Echo27—October 5, 2020
Like many i'm sure, I saw reviews of this monitor as was a little wary of it due to the reports of severe motion blur. However, after gaming on it for about two weeks I've been surprised at just how great this monitor has been so far. Yes, if you look at images of the UFO ghosting test, it does have quite a bit of ghosting. Especially in dark areas of the scene. However, in game I've not noticed it at all.. Maybe I'm just one of those people who are not particularly sensitive to ghosting. I keep the monitor on its fast response time in the OSD settings. Fastest seemed to cause some really noticeable inverse ghosting in my experience. My one complaint so far about the monitor was the stand and it's vesa mounting system. The panel was kinda hard to attach and detach from the stand, which also takes of a lot of depth space on my desk. Thankful it came with all the required parts to VESA mount it. However, the spacers required to be used didn't seem to want to screw in all the way, and the screws to attach to the VESA didn't seem to quite line up with the spacers perfectly. Read more
James Marcrum—October 27, 2020
This was my first monitor purchase in 15 years. I have not had a desktop in that time. This was for my wife who is a graphic artist. The monitor gave her a huge amount of area allowing her to open multiple windows for her designs. It also allowed her to play games with greater than a 180 refresh rate. Absolutely love this monitor. Read more
K. Chow—July 21, 2020
Works as expected. Some flickering early on, but with some settings and GPU setting changes, they disappeared. Works great, as I only have a 1060 6GB GPU and couldn't do higher pixel density ultrawides. Read more
Grayson Rutherford—May 19, 2020
Using this monitor for competitive gaming like CSGO and Rocket League. Colors are great, high refresh rate is super smooth. Using a Radeon 5700 graphics card, so the Free-sync has been working great. Ultrawide is great for work purposes, and the screen isn't overwhelmingly large, so everything stays in view nicely. 1080p was all I needed, I don't really do any work or play games that would benefit from 2k or 4k resolutions. If you are looking for a wider view that won't overwork your graphics card, this is a great option. Read more
David Laufer—July 25, 2020
Average quality for the price, but the refresh rate really helps it stand out from the crowd. The ghosting like others mentioned is not great, but it's similar to VA panels in this price point, so I don't see it as that much of an issue. My only issue is some of the settings are just terrible. Any picture mode but "user" completely destroys any color accuracy and somehow makes gradients crazy visible. I'm not opposed to different color settings, but it's amazing how it makes everything objectively worse. I would advise MSI to strip a lot of the useless extras like those picture modes or the timer it has for some reason and just make it a more streamed line experience. One other thing of note is I have not experienced any flickering when using freesync or gsync that I have typically seen with monitors in this range. Read more
CLR—May 12, 2020
UPDATE: MSI has announced a 30" ultrawide based on Rapid IPS technology, called the MAG301RF. G-sync compatible, 200hz refresh, 1ms response. Estimated launch in May 2021. ORIGINAL REVIEW: First some corrections/explanations to the specs provided. The colors are actually DCI-P3: 98.29% / SRGB: 127.39% according to MSI. The 1ms response time is MPRT, not G2G. And at 300 max brightness this thing is not for HDR, as the minimum is considered 400. My system is 9700k / GTX 1070 / 16GB RAM Connection to monitor using Display Port Set Windows to 2560 x 1080 @ 200Hz My current monitor is a 1st gen LG 29UM68 (60hz, no freesync). It's IPS so the colors and viewing angles are good. Wanted to stick with 30' so I've been waiting for a good updated panel with high refresh rate and freesync/g-sync. Getting right to the point there is ghosting especially on shades of grey. Easy to see in Windows just dragging the MSI OSD window around. Also I used the Blur Busters UFO ghosting test to see if the monitors "Response Time" feature would make a difference. The three options are Normal, Fast and Fastest. Honestly I couldn't tell a difference between them. Either it doesn't change much or there's a firmware issue. Freesync appears to work well when tested using the nVidia demo and in COD Warzone. There's an "Anti Motion Blur" mode which I assume is black frame insertion, since the brightness output of the monitor effectively cuts in half. In fact the brightness scale is disabled when using this feature. So you'll be using about 150 brightness, useless except in the deepest depths of space. With a little fiddling the colors are close to my old IPS. Contrast is clearly better on this panel since it's VA, but that means viewing angles are worse. Not a huge deal since you should be playing near center anyways. Very slight panel uniformity issue on left side when viewing on a solid grey background but not noticeable in general use. Now for actual hands on impressions: -Played several hours of COD Warzone and felt pretty good running Freesync around 120fps. Much easier to track enemies than with my 60hz. To be honest I couldn't even detect ghosting while playing so that's great, however the game is "daytime" so most areas are well lit. -Next played a game with dark areas/level (STARCRAWLERS) and the ghosting was immediately visible. While looking around, areas that are dark will lose detail and actually darken the entire screen a bit. When I stopped moving everything lightened up again and details returned. Visually much worse than my 60hz IPS. It's quite jarring. Build quality seems to be good, easy to setup. Panel had zero stuck/dead pixels. No speakers but I already knew that. If you mostly play games that are dark/night then you will certainly want to look elsewhere. 3 stars because the monitor is adequate but has too many shortcomings in my opinion for 2020 especially for gaming. "HDR Ready" is useless. "Anti Motion Blur" is useless. "Response Time" is useless. Obvious ghosting in dark areas. I'm sure the fear is that a really good 30' monitor will be expensive enough that gamers will just jump to a 34/35 inch 1440p 120Hz+ instead. But maxing those monitors takes a lot of hardware that many folks don't have or cannot afford. Guess I'm left still hoping for that 30' IPS 120Hz someday... Read more
Lance—October 26, 2020
The quality is just as good, if not better, than you can imagine in person. It's big though, really, really big. It's a hefty, 2K monitor @200 Hz that'll occupy 70% of your desk real estate, but it works like a charm for gaming, movies, or Youtube binging. Read more
Kivin Woods—February 28, 2021
If you plan to use with a VESA arm, plan to use 2” or 2.5” long screws instead of the standard 1” we’re used to using on our monitor vesa plate mounts. This monitor has RGB on the back that is an obstacle for the mounting plate of an arm mount, you’ll need slightly longer screws to reach from the vesa plate to the threaded hole for the screw inside the back of the monitor. Read more
