Zowie XL2586X+ 600 Hz review

The Zowie XL2586X+ is by far the product I’ve most wanted to keep hold of and have been the most reluctant to hand back. It’s also one I’m certain I won’t be buying any time soon. And that just about sums up this monitor, because it’s fantastic for competitive shooters but it’s very much only fantastic for those games and, more importantly, comes with a great stonking price tag.

Whether I actually fit the monitor’s use case is a question I found myself returning to over the three weeks that I put it through its paces. It is, of course, a monitor aimed solely at competitive FPS gaming, and I do consider myself to be a competitive FPS gamer. But am I enough of a competitive gamer to justify spending $1,000 to eliminate every sliver of pixel persistence and max out on motion clarity?

It’s a tough call. To give some context, I’m a lifelong competitive gamer who sometimes goes through stints without playing such games but who always inevitably returns to them. After maining Starcraft 2 and Quake during my teenage years, for a long time my main game was Counter-Strike. As of this week, I’ve amassed over 1,800 hours in it (most of these being back in CS:GO rather than CS2, when I was around LEM/Supreme) and have recently returned to CS2. I’ve shaken off the rust but I still consider myself very much returning to form rather than at form.

I explain all this because in many ways I think I sit in the exact same spot as many others who are debating buying a monitor like this. I’m not a pro or anywhere near one, and if I was and if I had the money to spare then getting this monitor would be a no-brainer because it’s simply the best on the market for tactical shooters like CS2 and Valorant. The XL2586X+, or a similar but lower refresh rate Zowie panel, is what the majority of CS2 and other FPS pros use for good reason. But I’m not, and never will be, in that echelon.

On the other hand, I’m better than the statistical majority of CS2 players and would be happy if I could stay in the top, say, 3–5% of players. Players like me who are not pro but are aiming somewhat realistically at the top of the ranking distribution are exactly who will be debating buying this monitor.

With that in mind, I can tell you that yes, after dozens of hours using the XL2586X+ to play CS2 and some other games, it can improve your gaming performance, even compared to fast-but-not-quite-so-fast OLED and IPS panels. I’m not sure to what extent that comes down to the absurdly high 600 Hz refresh rate or Zowie’s DyAc 2 anti-motion blur tech—I’d hazard a guess that it’s more the former—but either way it’s impressive.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go over what this thing is. At base, it’s a 24-inch TN panel, and I’m sure that’s where I’ll have already lost most readers. Yes, it’s small by today’s standards, and yes, it’s a TN panel. But I was surprised to find that this particular screen is far from the washed-out TNs of yore. It lacks some of the detail and accuracy of an IPS or well-calibrated OLED, but it’s not bred for that purpose.

It’s bred for competitive gaming alone—especially for CS2, Valorant, and to a lesser extent Apex Legends (lesser because Apex caps frame rates and the former two arguably require more pixel-perfect accuracy and twitch reactions as opposed to, say, tracking ability). And in those games, things look just as you’d want them to. The monitor even has three pre-set FPS modes for these games, and I must say, for actually spotting enemies and playing well, I prefer how CS2 looks on that FPS1 preset to how it looks on any IPS or OLED I’ve used.

The presets in general are pretty great compared to most monitors that, in my experience, are better when you calibrate them yourself. Zowie has a ‘Settings to Share’ app that I found to work well, which lets you download colour profiles tailored to different games, and even lets you try out pro player settings if they’ve shared them.

(Image credit: Future)

The FPS1 mode I spent most of my time in made CS2 look fantastic to my eyes, with enemies staying incredibly visible. FreeSync was kept off given that tearing at 600 Hz is a non-issue, DyAc 2 anti-ghosting was on Premium, and AMA (overdrive) set to high, the second-highest setting. Vibrancy was bumped up ever so slightly, and of course you’re not getting any HDR with this monitor at all.

Despite how great FPS1 mode is for CS2, for pretty much everything that isn’t competitive gaming, whether that’s browsing, watching videos, or playing more cinematic games, I’d prefer any half-decent VA, IPS, or OLED to this Zowie TN, not because the latter isn’t vibrant enough (it is) but because it misses a lot of colour detail and nuance. It’s something I noticed day-to-day as it sat next to my second monitor, an IPS panel, and it’s definitely something I noticed when I swapped to an OLED with a well-calibrated sRGB mode for comparison.

The 24-inch screen size is also a little diminutive these days for anything other than competitive gaming. When it comes to getting in-game in CS2 or Valorant, though, and despite what I expected coming from a 27-inch panel, I’m sold on the whole 24-inch thing. For those who aren’t aware, pros often stick to 24-inch monitors because they can take up a good amount of your vision when at a normal distance from your face, without having to move your head or eyes much.

(Image credit: Future)

You could get the same thing by moving a bigger monitor further away, but having the monitor closer is easier for your eyes to focus on. Or so the argument goes, and I must say I’ve found it to be true in my own experience. By far the best time I’ve had gaming in CS2 has been when I’ve stuck a 24-inch monitor pretty close to my retinas, which is of course saying nothing about how much good that will do my eyes over the long term.

So, we’ve got ideal colour profiles and a perfect screen size for these competitive FPS games. But that’s only half of the equation; the other half is refresh rate and DyAc 2. 600 Hz is, of course, a ridiculously high refresh rate, but I was surprised to find that I can actually tell the difference between 600 Hz and 360 Hz. It’s not as big of a difference as I saw when switching from 240 Hz to 360 Hz, and it’s even further from the 144 Hz to 240 Hz jump, but it is noticeable.

The best I can describe it is to say that it felt like the monitor simply got out of my way. Gaming at 360 Hz didn’t feel like there was any perceptible choppiness at all, but somehow 600 Hz still managed to feel even more like I was directly perceiving the game world without any pesky frame changes to process, which made it slightly more enjoyable than gaming at an already very enjoyable 360 Hz.

That being said, I didn’t feel like using 600 Hz actually improved my gaming performance significantly more than using 360 Hz, even if the higher refresh rate did feel a little nicer to play at.

The main benefit to an ultra-high refresh rate is that it gives you a baseline level of confidence in your shots. I find I have more confidence making more reactive, faster plays at 360 Hz than I do at 144 Hz, even if we’re just talking the difference between gripping my mouse a little tighter and relaxing to make the same shot that I’ll probably hit either way.

Stepping up to 600 Hz, however, only improves that confidence marginally compared to at 360 Hz. It does improve it, but it’s so slight that I seriously doubt it gives me any actual improvement in gaming performance. Again, though, the ‘not a pro’ caveat applies.

I personally wouldn’t pay loads extra for 600 Hz compared to 360 Hz. And unfortunately you are paying a lot extra here, even compared to Zowie’s own 360 Hz and 400 Hz monitors which also have DyAc 2.

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You’re really paying the premium for that refresh rate, and in other respects it’s pretty basic, including design. Though you do get some side-wings to block out distractions, which I didn’t feel the need to use, three HDMI ports, one DisplayPort, a headphone port, and even a couple of extra tidbits in the form of an external control puck and a back-side headphone stand that flips down.

It’s also worth noting that of course a 600 Hz monitor isn’t really worth buying if you can’t hit above 360 fps in-game. It’s not completely pointless, because a higher refresh rate can align with your lower frame rates a little better, but it’s pretty close to pointless, if you ask me. For reference, with an RX 9070 XT and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, I achieve between 450–600 fps in CPU-bound CS2 on average.

DyAc 2 is often cited as a reason to opt for a Zowie panel rather than a similarly fast IPS or even an OLED. This tech, Dynamic Accuracy 2, is Zowie’s proprietary variable backlight strobing solution that reduces ghosting and improves the perceived clarity of fast-moving objects such as in-game enemies.

However, as with the jump from 360 Hz to 600 Hz, I didn’t notice a massive difference when I enabled it. It’s just a best guess, but I think that’s probably because frames already refresh incredibly quickly at 600 Hz so perceived clarity is high to begin with and any between-frame strobing lasts for less time and has less of an effect on your eyes and brain.

I did try it out briefly at 240 Hz and 360 Hz, and even there I didn’t notice a big difference between having it off and having it on, even when eyeballing UFO test. But there was a difference, small though it may have been, and on the occasion I did actually notice it, it made me realise why a pro might pick this over even an OLED which doesn’t hit that level of clarity.

I also tested latency with the monitor using an Nvidia LDAT (latency and display analysis tool) and found things to be incredibly snappy. With this Zowie monitor I had a near-instantaneous 6.8 ms of delay between input and on-screen effect. For overall system latency, that’s fantastic and demonstrates the ultra-low response time of the XL2586X+. Zowie doesn’t actually list that response time anywhere, but I’d have to assume it’s under 1 ms, though it will almost certainly struggle to match an OLED’s 0.03 ms given the inherent limitations of TN panels.

That bore out in my testing, too, as an OLED gave me an overall system latency of 6.2 ms, meaning the TN is about 0.5–0.6 ms slower. Saying that, with response times this low, you really will struggle to tell any difference at all; I certainly can’t tell any difference in practice between the response time on the Zowie and on an OLED.

(Image credit: Future)

Overall, I really don’t think I would ask for anything else out of a gaming monitor for competitive FPS gaming. Other, that is, than a cheaper price tag. However you look at it, $1,000 is an incredibly large amount of money for a monitor that’s only anywhere near worth it for a single purpose. And to be honest, even for that single purpose of competitive FPS gaming, I’m not sure I’d think it was worth it over a cheaper 360 Hz monitor, unless I happened to be sitting on a pile of cash waiting to be spent.

What this Zowie monitor has done more than anything is make me want one of the cheaper DyAc 2 panels. As I write this review I’m also finding myself tabbing over to check out the prices of the lower refresh rate versions that come with DyAc 2. And as I spot the 240 Hz XL2746K on sale on Amazon UK for £380, I’m incredibly tempted to hit that purchase button. I won’t, but if I was a little more liberal with my spending, I would. And I’ll still be considering it for a potentially less impulsive purchase after actually calculating my budget.

If I had a bunch more money to spend, however, and given that I almost solely play Counter-Strike, I’d actually be tempted by this $1,000 competitive powerhouse. You just have to be all-in on competitive shooters and have an enormous budget for it to make sense.