Dell Alienware AW2521HFLA 63.5 cm (25") 1920 x 1080 pixels Full HD LCD Silver, White

Product Information

The best thing about the Alienware AW2521HFL is its strong performance in motion handling. The monitor offers excellent control over blurring and ghosting which makes it great for fast-paced competitive titles. This model also has three overdrive settings to further clean up its image output, but we recommend staying with the Fast level. The Alienware AW2521HFL has a distinct design that reflects its branding, but what further emphasizes that is its AlienFX RGB lighting. The full span of the stand’s pillar has an LED ring that glows in any color or preset you like from the OSD or from the AlienFX app. It’s bright enough to cast a bias lighting glow if the monitor sits close to a wall, but what we didn’t like it cannot sync with other RGB ecosystems. In terms of design and build, the Alienware 25 is unmistakably a gaming monitor, with its dramatically splayed legs, customisable RGB lighting and Alienware logo at the rear. You can even change the colour of the power button on the bottom right edge if you wish. At 60Hz, above, the UFO appears soft without sharp focus or clear internal detailing. This reflects a moderate amount of perceived blur due to eye movement and is something shared with the reference screen. There is various degrees of trailing behind the UFOs due to pixel response time weaknesses. In this case, overshoot (inverse ghosting) including some colourful bright ‘halo’ trailing due to aggressive pixel overdrive. The ‘Fast’ setting only showed a relatively small amount of this, whilst the ‘Super Fast’ and ‘Extreme’ settings ramped this up. ‘Extreme’ in particular showed very strong and eye-catching overshoot. ‘VRR off’ did not significantly affect the pixel response behaviour at this refresh rate. The ‘Fast’ setting was quite close to the reference here, with slightly stronger but still by no means extreme overshoot. We therefore consider ‘Fast’ the optimal setting at 60Hz. The image below shows how things look with refresh rate bumped up to 144Hz.

AW2521HF vs AW2521HFL | DELL Technologies ‎AW2521HF vs AW2521HFL | DELL Technologies

The image appears ‘rich and natural’ overall, with good variety. The gamma is slightly below target, brightening up some shades just a little, but the overall image balance is very respectable. Strong pixel responsiveness overall, low input lag and Adaptive-Sync working well with both our AMD and Nvidia GPUThe Lagom text appeared a blended grey throughout, with a slight red hue to the striping of the text. There were no clear flashes of saturated red, orange or green or shifts between these with a bit of head movement. This indicates a low viewing angle dependency to the gamma curve of the monitor, typical for an IPS-type panel. On Battlefield V the monitor provided a very fluid experience, where the frame rate kept pace with the 240Hz refresh rate. Compared to at 60Hz, or indeed a 60Hz monitor, you’re getting up to 4 times as much visual information pumped out every second. And twice as much when compared to 120Hz or 1.67 times as much compared to 144Hz. This gives an excellent ‘connected feel’, which describes the precision and fluidity felt when interacting with your character and the game world. The very low signal delay of this model also aided the ‘connected feel’, but the very high frame and refresh rate combination also helped. The perceived blur due to eye movement was also greatly reduced, much as demonstrated with the pursuit photos earlier on. The improvement in ‘connected feel’ and reduction in perceived blur was still noticeable to us and would be to sensitive users going up from 144Hz to 240Hz. Although not nearly as pronounced or obvious as stepping up from 60Hz to 144Hz (or even 120Hz). More importantly, though, the colour accuracy of AW2521HFL's IPS panel also leaves a lot to be desired compared to its AOC rival. Whereas my X-Rite DisplayPro i1 colour calibrator showed the AOC C27G2ZU was already showing a near perfect 99% of the sRGB colour gamut straight out of the box on maximum brightness, the AW2521HFL only returned a rather sub-par coverage score of 90.9% when I tested it on its default Standard preset. I'd normally expect an IPS panel to hit around 96% of the sRGB colour gamut, but this was more in line with what I'd expect from a good TN panel.

AW2521HFL) - PCMag Australia Alienware 25 Gaming Monitor (AW2521HFL) - PCMag Australia

Calibrating the monitor will yield a very low deltaE average of only 0.54 which is very close to the result found on the Alienware AW2521HF. However, not all have access to a colorimeter, so we recommend using the custom color preset and tweaking the screen to your liking instead. The added cost of the gadget will make the total cost of your upgrade even higher, so it’s not worth it. With a gaming monitor there are two key strands to image quality. Overall picture quality, which takes into account such elements as colour accuracy, contrast ratio, brightness and so on; and responsiveness, which is the chief concern of gamers. Finally, note again that you can go to ‘Game Enhance Mode’ in the ‘Game’ section of the OSD to activate the ‘Frame Rate’ feature. This displays the current refresh rate of the monitor and will reflect the frame rate if it’s within the main variable refresh rate window (e.g. 80 – 240fps). Dell claims the Alienware 25 can hit up to 99% of the sRGB color space. It comes close in our tests, but in Standard mode, the monitor only reaches 96.8% of the gamut, as shown in the sRGB color-space diagram below... It's not just colour settings you get on the AW2521HFL, though. There are also specific Sharpness, Response Time and Dark Stabilizer settings, the latter of which artificially brightens the screen to help you spot things in the shadows. It's a feature often touted as a 'must-have' for competitive multiplayer games to give you that extra 'edge' online - especially when said games are often the ones that can make the most of the AW2521HFL's 240Hz refresh rate. However, I found that the screen's regular peak brightness and accompanying contrast ratio from the Gamer preset was more than enough to help me see everything that I needed to in-game.

Displays certified for the AMD FreeSyncTMPremium Pro tier include highly accurate luminance and wide color gamut testing to enable an exceptional HDR visual gaming experience. Any game titles that use the previous FreeSync 2 HDR branding, are supported by FreeSync Premium Pro displays.Going forward, new games that support FreeSync Premium Pro technology will use the new branding.

Alienware 25 AW2521HF review: Super smooth | Expert Reviews

The L standards for Premium. So the "HFL" is the Freesync Premium version. The "HF" is the standard Freesync. A ‘gamery’ but in our view tasteful aesthetic, good ergonomics, competitive pricing and a relatively easy to drive resolution All that being said, if gaming is where your priorities lie, then the AW2521HF is a great choice. It’s fast and responsive, and is compatible with both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia’s G-Sync technologies for tear-free gaming, which is a sensible move if you own a card from one manufacturer and think you might switch allegiance sometime in the future.

You will find the latter and two of the USB slots in a hub at the middle of the bottom bezel for easy access. It’s great that you don’t have to flip the monitor or blindly reach for the slots at the rear panel if in case you want to swap between your peripherals. Note that there is always some disparity between how emissive objects (monitor) and non-emissive objects (printed sheet) appear. The representation of shades in this image depends on the camera and your own screen, it’s not designed to show exactly how the shades appear in person. It still helps demonstrate some of the relative differences between the original intended sRGB shade and what the monitor outputs, however. Full profiling and appropriate colour management on the application would provide a tighter match, our intention here is to show what can be expected in a non colour-managed environment. LG 27UL650 Review – 4K IPS Monitor with FreeSync and HDR The LG 27UL650 is the next 4K monitor in line to the well-loved 27UK650 which provided accurate color and excellent… As shown in the image above, the monitor uses the usual RGB (Red, Green and Blue) stripe subpixel layout. This is the default expected by modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS. As a Windows user you don’t need to run through the ClearType wizard, although you may still wish to adjust this according to your preferences. As a Mac user there’s no need to worry about text fringing from non-standard subpixel layouts. The subpixel layout and arrangement is normal and we had no subpixel-related concerns related to sharpness or text clarity on this model.