Alienware – AW2521HFL 24.5″ IPS LED FHD FreeSync and G-SYNC Compatible Monitor (DisplayPort, HDMI, USB) – Lunar Light

240hz, Ips g-sync RGB!?!?!?!? Truly a monitor of my dreams, but moving on. This monitor is amazing, color angles from any direction adjustability to anything you want vertical, to aiming up, and adjustability to the stand, when you plug in the USB hub cable, included with the monitor, you also get the Alienware command center installed, but if you have an Alienware pc, or laptop that would already be there, here is where you change the power mode, or AlienFX RGB on the stand holding up the monitor or the Alienware RGB logo on the back, and the power button, but if you don’t want the software you can do that in the monitor’s menu.

The best gaming monitor I could own. I have entirely no reason to upgrade.

Alienware often demonstrates a flair for “over-the-top” design that goes for the jugular of the “gamer aesthetic”…one look at the glowing alien, angular shape, and oval LED cutout at the back of the stand and you know this monitor was designed with serious, unashamed gamers in mind. But that’s what makes the performance of the AW2521HFL even more compelling—its almost intimidating set of adjustments for picture quality and video performance would make this monitor ideal for digital content creators as well as gamers shooting for buttery smooth HD at over 200 fps.
DESIGN OBSERVATIONS
There’s not much I can say in terms of appearance you can’t get by looking at the product images, so I’ll run down some observations that might not be obvious. First, Dell packed in a DP, USB and HDMI cable so nothing could get in the way of quickly getting this beautiful monitor up and running. Assembly is mercifully quick with the oversized base attaching to the beefy riser with a single wing-headed screw. The box even features a handy cut out so you can attach the riser to the back of the monitor BEFORE you have to unpack and unwrap it—it is brilliant packaging that ensures protection of the screen until the monitor is actually on your desk and ready for action.
And yes, it IS beautiful—the lunar white is really eye-catching, as is the LED alien head and ambient riser LED–if you’re looking at the back of the monitor. This monitor simply BEGS to be sitting out on a free-standing desk where people can walk in and marvel at your tricked-out rig. But if your monitor faces a wall or into the back of a hutch or something, all you’re going to see up front is the LED power button at the lower right of the bezel, and the glow of the rear LEDs bouncing off whatever is behind the monitor.
The effect is still really cool, but most of that awesome and visceral impact of the monitor aglow on your desktop is a little lost because virtually all of it faces away from you. This is even truer if you use a VESA mount as the largest LED accent is on the back of the riser. Maybe if some of the LEDs would cast onto the surface below the monitor, perhaps even projecting a little image of the Alienware mascot??? That would be entirely possible because empty space between the stand’s feet is ENORMOUS with an inverted U-shaped opening going from 4” wide to more than 16” wide at the front of the stand. And despite being only a 25” monitor, its stand, while providing a spectacular range of rise, tilt and swivel, needs nearly 11” of clearance from the front of the feet to the back of the base to sit securely on your desk. This may not be problem for many, but if you happen to have a soundbar or something like that normally underneath your monitor, you might end up chewing through most of your available real estate. But otherwise, you DO have acres of spare space under the monitor to stash a controller or a headset (or Funko figures).
Speaking of a soundbar, that this monitor doesn’t have built-in speakers—not that you necessarily need them as there is a 3.5mm headphone jack between two bottom-facing USB ports, but even a modest pair of speakers would have been welcome for some quick YouTube or Web audio. Still, connectivity is plentiful with 4 USB ports, the headphone jack, 2 HDMI inputs, a Display Port input, and a line-out jack for a pair of powered speakers. Other thoughtful design touches include a cable-management cut-out in the riser that does a good job of keeping front-facing cable clutter to a minimum and a plastic rear cover to streamline the backside by enclosing the cut-outs for all cables and connectors.
OPERATION, CUSTOMIZATION AND CALIBRATION
How does the monitor look and perform? In a word: superb! Image quality out of the box, even on “Standard,” via DP was actually VERY good with white temperature (measured via Datacolor Spyder colorimeter) reading 6663K and just a hint of green push. But spelunking through the menus for color and performance options got a little confusing at first. For example, none of the color presets are under “Display” though that is where you specify the color format (RGB or YPbPr) and set brightness and contrast. All picture adjustments of note actually fall under the “Game” menu and the adjustments are as extensive as they are sometimes perplexing.
First, we have the color presets, most of which I rarely use because I’ve always found them somewhat gimmcky and unnatural though YMMV. There are color presets supposedly “ideal” for FPS, MOBA/RTS, RPG, and SPORTS, but best I could tell, those modes have similar, nearly neutral color temps, but all seemed (to my eyes) to futz with the brightness/contrast values to varying degrees, with FPS in particular greatly enhancing detail retrieval in dark areas—which, of course, simply washed out dark areas into a murky grey so you can see stuff hidden in corners better. There are also 3 other customizable “Game” presets, “Comfortview” which came in at 6073K and had a strong push in green and deep cut in blue, “Warm” which measured 6690K and strangely featured just a hair of green push and a slight cut in the reds, “Cool” at 8550K with completely overblown blues and a deep cut in reds, and then another “Custom” color preset that featured even more customization options. I dialed in the Custom preset to within 5 degrees of 6500K at a luminance reading of 206.3 lux using the following Gain settings: R 98%, G 86%, B 91%.
But here’s where things get better (or worse, depending on how OCD you are). Some presets allow you to individually adjust gray-to-gray response separately from the global setting so you can, for example, have a global color preset with 2ms response time but an FPS color preset for eSports with 1ms response. There are 3 response time options: 4ms, 2ms, and 1ms. 1ms is the “Extreme” setting for the ultimate in blur-busting, but I’m guessing it’s achieved via some kind of overdrive because the manual warns this setting might introduce “slight and noticeable visual artifacts into the image.” I haven’t noticed any artifacts in the past few weeks, but in practice I tend to stick to the 2ms option just to wring a little more life out of the panel down the road.
All color presets allowed adjustment of the “Dark Stabilizer” which “improves visibility in dark gaming scenarios”…again, it looked like the workings of brightness/contrast sliders that gradually washed out blacks to better make out shadow detail. But the gaming and custom presets ALSO provided adjustments for offset (RGB), 6-channel saturation (RGBCMY) and 6-channel hue (RGBCMY). I’ve never come across a consumer-level gaming monitor with this much granular control over so many settings. I would imagine someone working in media creation with calibration tools could take this monitor even further than a color temperature and grey-scale calibration alone (which is frankly where I’ve always stopped).
Sadly, the instruction manual spends more time describing how to use the AlienFX app to adjust the LED lighting effects than it does describing the use case for some of these picture control settings, but it’s nice the option is there for those with the know-how and capability to take advantage of all that adjustability. There are additional options for the LED color and effects, audio, shortcut key settings and menu personalization, even LCD conditioning to combat burn-in, as well as a host of other features; but the picture settings and response times were where I devoted most of my attention. However, one particularly handy feature is the “Game enhance mode” which allows you toggle a display for current FPS, a timer, and even display alignment hashes for aligning multi-monitor setups.
As some have pointed out, this monitor may initially be recognized by Windows as a 60Hz display. This can be adjusted up to the 240Hz cap under Windows display adapter properties using “List all modes” or in the NVIDIA control panel resolution selector by scrolling down past the default resolution sets covering “Ultra HD, HD, SD” to the “PC” resolution settings for 1920×1080—the 240Hz refresh rate will then be available in the pull-down.
BOTTOM LINE
This thing ROCKS—the pictures I’ve attached simply cannot do the panel’s PQ justice! The Radeon RX-580 in my daughter’s computer immediately recognized the monitor as a FreeSync device; the 2080 Ti in my own rig also recognized the unit as a G-Sync display. Playing DOOM Eternal at 240 fps is a positively sublime experience, as is the stutter-free G-sync action during those few dips below the screen’s max refresh rate. There is a bit of backlight bleed at the 4 corners but it’s pretty uniform and barely noticeable in action; overall, the panel is more than capable of delivering some pretty satisfying inky blackness when you’ve got the color dialed in just right.
Dell and Alienware really seem to have upped their game with this monitor and the performance, picture quality, and seemingly rock-solid build honestly make this a monitor that feels like it is well worth the asking price. Sure, an ultra-wide or 4K monitor will give you more eye candy, but if you want the pinnacle of HD video performance (or that’s all you can drive at 100+ frame rates with your current setup), it’s probably going to be hard to do much better than this panel right now…enthusiastically recommended!

Unpacking and Setup
The Alienware 25″ Gaming Monitor (AW2521HFL) is a beautiful beast! This is evident from the box’s size and the packing that keeps this fantastic monitor safe for shipping. The vertical support post was quickly attached to the V-shaped base with a single anchor screw, and the unwrapped monitor clicked into the mount. A single push button is available for quickly releasing the monitor from the stand. I soon discovered the need for this to get the cables attached to the monitor. The bottom back of the slides down and off to reveal the ports for the cables. Grooves below the ports firmly secure the wires. Reattaching the monitor to the stand is a quick snap, and a cable tunnel in the stand is perfect for threading the cables.
As soon as I plugged in power, the back of the monitor came alive with light from the Alienware logo and a u-shaped light bar on the vertical support. The lights cycled through a range of colors and ended in a nice glowing red. I connected the monitor to my Geforce equipped computer with an HDMI cable for video and a USB upstream cable for enabling the two USB ports on the bottom of the monitor. The power button for the monitor is on the bottom right. When pressed, it will cycle through colors until blue.
Configuration Menu
A push of a small joystick button on the right back of the monitor enables the monitor configuration menu. This menu provides settings for Game Modes, Input Sources, AlienFX Lighting, Display settings, Audio volume, Menu settings, Personalize settings for customizing the three Shortcut buttons, and Other settings.
The AlienFX Lighting settings are for configuring the light colors of the logo, stand light, and power button. I set mine to Spectrum for rotating through all the colors. Other settings are for enabling DDC/CI, LCD Conditioning, Firmware version, Service Tag, and Factory Reset.
Game Modes
The monitor comes with five preset modes:
-Standard
-FPS: First Person Shooters
-MOBA/RTS: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena and Real-Time Strategy games.
-RPG: Role-Playing Games
-SPORTS: Best color settings for sports games
Three custom game modes can be saved and assigned to the three bottom push buttons on the back of the monitor.
Gaming
The performance of this monitor is crazy fast. My games of choice are No Man’s Sky, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Sid Meier’s Civilization V, and Minecraft. The monitor was able to handle everything I threw at it. Entirely no ghosting, no stuttering, or frame freezing. Only on No Man’s Sky did I get a bit of stuttering in the maximum graphic settings, which is due to my video card and not the monitor.
Pros
-Crazy fast performance. A gray-to-gray response of 1ms in Extreme mode.
-The stand is very adjustable in height and tilt. Monitor can be rotated to portrait for us code geeks.
-Beautiful non-glare monitor with a nice looking edge-to-edge minimum bevel.
-Back-mounted joystick control for monitor settings.
-Plenty of ports for connectivity. 2 HDMI, 1 DP, Upstream USB, 2 USB out on the bottom, 2 USB out on the back, Headphones jack, and Audio out.
-It can be mounted to VESA mounts.
-Supports AMD FreeSync for the highest possible frame rates.
-DDC/CI support for controlling the monitor settings from the computer, via Alienware’s downloadable software.
-LCD Conditioning for reducing minor cases of image retention.
The non-glare coating and the ability to rotate makes this monitor a flexible choice for gaming, programming, and writing.
-Timer display mode for 30,40,50,60,90 minutes. Nice for in-game cycle reminders.
Cons
-While the manual says the monitor is Nvidia G-Sync compatible, I could not find any settings for controlling this. G-Sync is hardware-driven, whereas AMD FreeSync is software-driven. Since FreeSync is touting compatibility with G-Sync, I feel this can’t be accomplished without integrating the G-Sync hardware.
-The Frame Rate setting only showed the Refresh Rate of the monitor, and it never did show the Frame Rate of the games.
-The base of the monitor stand is deep at 10.5 inches. Be prepared to lose some desk space.
Some Specs and Features
-AW2521HFL, Lunar Light model.
-Interface: HDMI (2), USB 3.0, DP
-Headphone port.
-Audio line-out.
-Resolution: 1920 x 1080
-Refresh: 240Hz with 1ms response
-Video Compatibility: AMD Free Sync, G-Sync compatible
-Brightness: 400 nits
-On-Screen Design with six preset modes for quick selection of screen settings to match the gaming mode.
-On-screen timer for tracking time-based game events.
-FPS Counter for showing frame rate touted but did not work.
-Visual alignment lines for aligning with multiple monitors.
-VESA standard mounting holes
-TN panel, LED edgelight system, Active matrix. TFT LCD 1920 x 1080 at 240 Hz and 1 ms gray-to-gray response time.
-Preset video modes for First-Person Shooter, Real-Time Strategy, RPG, and Racing. And three customizable game modes.
-Back-mounted joystick for monitor controls.
-Selectable color modes for the back of monitor Alienware logo and light strip.
-Dark Stabilizer mode for improving visibility in dark gaming scenarios.
Summary
The Alienware 25″ Gaming Monitor is an ideal match for gaming and working. The lack of a “true” Nvidia G-Sync implementation is a minor detail, and the monitor can handle whatever I could throw at it. It is a perfect match for my dual-use needs.