I bought this monitor a couple of months ago. It arrived in a very large box that I was surprised with, as the box that my previous monitor came in was only just bigger than it. What this means is that the monitor has plenty of thick polystyrene to protect it from damage, however it does mean that it can be a bit more inconvenient transporting the monitor if you intend on moving from place to place a lot. Thankfully there were no dead pixels when I first got it, and none have appeared since. Backlight bleeding on my monitor also seems to be at a minimal and nowhere near as bad as some people have been reporting on their monitors.One thing to note is that the screen sits quite far forward, just over 20cm from the back of the base. You might want to take this into consideration if you have a small desk and prefer not to be too close to a monitor.Starting up one thing that you should ensure is that you do not use the HDMI cable that comes with this monitor, you should instead use the displayport cable as HDMI only supports refresh rates of up to 60Hz. Also make sure that under the nvidia control panel you set the refresh rate from 60Hz to 144Hz, I've heard a few cases where people with high refresh rate monitors didn't realise that they were still running at 60Hz months even years later. While this monitor does allow overclocking to 180Hz, I would recommend sticking with 144Hz at a maximum. I haven't tested this myself, but there are a lot of reports of colour losses at the overclocked frequencies due to some features having to be disabled.Since using this monitor I haven't suffered from screen tearing at all, I almost went for a cheaper 144Hz model without G-SYNC but I decided to invest a little more and it's nice to know that I won't have to worry about tearing now. I know some people say that it doesn't, but for me the 144Hz really does show an improvement in smoothness of movement. In some games thanks to the fact I can now actually see more frames, I've been noticing smaller details in some of the animations that I have previously missed. It's a small improvement but it all adds up to a better experience. It's hard to describe something that you have to see in order to see the benefit, if you can preview a higher refresh rate monitor I'd recommend doing so before purchasing, I took a gamble by not previewing it and in the end it paid off thankfully.Now gambles don't come without risk, so I think that it's probably best to address some of the most common issues that I came across and had to consider when researching this monitor. You should know that this has a TN panel rather than an IPS panel, so there are tradeoffs to be made and some inherent issues that come from having a TN panel.Firstly TN panels have poor viewing angles. This monitor does suffer from it and it doesn't take much movement from one side to another before there is some definite gradient in the brightness, although I'm not seeing too much of a yellow tint that some have reported. I honestly don't see poor viewing angles as a reason to not buy this monitor though, most of the time you're going to be straight infront of it and the screen can go up/down and tilt in order to get it to the best position. Poor viewing angles in normal use will not make a difference whatsoever.Next up is colour banding. Again I can confirm that this monitor does suffer from it and straight out of the box it is noticeably bad, I remember being quite shocked at how obvious it was. It was probably most obvious when watching videos/cinematics where it was mostly a dark background with glowing lights appearing; the transition between the darkness and the lighter colours showed quite a harsh gradient. I'm pretty confident that this is a result of the monitor rather than the quality of the videos as I've brought up the same videos on both my tablet and phone and the transitions in the same sections were very smooth. However since I messed around with the settings I have managed to get this down to a minimum. While colour banding is still present, I now really have to be looking for it in order for me to notice it.Finally I guess I should talk about the quality of the colours themselves. As others have said, at factory settings, fresh out of the box the colours do seem to be fairly washed out. Again, by tweaking the settings I've managed to more or less correct this, at least to a point where I no longer notice it and can live contently with the monitor. I haven't used an IPS screen before, not knowingly at least so I can't say as others have that this screen is terrible compared to them due to the TN panel. However, I don't require precise colour accuracy as some graphic designers do so I'm not particularly bothered by the fact that I might be missing out, this isn't what this screen is about anyway. For what I use it for, it does the job just fine.