Available for under €200, the 24” (actually 23.8”) BenQ EX240N monitor has a fairly high refresh rate, great colour contrast, a 1ms MPRT and 165Hz refresh rate from a VA panel. VA isn’t the best or the worst type of panel for a gaming specific monitor and BenQ have pushed to get a lot from it here.

The externals of the monitor don’t look or feel cheap either, which makes sense coming from BenQ. It has the same external style queues as its bigger brothers and sisters in the Mobius range. A fairly significant but not over the top in terms of size stand keeps it solidly planted on your desk. It allows for tilting up or down but isn’t height adjustable like some of the more expensive monitors available. The screen surround has a sleek matte finish which means you won’t have to worry about any pesky reflections distracting from your game. As you’d expect from pretty much any monitor these days there are mounting points for wall mounts/desk arms etc.

Interestingly for such a cheap monitor it includes two speakers, so if you’re really on a tight budget and haven’t picked up a decent pair of headphones, you should be able to make do with these.

So, how do you actually connect your choice of gaming platform to it? If you have a PC you can hook up to the Display Port to get the absolute best performance out of it, otherwise you can use the HDMI 2.0 with your console.

If you do decide to use your console with the EX240N, you’ll be happy to find out about the built in Scenario Mapping. This feature self-adjusts to the current video input signal and loads your personalized game settings. You can access different game scenarios quickly by switching the input without wasting time on readjusting settings. 

The other features offered include Light Tuner, Colour Vibrance and Black eQualizer. The Light Tuner is fairly self-explanatory, though there are 20 different colour settings to choose from which you can change to suit the type of game you’re playing.

Colour Vibrance has different levels of settings which can be used to help make enemies stand out better against different backgrounds or again change colour settings to be most visually appealing to your tastes. Black eQualizer, meanwhile, increases the visibility in dark scenes without overexposing the bright areas so you can easily get your targets from enhanced visibility in dark scenes. Is this cheating? No, but it is definitely an advantage.

Overall, the BenQ EX240N wont match up against the likes of Zowie’s XL2566k or Samsung's behemoth G9, but if you’re on a tight budget or need a screen just to get your battlestation started with a plan to upgrade in the future, you could do a lot worse than this.