Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this monitor to go with my Xbox One X when I travel. I do HDMI to HDMI for peripherals and USB to USB-C for power, using one of the USB ports on the back of my Xbox. Only takes about a minute or two to set everything up out of my brief case. Side note: the HDMI cable included with my monitor was pretty short and stiff. I switched to a longer HDMI for my setup. I got this monitor for $120 thru a special deal site that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. For the price this monitor is an absolute steal. The pictures look sharp and crisp, also has decently low input lag and a tolerable amount ghosting across the screen in fast paced games (just make sure you turn overdrive on or the ghosting becomes excessive). Since the Xbox One X can do FreeSync and many other monitors this size can do so, I was hoping this one supported it as well. I was super excited to see FreeSync as one of the settings. The review gets pretty technical at this point. Tl;dr - FreeSync does NOT work on these monitors. I even ordered a replacement one to see if it would work, and it didn’t. You get black screens and the monitor resets every single time the frame rate goes down to 48 FPS. After reading about this issue with other FreeSync devices, I hooked the monitor up to my PC and downloaded 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, it fixed the issue of my black screens completely! I could even check the on screen menu if the display while my FPS was sitting between 50-60 FPS and the monitor was matching my frame rate with no stutters. So, what is happening with these monitors is that they’re programmed to handle FreeSync down to 48 FPS, but the monitor can’t actually handle that, so when the FPS dips that low it resets the monitor with a black screen until FPS is back above 50. Well, every time you go to a menu screen from your game or press the “Xbox” button, your FPS drops to 48, thus giving you a black screen every time you try to go to the menu. It gets really annoying. You’re better off keeping FreeSync OFF on this monitor. This monitor does have an anti-screen tearing feature inside of it that isn’t FreeSync. I found this out by doing the FreeSync windmill test on my PC. With FreeSync and Vsync OFF, there is absolutely NO screen tearing on this monitor, which I cannot figure out why or how this happens. I tested the same program on my other two FreeSync monitors and there was a lot of screen tearing if Freesync/Vsync was off. While screen tearing isn’t an issue at all for this monitor, there is still slight stutters when you get below 60 FPS with FreeSync off. But for the most part, gameplay is super smooth except in really intense graphical scenes. In conclusion this monitor is a great monitor for the price. If FreeSync worked properly this monitor would be perfect. I do not feel justified taking stars off for this as FreeSync was never advertised as being able to work on this monitor. Eviciv has a monitor that looks exactly like this one that advertises FreeSync, sometimes I wonder if these monitors from Newsoul are the ones from the manufacturer that have defective FreeSync. This review turned out to be way longer than I wanted it to initially. Overall, for paying $120 for this monitor it would be wrong to give it anything under 5 stars. If I had to pay full price for this I would go with the Eviciv version instead that has FreeSync advertised.