Dell Alienware AW2523HF  Monitor Review

This monitor features a gamer-oriented design with a hexagonal-shaped stand and a black and silver body. It also has a pull-out headphone rack on the left side.

The build quality is excellent. It's solid throughout, and the stand holds the display well as there's minimal wobble, and the screen stays in place when you adjust it. The plastic materials also feel good and don't flex that much.

The ergonomics are excellent. You can easily adjust it, and it swivels at the bottom of the stand. The back of the monitor features plastic with a metallic chrome finish and a cylindrical stand without any RGB lighting. There's cable management through the stand to help keep your setup clean.

The stand doesn't take up much space on the desk, and it holds the screen very well.

The housing width and height measurements include the headphone rack, which sticks out slightly (0.146 inches, 3.7 mm), and the joystick, which sticks out a bit at the bottom (0.071 inches, 1.8 mm). When you pull it out completely, the headphone rack measures 3.67 inches (9.3 cm).

There's a joystick underneath the center of the monitor to control the on-screen display. There's also a power button on the right side.

• DisplayPort cable
• Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power cable
• User guides

The Dell AW2523HF has a mediocre contrast ratio. It means that blacks look gray next to bright highlights, and it isn't ideal to use in a dark room. Unfortunately, there's no local dimming feature to further improve the contrast.

This monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is great. It gets bright enough to combat glare, and it maintains its brightness between different content. These results are from after calibration in the 'Custom Color' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max of '100'.

The HDR brightness is decent. It gets fairly bright, but without a local dimming feature, small objects don't pop against the rest of the image. The EOTF is decent at following the target PQ curve, but most scenes are darker than they should be. There's a slow roll-off at the peak brightness, so it doesn't let highlights get the brightest they could. These results are in the 'Desktop' Smart HDR mode, which locks the brightness to its max.

This monitor has a great horizontal viewing angle. For the most part, the image remains consistent when viewing off-center, but it looks darker when viewing from a really wide angle. Still, it's good enough if you need to share your screen with someone else.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Colors washout if you're looking at it from above or below, but as long as you have the monitor set to your eye level, you won't have issues using it.

The Dell AW2523HF has great gray uniformity. The corners are a bit darker than the rest, but other than that, there's minimal dirty screen effect in the center, which is great when browsing the web or playing games with scenic images.

The black uniformity is disappointing. There's backlight bleed throughout, and blacks look blue due to the low contrast. Sadly, it doesn't have a local dimming feature to improve this.

The accuracy before calibration is good. There are minor inaccuracies throughout, but they aren't big enough to be noticeable to most people. The white balance and most colors are only slightly off, but because it doesn't have an sRGB mode to clamp the colors, they're oversaturated. The color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a slightly blue tint, and gamma seems to follow a 2.2 target instead of sRGB, meaning dark scenes are too dark and bright scenes are too bright.

This monitor has remarkable accuracy after calibration. Any remaining inaccuracies aren't visible to the naked eye, and both the color temperature and gamma are nearly spot-on with their targets.

The Dell AW2523HF has a fantastic SDR color gamut. It has perfect coverage of the sRGB color space used in most web content, but it has limited coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, which is used in professional publishing.

The HDR color gamut is alright. It has limited coverage of both the commonly-used DCI-P3 and wider Rec. 2020 color spaces, and it has tone mapping issues in Rec. 2020, leading to a loss of fine details with bright colors.

This monitor has a mediocre HDR color volume. It's mainly limited by its incomplete color gamut and low contrast, so it doesn't display colors well at a wide range of luminance levels.

The text clarity is decent. Enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps improve the clarity on diagonal and curved lines. The pictures above are with Windows 10, and you can also see the photos with Windows 11 below.

The reflection handling is great. The matte finish helps reduce the intensity of glare from strong light sources, and combined with its great brightness, you won't have issues using it in a bright room.

The gradient handling is fantastic. You won't notice banding with scenes of shades of similar colors, like a sunset.

Due to bandwidth limitations, you can only reach the max refresh rate with 8-bit color depth over DisplayPort. This means you'll see more banding, but it allows you to take full advantage of the monitor.

The Dell AW2523HF has great motion handling across its VRR range. All the overdrive settings are extremely consistent as the refresh rate drops, which is great. While the 'Extreme' setting performs the best at high refresh rates, 'Super Fast' is better at lower 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 360Hz is good. Motion looks sharp on the 'Extreme' overdrive setting, but there's still some blur with fast-moving objects. Unlike other Dell monitors, the response time is the same whether you enable or disable VRR.

The CAD at 120Hz is good. Motion looks sharp, but unlike at the max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive is 'Super Fast' because 'Extreme' has a bit more inverse ghosting. This means you may need to change the setting if you change games or switch sources.

The CAD at 60Hz is decent. The 'Fast' overdrive doesn't have inverse ghosting, which the 'Super Fast' and 'Extreme' settings have. This means you may have to change settings if your frame rate drops or you change games.

This monitor doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

This monitor doesn't have noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates, which is fantastic for gaming.

This monitor has a flicker-free backlight that helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to it.

This monitor has low input lag for a quick and responsive gaming experience.

This monitor can't take full advantage of the PS5, but you can use the Console Mode setting to get a downscaled 4k signal.

This monitor has a Console Mode setting that allows you to get a downscaled 4k signal, which is useful because the Xbox Series X|S only supports HDR with 4k signals, so this allows you to play games in HDR.

There are two additional USB ports underneath the left side of the screen.

This monitor works well with macOS. VRR works without issue, and there isn't any flickering in games or on the desktop. If you're using a MacBook, windows return to their original position when waking the laptop up from sleep, but not all the time when you close the lid. Unfortunately, the one downside is that HDR looks washed out and dim, which is a limitation of the monitor's performance.

The Dell AW2523HF comes with a few extra features, including:

• AlienVision: Provides a virtual crosshair and 'Night,' 'Clear,' and 'Chroma' vision modes that adjust the picture to see opponents better. Your system won't detect this, giving you a competitive advantage.
• Console Mode: Optimizes the monitor for use with the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S as it downscales a 4k image.
• Dark Stabilizer: Adjusts gamma in dark scenes so that you see opponents better.
• Display Alignment: Displays a virtual grid so that it's easier to line it up with a second monitor.
• FPS counter: Displays an overlay showing the current frame rate.