Asus has once again taken the lead in the race to have the absolute fastest gaming monitors in the world. Its new 25-inch Nitro XV252QF display has a default refresh rate of 360Hz, but it can be overclocked to a ludicrous 390Hz, shaving ever smaller fractions of a millisecond off of your input lag for a slight competitive advantage.
Gaming monitors have become increasingly popular in recent years, not just because of their potential to give a competitive advantage, but because they improve the gaming experience through smoother animations and better response times to inputs. Often an upgrade to a higher refresh rate can be a more tangible benefit to how good your game looks and feels than a greater resolution, and it can be less taxing on your GPU too.
This has lead to an arms race with manufacturers pushing the limits of response time and refresh rate ever more. Asus recently made waves with a 360Hz display, the first of its kind, and has a 300Hz model in some gaming laptops. But this new Nitro XV252QF is faster again. It's 360Hz out of the box, but with a little tweaking, it can hit 390Hz, making it by far the fastest display ever made.
It also enjoys a sub 1ms response time, support for 99% of the sRGB color gamut, and it supports HDR. Amazingly, this is all achieved on an IPS panel, which just a few years ago could barely get close to 1ms response time and 144Hz, let alone the new heady heights we see today.
To take full advantage of this monitor you'll need to focus on lower-end competitive games, like CS:GO or League of Legends. Hitting anything close to 390FPS in anything else is basically impossible, even with high-end hardware.
The 25-inch Nitro XV252QF goes on sale on May 9 for $654.