The 4 Best 1080p Monitors - Summer 2024

Since the highest-end 1080p monitors all have gaming features, you'll also get the best 1080p gaming monitor with a premium option like the Dell Alienware AW2523HF. It's focused on competitive gaming with a 360Hz refresh rate. It has a few gaming features, like VRR support, a dark stabilizer to help you see your opponents better in dark areas, and different crosshairs to give you a competitive advantage in FPS games. It also has a consistently fast response time for sharp motion at any refresh rate, but it lacks a backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

Besides its decent gaming performance, it also delivers good picture quality with accurate colors, wide viewing angles, and great peak brightness, meaning it looks good in well-lit rooms. It even has a USB hub that makes it easy to connect your peripherals directly to the monitor, which is useful if your computer doesn't have any ports available.

If you want to save money and don't mind getting something with a lower refresh rate, check out a budget model like the ViewSonic XG2431. There are trade-offs for getting something cheaper, and in this case, the ViewSonic has a lower 240Hz refresh rate than the Dell Alienware AW2523HF, but this doesn't make a big difference if your setup can't take full advantage of the high refresh rate on the Dell anyway. This refresh rate is still good enough even for competitive PC gaming, too.

This monitor is better than other budget-friendly options because of its versatile backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur. You can adjust the backlight strobing flicker to your liking, which isn't something all monitors can do. However, like many monitors, this feature doesn't work simultaneously with VRR. Besides that, it has a fast response time and other useful gaming features, like black stabilization, so it's easier to see your opponents in dark scenes.

If you want a cheap and basic gaming monitor with a 1080p resolution, there are a few good options with a 144Hz refresh rate, like the ASUS TUF Gaming VG249Q1A, and you can even overclock its 144Hz native refresh rate to 165Hz. While this isn't as good for competitive gaming as the ViewSonic XG2431, it's still very good for PC gaming, especially if you're on a limited budget and are building your first gaming setup. It has incredible motion handling, and fast-moving objects look fairly crisp, even at lower refresh rates. Like the ViewSonic, it also includes a backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur, but it isn't as customizable.

Besides that, it's rather limited in features, which is expected of a cheap gaming monitor. However, you can still add virtual crosshairs to give you a competitive advantage, as your game's anti-cheat tool won't detect it.

If you don't need any gaming-oriented features with a cheap 1080p monitor, then check out the Dell P2425H. It's different from the monitors mentioned above, like the ASUS TUF Gaming VG249Q1A, because it's limited to a 100Hz refresh rate and doesn't support VRR at all, but instead it comes with office-oriented features. Unlike most cheap monitors, it has a USB hub, so you can connect various devices to the monitor, which is useful if your laptop doesn't have many ports. It even has incredible ergonomics, making it very easy to adjust.

One downside is that it has limited picture quality as it doesn't support HDR or get bright enough to fight glare, but this is expected for a cheap monitor. That said, it has good reflection handling, so it's still fine if you want to use it in a room with a few lights around.