All the high-res gaming monitor you need is just $220 right now

Pixio PXC277 Advanced — (Image credit: Pixio)

The sweet spot for a modern gaming monitor is still 1440p. It delivers the perfect mix of high resolution, high refresh rate, and performance that won't stall on a mid-range graphics card. It also helps that you can pick up such a panel, in the Pixio PXC277 Advanced for just $220 at Amazon today.

Normally we'd be skeptical about such a cheap screen, and just how well it would actually perform once you plugged it in and started gaming on it. But we've got this particular screen in the office and our monitor expert, Jeremy, was seriously impressed when he was testing it for our Pixio PXC277 Advanced review.

For a 27-inch 2560x1440 panel to deliver the sort of gaming experience we've seen on this display, and cost this little, well, it's pretty damned cool. This is honestly all the gaming monitor you need. That screen size, the resolution, and the 165Hz refresh rate all combine with that contrasty VA panel to give you a gaming monitor that belies its low price.

Even more so now that it's got a $20 discount at the moment.

PXC277 Advanced review

"$240 for a high-refresh 1440p panel? Really? Yup. The 165Hz Pixio PXC277 Advanced does almost everything pretty well. Sure, the HDR support is extremely limited. But for the money, this is a surprisingly lovely all-round gaming monitor."

PC Gamer score: 85%

It doesn't look like a budget gaming monitor, though the packaging is certainly a no-frills affair. But it's got its share of display inputs, a decent response rate, and a pretty accurate out-of-the-box image calibration, too. It's not the most punchy of displays, and if you set one of the more aggressive overdrive settings it can get a bit ghosty. But if you set overdrive to low you get a good mix of surprisingly good response times and no obvious blurring.

We're not going to pretend that you can't get a better screen—we love an ultrawide 1440p display, and you can't do better than an OLED gaming panel—but we're talking about a significant outlay on those sorts of monitors.

At $220 this Pixio screen certainly isn't chump change, but you won't find a better gaming display at this price anywhere.

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.