Dell Alienware AW2523HF Monitor Review

The Dell AW2523HF 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 Dell AW2523HF has excellent build quality. 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 Dell AW2523HF has impressive ergonomics as 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 that sticks out slightly (0.146", 3.7 mm) and also the joystick that sticks out a bit at the bottom (0.071", 1.8 mm). The headphone rack measures 3.67" (9.3 cm) when you pull it out completely.

The Dell AW2523HF features 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 Dell AW2523HF has great SDR peak brightness. It gets bright enough to combat glare, and it maintains its brightness between different scenes. 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 bright enough to make some highlights look bright, but without a local dimming feature, small objects don't stand out against a dark 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 lose too many details in bright scenes in content like movies.

These results are in the 'Desktop' Smart HDR mode, which locks the brightness to its max.

The Dell AW2523HF 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 Dell AW2523HF has an okay vertical viewing angle. Colors washout if you're looking at it from above or below, but as long as you have the monitor set to the right height, 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 Dell AW2523HF has disappointing black uniformity. 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 to the sRGB color space, colors are over-saturated. 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.

The Dell AW2523HF 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 SDR color volume is incredible. It displays bright colors well, but due to its low contrast, it fails to display dark colors well.

The Dell AW2523HF has an alright HDR color gamut. 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.

The Dell AW2523HF has alright 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 reflection handling is great. The matte finish helps reduce the intensity of glare from strong light sources, and combined with its great peak brightness, you won't have issues using it in a bright room.

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

The Dell AW2523HF has a high max refresh rate that you can only achieve with a DisplayPort connection and limiting the color depth to 8-bit. It means you'll see more banding, but it allows you to take full advantage of the monitor. However, due to bandwidth limitations, the refresh rate is limited if you use a 10-bit signal or an HDMI connection.

The FreeSync VRR support works over both DisplayPort and HDMI connections, but you can only use the G-SYNC compatibility with a DisplayPort connection. It also supports Low Framerate Compensation for the VRR to continue working when the frame rate drops too low. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card and prefer something with native G-SYNC support, consider the Dell Alienware AW2524H.

The Dell AW2523HF has an incredible response time at its max refresh rate of 360Hz. Motion looks smooth with minimal blur behind fast-moving objects. The overdrive settings all perform very similarly to each other as none result in any overshoot, and 'Extreme' produces the fastest response time. However, because they perform differently with lower refresh rates, it might be best to leave it on 'Fast' if you want a set-and-forget setting. The overall response time performance isn't quite as good as the BenQ ZOWIE XL2566K, which offers a customizable overdrive feature.

The response time at 120Hz is once again fantastic. Unlike at its max refresh rate, the Response Time overdrive settings perform a little differently, as 'Fast' results in the fastest response time and least overshoot. It means you might have to change the setting if you set it to 'Extreme' at its max refresh rate and the frame rate of your game drops.

The Dell AW2523HF has a great response time at 60Hz, leading to smooth motion with low-frame-rate games. The overdrive setting is similar to 120Hz, so the recommended setting is 'Fast' as it has the quickest total response time and the least amount of overshoot.

The Dell AW2523HF doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

The Dell AW2523HF has a flicker-free backlight that helps reduce eye strain during long gaming sessions.

The Dell AW2523HF has low input lag for a quick and responsive gaming experience.

Despite the lower resolution, the pixel density is still decent, thanks to the smaller screen size, but you'll still need to get a higher-resolution display if you want sharper images, like the Dell Alienware AW2723DF.

The Dell AW2523HF works well with the PS5, as it even downscales a 4k image, resulting in a sharper image than a 1080p signal. You need to enable Console Mode for that to work; otherwise, you can just play 1080p games at 60Hz or 120Hz. However, there are some limitations, as it can't downscale a 1440p signal and doesn't support the PS5's VRR format.

The monitor works well with the Xbox Series X as it downscales a 4k image, and once again, you need to enable Console Mode for it to work. As the Xbox only supports HDR with 4k signals, you also need to enable this for HDR. 4k signals are limited to 60Hz because it lacks HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, so you have to lower the resolution to 1080 for a 120Hz signal. Unlike with the PS5, VRR works with the Xbox because the console supports FreeSync.

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

You need to connect the USB-B to USB-A cable to your computer for the USB ports to work.

The Dell AW2523HF works well with recent M1 MacBooks. VRR works without issue, and there isn't any flickering in games or on the desktop, but the MacBook doesn't support any refresh rate higher than 240Hz. It's a bit slow to connect to the laptop, but once it works, it's fine. Windows return to their original position when waking the laptop up from sleep, but not all the time when you close the lid, which is a common problem among monitors. 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 as it downscales a 4k image, but the refresh rate is limited to 60Hz.
• Dark Stabilizer: Adjusts the 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.
• Timer: Displays a virtual timer on the screen.