BenQ Zowie XL2566K Review: 360Hz for Competitive Play

The BenQ Zowie XL2566K is the monitor equivalent of a purpose-built race car: 1080p, 360Hz, Fast TN, backlight strobing — and nothing else that doesn’t win rounds. PC Gamer’s verdict captured the contradiction best: the sharpest, fastest-moving image the outlet had ever measured, on a spec sheet that trails most rivals in every other column. It launched at $599 US, a premium price for a 24.5-inch TN panel that only makes sense when you understand what it is for.

Where the speed comes from

BenQ specifies a 24.5-inch Fast TN panel at 1920 x 1080, 360Hz over DisplayPort 1.4, 320 nits typical brightness, 1,000:1 native contrast, and a 0.5ms GtG figure — which, as PC Gamer notes, matters less than how the panel behaves under overdrive. BenQ’s answer is fine-grained control: AMA presets plus a 30-step custom overdrive slider, so players can tune the ghosting-versus-inverse-ghosting balance for themselves. The 360Hz ceiling and where it sits in the upgrade ladder are covered in our refresh rate guide.

The headline feature is DyAc+, Zowie’s backlight strobing, which inserts a black frame between refreshes to sharpen moving objects. PC Gamer found its brightness penalty barely perceptible here — unusual for strobing — and the combined effect is motion clarity that OLEDs still don’t replicate in the same way, because strobing and instant pixel response attack different parts of blur.

What you give up

Everything the XL2566K lacks is a deliberate trade for speed: poor viewing angles and mediocre color and contrast inherent to TN, no HDMI 2.1 (its two HDMI 2.0 ports manage 120Hz for consoles), and a utilitarian design with no RGB. The package is otherwise built for LAN life — a small-footprint stand with 155mm height travel and notched markers for fast re-setup, an S-Switch remote for instant settings swaps, a shielding hood, and XL Setting to Share for importing pro-player configurations. Panel-type fundamentals are covered in our IPS vs OLED vs TN breakdown.

The 400Hz successor question

Zowie has since moved on: the BenQ Zowie XL2566X+ is a 24.1-inch Fast TN running 400Hz with the newer DyAc 2 strobing, listed at $650, with a 600Hz XL2586X+ above it. That makes the XL2566K the value play in the current lineup — where it is meaningfully cheaper than the X+ in your market, the strobed 360Hz formula remains intact; where prices converge, buy the newer panel. Strict budgets aren’t excluded from the philosophy either: the ViewSonic XG2431 brings Blur Busters-approved strobing to a 240Hz IPS near $300.

Who should buy it

For CS2 or Valorant players with the frames to feed it, the BenQ Zowie XL2566K remains the purest motion-clarity purchase in gaming. For everyone else — any single-player interest, any second use case, any sense of versatility — the money buys a better all-round panel elsewhere. That binary is the point.