A Good Gaming Monitor Makes All the Difference. Here Are the 6 Best You Can Buy.

So, you're a gamer, huh, and you're looking to buy your next monitor. But where to start? You don't want to buy too low, because you'll end up with input lag and a shitty picture, but god knows gaming can get expensive if you go high-end. There’s no way you're spending $3,000-plus when you could buy or build a killer gaming PC for a fraction of that price. The monitor world is overrun with, luckily, a lot of pretty solid options. But now you've got to decide what's important to you. Do you need a high refresh rate and low input lag for playing competitive shooters, or would you rather put an emphasis on colors and visuals for more artistic titles?

For the folks who are getting fed up with all the weird acronyms, here’s a rundown. 4K refers to the screen resolution, or how many pixels work on screen. 4K is standard at 3,840-by-2,160 pixels; that’s a helluva lot of pixels. TVs are even edging toward 5K and 8K right now. But while on a TV you're mostly watching the action, on a computer monitor you're always interacting with it, meaning input lag is a make or break feature. That's where a good refresh rate, measured as Hertz (Hz), comes in. A monitor's refresh rate is how many times per second the screen image updates, so if you have a 144Hz refresh rate, the monitor is redrawing what you see 144 times a second—a must for competitive gaming where split seconds make all the difference.

Whether you want 4K visuals, a high refresh rate, beautiful color, cool design, or a combo, one of these six video game monitors will get you finally gaming the way you always knew you were destined to.