600Hz TN vs. OLED | Zowie XL2586X+ Monitor Review

Summary

In this video, Jaeky reviews the Zowie XL2586X+ monitor, a 1080p TN panel boasting a refresh rate of 600Hz, and compares it to his experience using an OLED 360Hz monitor. Despite its advanced motion clarity, courtesy of the DIC to strobing technology, he finds the Zowie's performance not justifiable at its $1,000 price when compared to the color-rich and versatile OLED alternatives priced around $700. The review highlights the Zowie's pros for competitive gaming but ultimately underlines its impracticality and technical quirks, such as a tendency for dead pixels, as major drawbacks for general consumers.

Highlights

• Zowie XL2586X+ excels in motion clarity, ideal for pro gamers seeking edge in visuals. 🏆
• OLED monitors deliver vibrant colors and superior viewing angles, enhancing non-gaming use. 📺
• Zowie's design is perfect for LAN tournaments with its portable and gaming-oriented features. 🌐
• High performance comes at a cost—$1,000 for the Zowie against $700 for a competitive OLED. 💰
• Potential hardware issues like dead pixels and uneven brightness mar the Zowie's appeal. ⚠️

Key Takeaways

• The Zowie XL2586X+ boasts a 600Hz refresh rate, ideal for competitive gaming enthusiasts. 🎮
• OLED monitors offer superior color quality and resolution compared to TN panels, making them more versatile. 🌈
• Jaeky finds the Zowie monitor overpriced at $1,000, especially with alternatives offering better value. 💸
• Despite great motion clarity, the Zowie has noticeable inverse ghosting issues, unlike OLED. 👻
• Dead pixel issues and inconsistent brightness are technical drawbacks of the Zowie monitor. 📉

Overview

Jaeky's review of the Zowie XL2586X+ monitor is a deep dive into performance versus practicality. The monitor's standout feature is its 600Hz refresh rate, making it a star for gaming pros who crave supreme motion clarity. It's built for portability and esports, though it lacks in ergonomic versatility, unable to be rotated into portrait mode. The design is clearly set to focus solely on gaming, with thick bezels that help players concentrate on their action-packed screens.

However, when comparing this TN panel to an OLED monitor, the differences become stark. OLED screens, offering 1440p resolution, provide far superior color accuracy, viewing angles, and are generally more pleasing to the eye with vibrant display capabilities. For someone who uses their monitor for more than gaming, such as content creation or just general media consumption, an OLED at a significantly lower price point is hard to argue against.

Nonetheless, the Zowie's technical performance is critically acclaimed, with its strobing feature providing enhanced clarity. But issues such as variable brightness and dead pixels, not to mention its hefty price tag, make this monitor a tool for niche audiences: perhaps best suited for professional gamers who would leverage its high refresh rate at tournaments. For anyone else, especially those who want a good all-round display, OLED remains the champion.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Monitor Overview In this chapter, Jakey introduces the Zoi XL 2586 X Plus monitor, highlighting it as Zoi's flagship model. He discusses its key features, focusing on the high refresh rate of 600 Hz, which is an upgrade from its predecessor's 540 Hz. Despite receiving the monitor from Zoi for review, Jakey assures that his evaluation of the product will remain unbiased.
• 03:00 - 06:30: Unboxing and Features The chapter titled 'Unboxing and Features' discusses the similarities and differences between two monitors. Both monitors have similar colors, stands, and other identical features, with the main difference being an increase in refresh rate from 540Hz to 600Hz for one of the models. The narrator shares their experience using an OLED 360Hz monitor and hints at a comparison video. The chapter concludes with a brief mention of the unboxing experience for the 600Hz Zoi monitor.
• 06:30 - 10:00: OLED vs. 600Hz TN Panel Comparison The chapter discusses the packaging of AI's monitors, emphasizing its completeness and efficiency. The package includes essential items like a power cable, display port cable, HDMI cable, the monitor's base, the stand, and the monitor itself. Additionally, flaps are provided to be installed on the monitor's sides to block peripheral vision, enhancing focus, particularly useful in a gaming environment. The monitor also features an S switch, appreciated for its functionality.
• 10:00 - 13:00: Pros and Cons of XL 2586 X Plus vs. OLED This chapter discusses the features and benefits of the latest Zoi monitors, highlighting the convenience of the S switch which allows users to operate the on-screen display and save up to three different profiles with varying saturation settings. The chapter also praises the ergonomic design and high quality of the new Zoi monitor stands, emphasizing their excellent height and tilt adjustments.
• 13:00 - 15:00: Discussion on Monitor Quality and Dead Pixel Issue The chapter discusses the smooth height adjustment feature of a monitor on a new Zoi stand. However, it notes that the monitor cannot be swiveled to portrait mode, only landscape mode is possible. It points out that this limitation might be significant for those who prefer using portrait mode. Additionally, the chapter mentions the presence of markings on the base and height adjustment notches to help users know the height of their monitor.
• 15:00 - 17:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts The conclusion emphasizes the portability and user-friendly design of the monitor, tailored for LAN tournaments. The monitor includes features such as adjustable tilt and height that can be easily recreated, a headphone hanger, and a lift groove, highlighting its practicality for frequent transport and setup.

600Hz TN vs. OLED | Zowie XL2586X+ Monitor Review Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey what's up guys Jakey here today we're going to be checking out the zoi XL 2586 X plus this is their Flagship monitor that recently just came out it is a 1080p TN 600 HZ monitor huge shout out to zo for setting this out for review but as always that will not affect my opinion of it so this is the successor to the XL 2586 X and pretty much the only difference between the two monitors is the refresh rate going up from 540 HZ to 600 HZ every everything
• 00:30 - 01:00 else about this monitor is the same the colors stand and everything else is identical the only difference between these two is going to be that extra 60 HZ bump from 540 to 600 so as you guys know I have been using my OLED 360hz monitor for a while now and I made a video going over that as well which I will leave in the description below if you're curious but in this video I'm basically just going to be going over my experience using OLED compared to this 600hz zoi monitor but real quick let's go over the unboxing experience here
• 01:00 - 01:30 here I think AI does their packaging for their monitors extremely well as you can see here it comes with everything you need a power cable display port cable HDMI cable as well as the base for the monitor stand the actual stand itself and of course the monitor you also get these flaps that you can install on the side of the monitor to sort of block out the peripheral vision you're probably going to be using these flaps mostly in a landan environment to block out the peripheral vision to help you lock in easier this AWI monitor also comes with their s switch which which I really like
• 01:30 - 02:00 the switch basically just lets you operate the on-screen display but it also lets you save profiles so you can save up to three different profiles on this s switch with different saturation settings and whatnot so I actually use this a lot one for my desktop and then one for my in-game so that's one thing I really like about the latest zoi monitors is that they have this little s switch the new zoi monitor stands are also great ergonomically the height and tilt adjustment are really nice and the stand feels extremely high quality when
• 02:00 - 02:30 you're changing the height on the monitor it's very very smooth one thing you can't do on this new zoi stand is actually go portrait mode so if you're someone who likes to use your monitor in portrait mode for whatever reason you're you actually can't swivel it portrait you can only keep this monitor in landscape mode so that is something to keep in mind if you like using your monitor in portrait mode and yeah in zoi fashion you do have markings on the monitor base as well as the height adjustment with notches so that you know how high your monitor is so that you can
• 02:30 - 03:00 recreate that setting every time this is great for if you're bringing your monitor around to land tournaments and you want the exact same tilt and height adjustment you can just keep these numbers written down and you can get your monitor to the exact same setup every time on the back of the monitor there's also a headphone hanger as well as a little Groove that you can use to lift the monitor so obviously the whole design of the monitor is very focused towards orts and being very portable for land tournaments so that you can bring this monitor around with you you can see that the monitor design has very thick bezels and and this is apparently on
• 03:00 - 03:30 purpose so that it's easier for you to focus on your game according to zoi but yeah definitely very different especially when you consider that most modern monitors nowadays are going more towards a eolis design the zi monitor here has these very thick bezel so completely opposite and of course this monitor is a 1080p 24 in monitor it is a TN panel of course that is how we are getting these 600 HZ refresh rates the connections here are display port 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 so I'm not going to go over
• 03:30 - 04:00 the super technical specs of this monitor there's tons of reviews on YouTube and the internet in general if you want those really technical specs I'm just going to be going over my experience using OLED versus this 600hz TN panel let me start off by saying that the zoi XL 2586 X is retailing for $1,000 USD whereas I bought my 360hz QD OLED Alienware aw 2725 DF for around $630
• 04:00 - 04:30 USD so that's about a $300 to $400 difference in price a fantastic video that I highly recommend you guys watch is this video right here by monitors unboxed the 540 HZ LCD vers 360 HZ and 480hz OLED is fast LCD clearer now while I'm using a 600 HZ LCD rather than the 540 HZ the results here still stand so I highly recommend checking out this video I will leave it in the description below and I'll also be referencing screenshots from this video in my video so when we
• 04:30 - 05:00 talk about grto grade performance OLED monitors come out on top because the response time is basically instant meaning that you're not going to get any inverse ghosting with OLED and the main selling point of the zi 1080p 600 HZ panel is going to be their DIC to strobing So currently as it stands the motion Clarity on the 540 HZ and 600 HZ TN panels is better than OLED because of that strobing so if you look at the blur Busters UFO test with the 54 Herz with
• 05:00 - 05:30 Dia 2 enabled compared to a 360 HZ OLED the motion Clarity on the strobe TN panel is going to be better than the motion Clarity on an OLED so obviously if you're buying the zi monitor you are going to want to use daak because that is the whole selling point of this monitor is the strobing technology which gives it extremely clear motion clarity now the one thing I will say is that even though the zi has extremely good motion Clarity there's still a little bit of that inverse ghosting just because the response times on the TN panel aren't instant like they are on
• 05:30 - 06:00 the OLED so while the OLED motion Clarity is not as clear as a strobe TN panel you are going to have no inverse ghosting on the OLED due to those instant gray to gray response times and that is only compared to a 360hz OLED there are 4 80 HZ oleds on the market right now and there is a 500 HZ OLED coming out sometime this year as well and the motion Clarity on those higher refresh rate oleds are going to be even better than the motion Clarity on the 360 HZ oleds plus the added benefit of
• 06:00 - 06:30 the instant response times and no inverse ghosting is something to keep in mind as well for the OLED obviously when it comes to color reproduction color accuracy and viewing angles the OLED is going to be far superior than the TN panel and the fact that the OLED is 1440p resolution compared to the 1080p zoi panel just makes the OLED better for pretty much anything outside of Competitive Gaming I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy 7 rebirth and the difference in quality between the 1440p
• 06:30 - 07:00 OLED and the zoi 1080p TN is extremely drastic I feel like I've been extremely spoiled by the image quality of OLED because every time I look at OLED it is just eye candy and games and content really just pop out on this monitor it's really hard to describe unless you've seen it in person but OLED with the super vibrant colors and the infinite contrast ratio just looks incredible and I'm going to be honest when I switched over to the 1080p zoi panel it was actually pretty shocking how bad
• 07:00 - 07:30 everything looked even though I'm used to the look of 1080p TN since I used my 240 HZ zoi for literally like six plus years just switching to OLED and using that for a couple months and then trying to switch back to 1080 ptn has been extremely hard for me so let's go over some pros and cons of the XL 2586 X Plus over OLED first is going to be the form factor some people just prefer 24 in for Competitive Gaming so if you're someone
• 07:30 - 08:00 who mainly plays Counterstrike Valor and OverWatch some people just prefer 24 in for me this isn't really an issue at first it was a little bit jarring switching to a 27in OLED monitor but really you can just push the monitor back a little bit on your table and you're getting pretty much the same experience when I'm using the zi monitor I have to move it a little bit closer to my face just because it's smaller and if I'm using a 27in monitor I just push it a little bit further back the second reason why you might want to choose the
• 08:00 - 08:30 zoi monitor instead is just because you want to play on 1080p one thing that I do miss about 1080p is the way crosshairs look inv valerent crosshairs will look different from 1080p to 1440p just because the pixel count is different so on 1440p your crosshairs will look smaller because there's just more pixels obviously if you're playing at 1080p you're going to get more FPS which is definitely needed if you're running 600 HZ you want to try to hit 600 fps to utilize this monitor fully
• 08:30 - 09:00 and that's another thing is that if you want to get the most out of this 600 HZ monitor you're going to need a top-of-the-line PC so you're going to need something like a 9800x 3D to render out all those frames even if you're playing something that's not very demanding like you know a competitive shooter which is pretty much the only games that are going to be able to utilize the 600 HZ so CS valerant maybe OverWatch even on those games you're going to need a pretty beefy CPU like the 9800x 3D to to consistently push out
• 09:00 - 09:30 600 plus FPS and in most cases you're not even going to be hitting that consistently so let's talk about how 600 htz actually looks and feels so when I first took it out of the box and I plugged it in it's definitely extremely smooth like I do notice that it is a lot smoother than 360 HZ on the desktop even just moving my mouse around I could feel the difference and playing in game I could definitely feel that it was smoother but the question is did it make me play better not really honestly 30 60
• 09:30 - 10:00 HZ in my opinion is enough to play at the highest level I am top 500 radiant in valerant and I really don't feel like dropping from 600 HZ down to 360 HZ would hinder my performance in any way so let's talk about the cons of the XL 2586 X plus when compared to OLED first is going to be the price so if you guys remember a while ago I did actually pick up the 540 HZ monitor for a bit just to try out and I purchased that using my own money but I ended up returning the 5 40 HZ monitor after a couple of weeks
• 10:00 - 10:30 and the main reason is I couldn't stomach spending $1,000 USD on a 1080p TN panel in 2025 I think this price point for this monitor is absolutely ridiculous especially when you can get a 1440p OLED monitor for around $600 to $700 USD it just doesn't make sense to me that a 1080p TN panel is priced at $11,000 USD even if it is is on The Cutting Edge at 600 HZ it just doesn't
• 10:30 - 11:00 make sense to me in my opinion I think the only people that should be even considering buying this monitor is like 0.1% of consumers if you are a tier one professional player and you make money playing the game so if you are a pro valerant player or you're a pro CS player or you're just a pro tier one competitive shooter player that makes money playing this game that is the only audience that I would recommend this monitor too if you use your computer for
• 11:00 - 11:30 anything else such as playing single player story games consuming content creating content you know just browsing YouTube watching anime watching TV shows whatever the case might be you are better off spending that money on an OLED monitor 1440p or even going for a 4k monitor but if you're looking to spend $1,000 USD unless you are a pro player I really just can't recommend it another issue I've had with the XL 25 86x plus that I also saw on the XL 25 86 540 HZ is the white uniformity I don't
• 11:30 - 12:00 even know if that's what it's called but basically the entire monitor is not completely lit up evenly so in this video I took here it's kind of hard to see on camera but the edges of the monitor is darker than the center of the Monitor and I'm not sure if this is on purpose but it's definitely not a faulty unit because with my 540 HZ I had this as well this is one of the first things I noticed actually and then on the 600 HZ I see this as well and basically it's like sort of a a vignette around your
• 12:00 - 12:30 monitor where the edges are dark and then the center is white as it should be and I'm not sure if zoi does this on purpose so that it's like easier to lock into the center of your screen but I find it extremely distracting especially for just browsing the web if you want to look at the corner of your screen it's like slightly darker even in game when I'm looking at the top left of my screen to look at my mini map to get information the top left of my screen is just darker than the center of my screen and it makes it a lot harder to get information from my mini map than if I
• 12:30 - 13:00 was using my OLED monitor on my OLED monitor the entire screen is lit up completely uniform but for some reason on the zoi monitor the edges of the screen is darker than the center and I'm not sure if this is a panel issue or if it's something that zoi deliberately tuned into the monitor to help you focus on the center I'm really not sure but that is one thing that I wanted to bring up that I noticed okay so quick pause as I was editing this video I actually noticed a little bit of something on my screen a little dead pixel right here
• 13:00 - 13:30 and I couldn't believe my eyes of hers I was like there's no way because I've literally had this monitor for less than a week now like it literally has not even been a full week and I'm seeing this little dead pixel so I wanted to make sure so I pulled up a little dead pixel checking website that just has different colors and there it is there's a little dead pixel on my screen it takes me a little bit to focus the camera here but there's a little dead pixel right there on my screen you can see it very clearly on the the White and
• 13:30 - 14:00 the green as well so yeah very disappointing especially considering that this is a $1,000 Monitor and I've had it for less than a week it already has a dead pixel not only that but this doesn't seem to be just an isolated issue I searched Reddit and it turns out that this panel specifically like not on the plus version but even just on the X version the 540 HZ a lot of people have been getting this dead pixel issue so as you can see there's a lot of Reddit posts that just talk about have having dead pixels with this monitor the
• 14:00 - 14:30 quality control should definitely be better than this and the fact that I'm able to find so many different Reddit threads with this dead pixel issue kind of goes to show that it is more prevalent than it should be obviously if you bought this monitor you can always exchange it RMA it but just the fact that so many people have to go through that process in the first place is a little bit disappointing to see so yeah guys overall my closing thoughts is this monitor is definitely leading in terms of motion Clarity the 600 HZ zi monitor monor is currently at the top when it
• 14:30 - 15:00 comes to motion Clarity so if you're a pro player and you're just looking for Pure motion Clarity performance then yeah you can consider this monitor but if you're literally anybody else I just can't recommend the zoi 600 HZ monitor especially when OLED is on the market OLED you're not going to get any inverse ghosting you have instant great a grade response times and in terms of motion Clarity you can go for the 480 HZ or the 500 HZ OLED that's coming out soon and you're you're going to get pretty close
• 15:00 - 15:30 to strobed TN panel motion Clarity on an OLED which has better resolution better color accuracy better viewing angles better brightness uniformity so yeah for me personally I will be switching back to my OLED I just cannot use a 1080p TN panel after using OLED for so long and just getting used to the quality of the OLED that's pretty much it guys I hope this video helped you guys out and was informative and if you liked it make sure you leave a com comment like And subscribe and I will see you in the next
• 15:30 - 16:00 one peace