Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the best times to buy a new monitor, mainly because it’s one of the only times they see the big discounts of the year as companies try to dump stock for new products. Similar to our overall Black Friday Sales Roundup we also published, today we’ll take the same format and focus in on just monitors. If you’re interested in some Best Of round-ups with recaps of our testing for the year, check our Best Cases of 2019 and Best CPUs of 2019 content.

We’ve researched the best overall displays for various categories, ranging from best budget 1080p panels to the best overall ultrawide monitors, and rounded-up everything in between to help those looking for a new display find their best match. We haven’t tested each of these in-house, but have researched each one on a sale-by-sale basis to try and determine which Black Friday monitor sales are actually worthwhile.

This will be a list of the best sales for each category. While there are better monitors for each category, the real question is whether or not they’re on sale this weekend.

Ahead of  CES 2018, ASUS is announcing their ROG bezel-free kit, a way for gamers to augment the visibility of the display bezels within multi-monitor setups. Such a product theoretically offers a seamless display setup; or rather, the imitation of one. The bezel-free kit makes use of vertical lenses affixed to mounting brackets on the top and bottom, that attach the monitors at a 130 degree angle. From there, the lenses use light refraction to essentially wax away the appearance of the bezels. How well this works, or how obtrusive the lenses or mounts are, remains to be seen. Should GamersNexus get a chance to see this up close, we’ll update accordingly.

In keeping up with our end of the year coverage, such as The Best CPUs of 2017, The Best PC Cases of 2017, and Best RAM sales, we’ve now put together the most noteworthy gaming monitors of the year. Monitors aren’t something we’ve spent much time with this year, although there are a couple we’ve gotten hands-on with and recommend. As the holidays approach—and thus, the most consumer-centric time of the year—we hope this guide of top-rated monitors will help take some of the guesswork out of any purchasing decisions.

We’ll look at best monitors in categories such as UltraWide, 4K gaming, budget 1080p, 1440p, G-Sync, FreeSync, and a handful of honorable mentions. This list includes Black Friday and other sales for monitors.

Vega’s partnership with the Samsung CF791, prior to the card even launching, was met with unrelenting criticism of the monitor’s placement in bundles. Consumer reports on the monitor mention flickering with Ultimate Engine as far back as January, now leveraged as a counter to the CF791’s inclusion in AMD’s bundle. All these consumer reports and complaints largely hinged on Polaris or Fiji products, not Vega (which didn’t exist yet), so we thought it’d be worth a revisit with the bundled card. Besides, if it’s the bundle of the CF791 with Vega that caused the resurgence in flickering concerns, it seems that we should test the CF791 with Vega. That’s the most relevant comparison.

And so we did: Using Vega 56, Vega: FE, and an RX 580 Gaming X (Polaris refresh), we tested Samsung’s CF791 34” UltraWide display, running through permutations of FreeSync. Some such permutations include “Standard Engine” (OSD), “Ultimate Engine” (OSD), and simple on/off toggles (drivers + OSD).

Our recent R7 1700 vs. i7-7700K streaming benchmarks came out in favor of the 1700, as the greater core count made it far easier to handle the simultaneous demands of streaming and gameplay without any overclocking or fiddling with process priority. Streaming isn’t the whole story, of course, and there are many situations (i.e. plain old gaming) where speed is a more valuable resource than sheer number of threads, as seen in our original 1700 review.

Today, we’re testing the R7 1700 and i7-7700K at 1440p 144Hz. We know the i7-7700K is a leader in gaming performance from our earlier CPU-bottlenecked 1080p testing; that isn’t the point here. We’ve also pitted these chips against each other in VR testing, where our conclusion was that GPU choice mattered far more, since both CPUs can deliver 90FPS equally well (and were effectively identical). This newest test is less of a competition and more of a “can the 1700 do it too” scenario. The 1700 has features that make it attractive for casual streaming or rendering, but that doesn’t mean customers want to sacrifice smooth 144Hz in pure gaming scenarios. As we explain thoroughly in the below video, there are different uses for different CPUs; it’s not quite as simple as “that one’s better,” and more accurately boils down to “that one’s better for this specific task, provided said task is your biggest focus.” Maybe that’s the R7 1700 for streaming while gaming, maybe that’s the 7700K for gaming -- but what we haven’t tested is if the 1700 can keep up at 144Hz with higher quality settings. We put to test media statements (including our own) that the 1700 should be “better at streaming,” finding that it is. It is now time to put to test the statements that the 7700K is “better at 144Hz” gaming.

This series is an ongoing venture in our follow-up tests to illustrate that, yes, the two CPUs can both exist side-by-side and can be good at different things. There’s no shame in being a leader in one aspect but not the other, and it’s just generally impossible given current manufacturing and engineering limitations, anyway. The 7700K was the challenger in the streaming benchmarks, and today it will be challenged by the inbound R7 1700 for 144Hz gaming.

People like to make things a bloodbath, but just again to remind everyone: This is less of a “versus” scenario and more of a “can they both do it?” scenario.

Samsung is releasing a trinity of gaming displays sporting High Dynamic Range (HDR), quantum-dot composition (QLED), 144 Hz refresh rates, and curved screens.

Samsung has seemingly reserved their Quantum-Dot Technology for their high-end TVs, and we are slowly seeing more HDR enabled gaming panels suffusing across the market, with the likes of both Acer and ASUS having flagship displays with the technology. Samsung’s flagship C49HG90, along with the C27HG70 and C32HG70, denote an ambitious incursion into the high-fidelity gaming display market for Samsung.

AOC is readying a multiplicity of gaming displays aimed at different price segments. All the gaming monitors belong to AOC’s AGON family and are largely similar aesthetically speaking, with dissimilarities chiefly in the panel types and feature sets. We’ll provide an overview below.

AOC is introducing two new curved displays to supplement their existing curved gaming monitors. The new displays both have 1800R curvature with a 16:9 aspect ratio, as well as VA panels capable of 144Hz refresh rates.

Following suit with our CES coverage, which is sure to remain incessant throughout the next few days, we have Acer’s prize announcements. Acer pulled the curtain back on several products, but the showcase is undoubtedly the expansion of the Predator product family. Both highly sought (and priced), the Predator series is the zenith of Acer’s gaming offerings.

Below we have a few SKUs to overview. The Predator line up will see the inclusion of three new displays: the flagship Z301CT, the XB252Q, and XB272. Also announced were two gaming notebooks, the Predator 21X and 17X.

ViewSonic has made public the existence of their new WQHD 27” professional monitor, the VP2771. Following BenQ’s announcement of their newest flagship photography monitor, the ViewSonic VP2771 also wishes to be the display of choice for professional users residing in the realm of photo and video editing, modeling, graphic design, and other content creation.

A common thread shared between both displays is the vowed color accuracy and uniformity, on which color-critical work is no doubt dependent. As such, the VP2771 claims a precise, factory calibrated Delta E ≤2 value. For those who may be unversed in color science, Delta E is the standard metric that quantifies the difference between a primary (source/input) and secondary (reproduced) color. The idea, although somewhat unempirical, is that a dE value of 1.0 is the smallest perceptible difference the human eye can see. The higher the dE value, the greater the distance is between the two samples, producing a more observable dissimilarity.

LG has made a preliminary announcement heralding the arrival of a new flagship display: the LG 32UD99. Poised to entice creative professionals, gamers, and prosumers, the LG 32UD99 suggests targeting a more encompassing demographic; a contrast to the fairly recent announcement of LG UltraFine 4K and 5K panels that seemingly left Windows users in the cold. LG plans to demonstrate the 32UD99 at CES next month alongside some other panels. Naturally, many specifications were left undisclosed. Here is what we know so far:

The LG 32UD99 touts a 32” IPS panel at a native resolution of 3840 x 2160, making this a UHD 4K display. The IPS panel is of 10-bit color depth and can reproduce 1.07 billion colors. That’s vs 8-bit with 16.77 million colors. The panel of the LG 32UD99 allegedly saturates 95% of the DCI P3 color space, and LG has reported nothing of other color spaces such as sRGB and Adobe RGB. The LG 32UD99 also supports 3D LUTs (look-up tables), but again, there are no details on the LUTs. As look-up tables are primarily for color enhancement and correction, this is a feature more prepared for users working in digital media.