Acer XB270HU ULMB Issue with my screen, or drivers maybe? Baffled

Greetings! I bought this XB270HU earlier this month and I absolutely love it. It seems like G-Sync works like a charm, and that 144Hz refresh rate is wonderful. There's some slight bleed in the upper left that can be seen with black bars around some videos, but never in the videos themselves. Considering that is the only way it can be spotted, I figured I finally found a GREAT monitor. My old one was a Dell S2440L that had outstanding contrast and zero bleed, but had massive overdrive issues.

While everything is going great, I chose to use ULMB sparingly since it bothered my eyes the very first time I tried it out, though the visibly dimmer screen didn't bother me. For the record, this monitor is one that supports ULMB at 120Hz and if you try to enable it at 144Hz, the monitor will flash a message up saying it can only be used at 85 100 and 120 Hz. So, it *does* work at 120Hz. I am sure I may have used nvidia's GeForce Experience to update the graphics drivers at least twice out of habit, and Windows Update installed an XB270HU driver as well. I recently went to turn ULMB on at 120Hz to use it with a movie, and was shocked to see that the screen got *brighter* instead of dimming. I chose 85 and 100 Hz to see, and it brightened as well, to the same settings. I don't really understand at all what happened, but it feels as if its not even using ULMB. Since it was clearly working and suddenly is not, is this a driver issue from an update, or did something go haywire inside the monitor? I never tinkered with anything other than the brightness levels. I have the 144Hz Gsync mode at 50% Brightness instead of the 36% that i had it on before and when I turn ULMB on at 30% brightness, it looks much brighter than it does now. I find this incredibly strange and was hoping someone could shed some light on this, or help me fix it.

Some Specs:

Windows 8.1 64bit (updating to 10 soon)

Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.4Ghz

ASUS Maximus V Formula BIOS 1903

16GB (8GBx2) DDR3-2133 G.Skill RipJaws X series memory

eVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC+ ACX 2.0

Using the DisplayPort cable that came with the monitor still.

Accepted answers

-Justin

acheron,

PM received, thanks.

All comments

-Justin

acheron,

Could you please PM (private message) me the following information, I believe that we can update the firmware and fix that dimming/brightness issue.

Serial number:
Contact name:
Contact number:
Email address:
Shipping address:
Purchase date:
Resolution attempting to use:
Max resolution monitor will work at 144 Hz without issues:
Video card(s) is use:
Video connection(s):
Symptoms:

-Justin

acheron,

PM received, thanks.

zepharus

I am having this exact same issue Im close to returning this display please help

acheron

The issue appears to have been fixed when my monitor returned. I switch to ULMB and the screen was indeed dimmer from the backlight blinking and really made movie/video watching on the PC very beautiful. It actually has recently appeared to revert back to that same issue as before. I just found out today that my brother in law actually also has an XB270HU, so we set up a time at his house where I brought my PC over and the monitor. In ULMB mode, you could clearly tell it was working on his XB270HU. In fact, it kind of hurt my eyes a bit because of the flickering from the ULMB mode. In mine, it was bright again and visually did not appear to be impacting motion at all again. We swapped monitors, and his worked perfectly fine on my PC, whereas it had the same thing on his PC. I also recently noticed a dead pixel popped up in the upper left corner of the screen, then a week later had another dead pixel pop up in the upper right corner of the screen. I have had stuck pixels in other areas of the screen that were successfully cleared by software (which obviously won't work on a dead pixel), too.

Perhaps they can fix yours, but since i've had another person with that monitor concur that ULMB doesn't seem to be working on this screen and now that i'm having issues with dead and stuck pixels, I would say that this screen is faulty. I honestly think it would be a better choice to exchange it for another XB270HU, if you are having the exact same issue as mine. For me, I no longer have the retail box and its been beyond the return policy for newegg anyway. It also, I think, doesn't meet the criteria in regards to dead pixels, so I don't know what I will do. I saw that Acer is coming out with an XB271HU soon, so I may just have to take this one for a loss and just get the new model.

-Justin

zepharus,

I have sent you a PM regarding this.

freehotdawgs

I have this same problem altough it is on and off for me. I thought it was a driver issue. I rolled back my drivers and it started working again. Then I decided to upgrade my drivers and forgo the ULMB, but I upgraded my motherboard's bios and it worked again. Then today it stopped working again. I don't know what changed. The only thing I can think of is that geforce experience updated. Maybe that did it?

-Justin

freehotdawgs,

I have sent you a PM in regards to this.

Gamesiarz

I have exactly the same issue with my xb240ha.
Acer-Justin could you help me?

-Justin

Gamesiarz,

Contacting the Acer technical support in your area would be the avenue you would need to take to see options are available on their end. Unfortunately, on the US side, there is not much I can do. If you still need help after contacting them I can see what I could possibly do as far as a message goes (maybe), but contact them first for assistance.

Jendrix

I just registered because I am having the exact same issue. When activating ULMB, the brightness increases, contrary to expectation. Was working fine when I recieved the monitor yesterday, now all of the sudden not working. I did purchase a refurbished model from NewEgg, so that may have something to do with it, except for the fact it was working as expected at one point. I've tried everything from driver reinstalls to an entire Windows 10 system reinstall. Please help!

Gamesiarz

It's some kind of drivers issue imo. What I did was shutdown computer then poweroff lcd and on next day after about 16 hours this issue gone. What I noticed is fact that fixed refresh rate in drivers is responsible for this so never choose it but only gsync and ulmb

Jendrix

This worked! Computer and screen were off for about 12 hours and everything working fine upon return. In the interest of trying to diagnose the problem, my ULMB appeared to "break" either as a result of frequent mode switching between ULMB and GSYNC (was trying to determine what I liked best in-game) OR as a result of trying to switch the mode when just alt-tabbing out of the game instead of quitting it.

I suspect it was the second one - the monitor really seemed to freak out from that. If that's the case, lesson learned! Strange that if it is a driver bug it wouldn't cycle out with a restart though. My understanding of shutdown in Windows 8 on up to 10 is that it isn't the full shutdown of 7 and previous iterations. I thought only restart fully flushed everything out of the system. Oh well, thanks again!

freehotdawgs

Turning the computer off and flipping the power switch on the PSU and keeping it off for like 5mins worked for me. Thanks so much for figuring this out!