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By Dave James published 23 December 21
For less than $300 you're getting one of our favorite gaming monitors of 2021, and a mighty impressive specsheet to boot.
The recent trend in PC gaming monitors has been towards ever more expensive panels, and each one, ever more ludicrous in scope. Sure, we'd all love some micro (mini?) LED backlight, or OLED display, but how many of us can really afford to drop a grand or more on a shiny new monitor? Not many, I'd wager.
So, it's refreshing to see Dell—an always reliable display manufacturer—drop one of the more affordable 32-inch gaming monitors this year. And even more refreshing to see it discounting the hell out of it over Black Friday and now into Christmas time. Happy holidays, folks!
The Dell S3222DGM is actually cheaper today than it was over the Black Friday weekend, and it was a pretty stonking $200 discount back then. Now it's under $300 and a huge amount of screen for the money.
For a start that 32-inch 16:9 display makes it feel huge on a desktop; a few years back this was a standard living room TV size. The trade-off here is that the 2560 x 1440 native resolution is stretched across a larger area than on something like a 27-inch panel.
Dell S3222DGM | 32-inch | VA | 165Hz | 1440p | $529.99 $299.99 at Dell (save $230) For less than $300 this curvy 32-inch Dell screen delivers on pretty much all counts. With a 1440p resolution it's bang in the sweet spot for PC gaming, and that 165Hz refresh rate will deliver a silky smooth experience. It's a VA panel, too, so can offer the sort of black levels a traditional IPS cannot. And at 32-inches it's big for a PC monitor.
That makes the pixel pitch a touch larger, which means it's not going to be as sharp as say a 4K 32-inch monitor, but then you're not paying 4K money here either. It's only really likely to be noticeable in truth when you're navigating the Windows desktop, and then only really if you press your nose up to the screen.
But when you're in a game, the broad display real estate and 165Hz refresh rate will be what grabs your attention, and the VA panel is responsive enough, and crisp enough to make things look great.
So, what are you missing out on at this end of the market? Not a whole lot, if I'm honest. There is the lack of HDR support, given its 350 cd/m2 peak luminance rating, but that's not a big miss in a world where PC HDR support on the whole is patchy to say the least. You're also only getting a single DisplayPort 1.2 connection and a pair of HDMI 2.0 ports on the back.
That's important because you'll only hit the peak 165Hz using DisplayPort, without HDMI 2.1 you're restricted to 1440p at 144Hz max.
But these are all compromises I'd be happy to make in exchange for an excellent value, great-looking gaming monitor.
Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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