Asus VW223B

Part of Asus' EzLink family of monitors, the VW233B features an analog VGA entry, but also connects to your computer via a USB lead.

In fact, you can daisy-chain up to six of these monitors together using the 3-port USB hub.  Monitors like this are, in general, intended for office users rather than gamers.  They make it very easy to work in dual-screen mode, or string even more monitors together to keep an eye on several screens at once.

They're also suitable for shopfronts and other display applications where USB leads make it easy to create custom layouts.  The catch is that you can't use applications which are particularly graphically taxing.  This is partly because USB cables don't offer enough bandwidth, and partly because you will soon use up too much processor power running multiple displays.

Showing websites on a whole series of screens, or spreadsheets and text documents, is absolutely fine, but watching a DVD adds 25% to the CPU load.

Colours & Contrast
The colours are accurate, with a deltaE score (the average discrepancy between the colours sent by the graphics card and those actually shown) of 2.7.  For comparison, results under 3 are usually considered to be very accurate, and reducing red from 100% to 95%, the deltaE socre falls to an even better 2.5; the very best monitors reach 2.2.  Given the very deep blacks, the contrast ratio reaches 940:1.




Gaming
The reactivity is not as good as we're used to thanks to the USB connection, which can't manage very fluid movement.

Asus' claim that the screen has a response time of 5 ms is not an exaggeration, though, and that inevitably leads to noticeable ghosting, which is fortunately rarely irritating.
Finally, we got a nice surprise when we got to the end of our tests, as it uses far less energy than its technical specification suggests.  Despite Asus' suggestions that it sucks up 65 W, our tests showed that this was closer to 35 W.  Bravo!