Ultra-fast 360Hz ASUS PG259QN To Launch In September For $699

High-refresh gaming has been a thing for a while, but in recent years, the number of options have skyrocketed, and not to mention have brought us to new heights. It used to be that 144Hz was as drool-worthy as it got for high-refresh, but today, 240Hz is really common – even on notebooks. We took a look at a 300Hz Acer laptop a couple of months ago, and outside of PC hardware, some mobile phones are finally breaking through the 60 Hz plateau to improve smoothness in gaming and general use.

Well, there’s something to be said about the fact that once you reach a certain high refresh rate, going beyond it is going to begin offering fewer gains. That’s at least how we felt ahead of visiting NVIDIA’s suite at CES in January, and taking some 360Hz monitors for a test drive. We wrote on these experiences before, but long story short: refresh rate matters. It especially matters if we’re talking about competitive gameplay, such as with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

It looks like the first company out-of-the-gate with a 360Hz model is ASUS, with its new ROG Swift PG259QN. Fortunately, this is one of those announcements that actually brings a price-tag: $699 USD.

What this $699 gets you aside from the super-high refresh is a monitor that’s 24.5-inches in size, and sports an IPS panel – not TN, as is really common for high-refresh options. It’s also pretty bright, spec’d at 400 cd/m2. ASUS notes that HDR10 is supported, but that doesn’t matter as much when the panel itself can’t even hit a luminance rating of 1,000 cd/m2.

This no-glare PG259QN offers a number of gaming-specific features that could prove useful to some, such as “GamePlus”, which can add a crosshair, timer, FPS counter, or other niceties as a hardware overlay. The FPS counter really grabs our attention, since it’d be great to be able to see true FPS without any external tools, and regardless of what’s being done with the PC.

Of course, if you ever need to run this monitor at lower than 360Hz, you can do that, with both 240Hz and 144Hz being officially supported. This could be useful for quirky games that seem to like really specific settings to achieve as close to flawless performance as possible. For ports, the company is bundling just one DisplayPort connector, along with an HDMI 2.0, dual USB 3.0, and a headphone jack.

ASUS says its PG259QN will be made available next month, presumably at the usual etailers you’d expect to find them at.