Dell Alienware AW2524H Monitor Review

The Dell AW2524H has a gamer-oriented design and an all-black plastic body. It has some RGB lighting on the back, and it has a headphone rack that you can pull out from the left side of the monitor.

The build quality is excellent. The plastic feels solid, and even though it flexes a bit, it isn't a big issue. The stand is sturdy, and the display doesn't wobble easily. The headphone rack feels flimsy, but it isn't a problem if you're just leaving your headphones on it.

The Dell AW2524H has excellent ergonomics, as you can easily adjust it in different ways. The back is fairly plain, but the inputs can be hard to reach because they're down-facing and set into the back. The stand features a cut-out for cable management to keep your setup clean.

The housing width measurement includes the headphone rack that sticks out even when closed. The rack itself measures 3.7" (9.3 cm) in width.

There's a joystick underneath the center of the display to control the on-screen menu, and there's a power button on the right side.

• DisplayPort cable
• USB-C to DisplayPort cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power cable
• Alienware sticker
• User guides

The Dell AW2524H has a low contrast ratio making blacks look gray next to bright highlights. Even though it has a local dimming feature, it doesn't do anything to improve the contrast ratio.

The edge-lit local dimming feature is terrible. It has 32 large edge-lit zones, and any small bright object causes an entire zone to light up. This results in distracting blooming, like when there are subtitles. However, most content causes all the zones to turn on, so the blooming isn't as bad. Sadly, it's distracting when each zone turns on and off, especially when you have black bars on the top and bottom. The zones are also quick to turn on when a bright object appears on the screen but slow to turn off when it disappears, which can get distracting.

You can adjust the Variable Backlight setting to 'Mode 0', 'Mode 1', and 'Mode 2'. When using 'Mode 2', there's black crush that causes a loss of details in dark scenes; however, the details are easier to see if you disable the local dimming feature entirely.

You can see the local dimming video with Variable Backlight set to '0' here and with it off .

The SDR brightness is great. It gets bright enough to fight glare in most well-lit rooms and maintains its brightness consistently across different scenes. These results are from after calibration in the 'Custom Color' Preset Mode with the Brightness at its max and Variable Backlight set to 'Mode 2'.

The HDR brightness is decent. While it gets bright enough to use in a bright environment, it doesn't make small highlights pop against the rest of the image. It doesn't track the PQ EOTF perfectly, and with a slow roll-off at the peak brightness, it doesn't let highlights get the brightest they could. These results are in the 'Custom Color' Preset Mode and Variable Backlight on 'Mode 2'.

The Dell AW2524H has a decent horizontal viewing angle. While it looks dark at wide angles, it's still fine if you want to share the screen with someone next to you for co-op gaming.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Colors look washed out if you mount it high above eye level or are standing up and looking down on it, but you won't have issues when sitting directly in front of it.

The gray uniformity is very good. The edges of the screen are a bit darker than the rest, but other than that, the screen looks uniform, and there aren't any distracting issues.

The black uniformity is disappointing. Without local dimming, there's backlight bleed along the edges and clouding throughout. Unfortunately, the uniformity is worse with local dimming because there's a ton of blooming around bright objects.

The accuracy before calibration is decent. It doesn't have a dedicated sRGB mode, so colors look oversaturated, but most colors and the white balance are both still accurate. Gamma also follows the target sRGB curve well, but most scenes are slightly overbrightened. The color temperature is a bit on the cool side, resulting in a slightly blue tint.

The accuracy after calibration is remarkable, and you won't notice any issues with it.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. It has perfect coverage of the commonly-used sRGB color space and okay coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, but it isn't wide enough if you need to use it for content creation.

The Dell AW2524H has a good HDR color gamut. It has very good coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most web content, and colors look accurate thanks to its fantastic tone mapping. Unfortunately, it has limited coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, and the tone mapping is worse.

The HDR color volume is decent. It struggles to make bright colors look vivid.

The text clarity is decent. Due to its low resolution and limited pixel density, text isn't the sharpest, but at least enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps improve text clarity. The photos above are in Windows 10, and you can also see what it looks like in Windows 11 with ClearType on and ClearType off.

This monitor has very good reflection handling. Combined with its high brightness, you won't have issues using it in a well-lit environment.

The gradient handling is incredible, and you won't notice any problems with banding.

You can only reach this monitor's 500Hz refresh rate with a DisplayPort connection and by using the monitor's overclock feature. Due to bandwidth limitations, the refresh rate is limited over HDMI. If you want something with a slightly higher 540Hz refresh rate that you can also reach over HDMI, the BenQ ZOWIE XL2586X is a good alternative.

On top of native G-SYNC support and FreeSync compatibility, this monitor also supports HDMI Forum VRR.

The Dell AW2524H has great motion handling across its VRR range. Motion looks sharp, especially at high refresh rates, but there's more inverse ghosting at low refresh rates.

The refresh rate compliance is good. Although its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame at the max refresh rate, it's much better at lower refresh rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 500Hz is impressive. Motion looks sharp and there's almost no noticeable blur. All three overdrive settings perform similarly, and you can't go wrong with either 'Super Fast' or 'Extreme'.

The CAD at 120Hz is good, but there's more blur than at high refresh rates. The recommended overdrive setting is 'Super Fast' because 'Extreme' has too much inverse ghosting.

The CAD at 60Hz is good. There's a bit of blur, but there isn't any visible inverse ghosting. Unlike at 120Hz, the recommended overdrive is 'Fast' because 'Super Fast' has inverse ghosting, so you may have to change the setting if you switch games or sources.

BFI Setting	360Hz	240Hz	120Hz
100
50
10

The Dell Alienware AW2524H has an optional backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur. It's a bit limited as you can't use it with VRR, and it only works with fixed 120Hz, 240Hz, or 360Hz signals, so you can't even use it at its max refresh rate. However, you can control its intensity with the NVIDIA ULMB Pulse Width slider from 10 to 100; you can see examples in the photos above. It creates a bit of image duplication, but it isn't the worst case of it and it reduces persistence blur. If you're looking for a monitor with less image duplication, check out the ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP instead.

There isn't any visible VRR flicker with changing frame rates, which is fantastic for gaming.

The backlight remains flicker-free at all backlight settings, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to it.

This monitor has remarkably low input lag, especially at its max refresh rate. While it's higher than expected with 60Hz signals, you still won't notice any delay. It increases a bit with BFI enabled, as you can see below:

• 360Hz: 5.6 ms
• 240Hz: 8.3 ms
• 120Hz: 15.2 ms

As the Xbox Series X|S only supports HDR with 4k signals, which this monitor doesn't support, you can't get an HDR signal from the console.

There are two additional USB ports underneath the left side, and the one on the right is used for the NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer feature.

This monitor has two audio ports. The one in the back is for speakers with their own volume control, while the one underneath the bottom bezel is for your headphones.

This monitor works well with macOS, and there aren't any issues like flickering. You can either send a fixed 500Hz refresh rate or use VRR up to 240Hz. HDR works well with either option, but it looks a bit washed out, which is a limitation of the monitor. If you're using a MacBook, windows stay in their place when waking it up from sleep or opening the lid.

This monitor comes with a few extra features, including:

• Dark Stabilizer: Adjusts gamma in dark scenes so that you see opponents better.
• FPS counter: Displays an overlay showing the current frame rate.
• NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer: This feature measures the latency of your entire setup, letting you see which sources have the highest latency. You need to connect a compatible mouse to the designated USB port on the monitor for it to work.
• RGB Lighting: Certain zones on the back panel light up. You get full control over it with the downloadable Alien FX software, but some options are also available through the OSD.