms response time means no ghosting or screen ripping while playing your games and for gaming alone this is a great monitor.
Text was a bit of a mixed bag depending on what application you were running and what web page you were browsing. It was weird sometimes the text was clear and crisp and then you could barely see it. This was more prevalent in Windows XP than in Vista contrary to what the reviews I have read stated, which claimed Vista was where they encountered blurry text with the HW-223DPB. I think the drivers on the ATI X1900 were a bit more blurry in XP, but when I hooked up the monitor to my other system that has an NVIDIA based card, XP was not even as clear as Vista. I found that using the default drivers in Vista worked better than the drivers provided by HANNS-G. Watching movies was also excellent and the picture clarity was top notch. The monitor has the capability of 1080p digital quality and if you have a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD you can enjoy the full benefits of High-Definition technology. All in all nothing absolutely requiring a complaint about, and actually quite a quality picture is to be had for the most part.
Test System
- Motherboard: ABIT F109HD
- CPU: Intel P4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition
- Cooling ASUS Power Cube
- Memory: 2GB of Crucial Ballistix Tracer
- VGA: ATI 1900XT 256MB DDR3
- Power: CoolerMaster 650W Green Power
- Case: X Clio
Test Software
- Microsoft XP/Vista
- ATI Media Center
- Microsoft Office 2007
- Half Life 2
- Prey
- Lost Planet
- STALKER