Q27GAZD: was $369.99 now $329.99
OLED gaming monitors are slowly but surely becoming more affordable, and this AOC is a good example. With a 240 Hz QD-OLED panel beaming games, movies, and dare I say even spreadsheets at your eyeballs, I reckon you'd be pleased to call this your own—although you'll need to use the DisplayPort 1.4 connection to make the most of it.

Key specs: 27-inch | 1440p | 240 Hz | OLED | 0.03 ms

Price check: Newegg $547.99View Deal

While most hardware is becoming increasingly expensive, gaming monitor deals are looking particularly good right now. So, while 2026 is arguably not the year to buy new RAM or SSD, it may well be the perfect time to upgrade to an OLED.

Case in point, the 27-inch AOC Gaming Q27GAZD is now even cheaper than the last time we featured it, back in April. This QD-OLED is pretty perfectly proportioned for 1440p gaming, offering all the brightness and colour vibrancy you'd expect of an OLED. It's also decently nippy, enjoying a 240 Hz refresh rate plus a 0.03ms response time all for the low price of $330 from Amazon.

Already very reasonably priced for an OLED, a $40 discount certainly sweetens the deal. As our Andy highlighted before, the main drawback is that you'll need to use this monitor's DisplayPort 1.4 connection to get the most out of it, as connecting via the HDMI 2.0 port will cap that lovely refresh rate at 144 Hz. That's not terrible, but it's also not the best use of your money.

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Lacking port options are par for the course at this price point. Take the similarly lovely 1440p Samsung Odyssey G50SF OLED our James spotlighted recently (though has unfortunately gone back up to full price since): you're similarly restricted to either a DisplayPort, or a HDMI connection and, worse still, this previously similarly priced OLED taps out at 180 Hz no matter which port you go with. Comparatively, the AOC Gaming Q27GAZD really is a cracking deal.

The Samsung also features a 'Glare Free' coating that is apparently '54% less glossy'. While that may not be fully matte, I do have to also wonder how that will affect contrast and colour vibrancy compared to the AOC Gaming OLED's glossy finish.

There's at least one point my hardware team colleague and I agree on—1440p resolution is a great compromise. As James says, you'd need a pretty beefy graphics card to play the latest games at 4K, and that's less than ideal if you're trying to put together a more budget gaming PC build (worse still, a number of high-tier GPUs may well be going up in price again before too long). 1440p is still Quad HD and, as I've already said, will look great on a 27-inch OLED.

Besides, a smaller monitor offers greater flexibility when it comes to setting up your gamer den. Sure, on a desk this would be fine flying solo, but the smaller size also means it could easily take to the stage as a second monitor without massively cramping your style. Either way, at only $330, this is one gaming OLED deal you won't want to overlook.

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Dual-mode is still not perfect in gaming monitors, but we are consistently getting the option for nearly no extra cost, and that is making it a mighty viable choice, especially if you are running a rig that can only sometimes run the native resolution.

The option to flit from 1080p at double the refresh rate for competitive or highly intensive games, and then back to 4K for lush sights or just a clean desktop in only a few seconds, and with native resolutions, makes so much sense to me. Koorui manages to offer both dual-mode and aggressive 4K pricing at the same time.

It's been more than a year since our review, but the Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG, which sits as our pick for the best budget 4K gaming monitor, is $100 more and offers almost identical specs. That's a few ticks in my book already.

But stats don't tell you absolutely everything; I've had this Koorui gaming monitor planted on my desk for a few weeks, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Features

In most of its basic specs, the Koorui G2741L fits the mould for a budget-oriented 4K gaming monitor. Koorui claims a 1 ms response time and 160 Hz refresh rate in 4K. It makes compromises where it needs to, being not massively bright and not super fast, but good enough in both categories to work just fine for 4K gaming. The 400 nits brightness (in HDR mode) is slightly above budget spec, though, which makes it bright enough for gaming beside a window.

The only place I might have expected even more compromises is in the size, perhaps going down to 24 inches, but then that's small enough that 4K likely isn't worth the price bump and performance hit—4K monitors smaller than 27 inches are quite rare for that reason. 27 inches is a sweet spot for dual-mode monitors, being big enough to get value out of the super high resolution, and small enough that 1080p doesn't feel like a massive hit.

It's super easy to set up too. The monitor comes in two parts, the panel and the stand, which clip together in mere moments. Despite this being very easy, it's not a weak stand, and my desk shaking does not cause anything to pop out of place.

You're getting two HDMI ports here, plus a DisplayPort port and an audio jack. that makes it a decent pick for a console and PC at the same time, or as a spare for your laptop when you need a second screen. You get no built-in speakers here or a USB port for charging, which is a slight shame but understandable given the cost.

The monitor itself can pivot 90 degrees to the left and right, making it a solid pick for both vertical and horizontal use. It can also tilt up to 25 degrees, and the stand holds it in place firmly.

Dual-mode is the standout feature here. You can swap from 4K to 1080p in just a few seconds with the button on the back. As it only has one button, you do have to scroll through menus, and I'd personally love a single button for activating dual-mode quickly, but it doesn't take too long to activate once you know where the button is.

Performance

Being an IPS panel, you're getting a strong viewing angle, good colours, and consistent performance. The HDR400 rating is pretty barebones, but in practice, it's punchy and feels rather bright. In fact, the monitor seemed rather stale without HDR on, and that's down to how day and night it feels. With 95% DCI-P3 colour coverage and 100% sRGB, its colour accuracy is lush for the price, though obviously it lacks the true blacks and vibrant colours of an OLED.

Though there are the typical 'not quite black' blacks of an IPS here, the contrast is strong, and made stronger thanks to the monitor's software. Mine needed very little tweaking out of the box, though I did up the contrast and brightness just a touch. I'll get into it more in the software section, but I'd advise not tweaking it too much, as it's pretty finely tuned already.

Generally speaking, using the desktop day-to-day is best in 4K, as it's not super intensive, but the smoothness of text and even just casual video really pop here. Then, picking between 4K and 1080p for gaming is largely reliant on whether or not your rig can actually handle it. In my RTX 4070 Super machine, I'd almost always opt for the higher resolution, occasionally with a helping hand from upscaling or frame gen. However, my RTX 2070 rig benefitted from being able to swap at a moment's notice. It is worth noting that 1440p is still a very solid resolution, especially at this panel size, as it still offers a solid pixel density. Therefore, there's a good reason to consider a monitor with a native 1440p output.

Koorui has gone for a matte anti-glare coating here, which makes it slightly more viable near a window letting in a lot of light, but glossy finishes tend to offer a clearer image.

Control looks phenomenal in 4K, its angular brutalist architecture contrasting against all the blood and moody lighting. Even without true blacks, the G2741L does a great job at contrasting blacks, reds and blues, with little clarity getting lost in high-contrast scenes. The RTX 2070 can handle it at 4K, though with lower graphical settings. That's the beauty of dual-mode, though; you can bump up the textures, get a higher FPS, or just get a higher refresh rate quickly by cutting the resolution by a quarter.

Dual-mode is still, however, in somewhat of an infancy stage. I find the Koorui's 1080p performance to be just fine in the majority of games, but there's a slight fringing and softness to text on the desktop that isn't quite as present in native 1080p gaming monitors. If I were purely going for 1080p, I'd be picking a dedicated, much cheaper 1080p gaming monitor instead. It's not quite a 'best of both worlds' situation, but it's the best of 4K at its price and pretty good 1080p. Though that's not quite as catchy.

For gaming, the monitor feels plenty snappy to me, with it being decently responsive. Naturally, IPS panels are more limited than say OLEDs in terms of response time, but I wouldn't call it slow.

Dual-mode does take a few seconds to swap over, though, and you may have to exit your game and go back in, but Windows swaps resolution without any prompting. Generally, it's not a major inconvenience to swap to 1080p when I want high frame rates in Fortnite and then swap to 4K for lush sights in Cyberpunk 2077's Night City.

Aesthetics

The Koorui is a gaming monitor, and its stand suggests as much. It's angular with red trimming, and not particularly subtle. However, with no RGB and no ugly branding slapped on the side, it looks pretty sweet to my eyes. Not understated but not loud either.

The bezels aren't super trim, but they don't distract from the gorgeous sights of 4K in between them, and the build quality is solid for the price too.

It does have a fairly wide panel and rather large base, which may make it struggle on smaller desks, but I'd wager smaller desks wouldn't be looking for 27 inches anyway. It has a VESA connector should you want to connect it to a monitor arm too.

Koorui does use a lot of plastic in the monitor, as you might expect from the price, but it doesn't feel flimsy, and it looks solid too.

Software

I suspect the OSD picks its size on the screen based on resolution, as it's oddly small in 4K. Not so small it's unusable, but certainly not as big and upfront as the 1080p version. Though it's easy to navigate, dual-mode takes a few more button clicks than I'd personally want.

You are getting a whole pile of fairly superfluous options in the OSD, like a crosshair mode that, well, adds a crosshair in the middle of the screen. Personally, this seems niche at best and distracting at worst, so I'd never use it.

You also get a DCR mode that automatically adjusts brightness and contrast based on what's on your screen. This is neat in principle but, in practice, it feels like the monitor is constantly adjusting brightness and contrast, which is just a little annoying. You get all the settings you would otherwise expect here, like brightness, contrast, an HDR game/movie mode, plus other tweaks like the overdrive mode, but it's plenty snappy, bright, and vibrant in HDR game mode, which is where I'd leave it. I mostly just used the software dual-mode, as it's not particularly laggy or hard to navigate.

Value

Though the MSRP is $350, the G2741L regularly hangs around the $250 to $300 mark. I look after our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitor deals every week, and this price tag puts it at around the same place as the MSI MAG 275UPD, which offers similar specs but a lower refresh rate.

It is around $100 more than the Acer Nitro VG270K L1, which is also a dual-mode 4K monitor, but the Acer panel offers a very limiting 72 Hz refresh rate in 4K. That's all to say that the G2741L is very competitively priced, hanging around the lowest-cost 4K panels right now.

If I were looking for a 4K monitor, this Koorui would no doubt be on my list. If I had exactly $250-$300, I can't think of anything I'd be picking over it.

But there's an elephant in the room here, and that's OLED. OLED gaming monitors have become such good value recently that budget 4K IPS panels are sitting around the budget OLED price point, and that opportunity cost is fierce. For instance, the gorgeous 1440p Alienware AW2726DM comes in at the same price point, and though its max refresh rate and resolution are lower, you are getting the true blacks of an OLED, plus super snappy response times too.

As is ever the case, the biggest problem with gaming monitors right now is that there are too many choices, but Koorui has successfully made that decision even harder.

G2741L: was $349.99 now $279.99
A punchy IPS panel with decent HDR support and a wicked-fast 320 Hz refresh rate in 1080p mode, this 4K monitor is very reasonably priced, even at MSRP and a bargain with $70 knocked off.

Key specs: 27-inch | 4K + 1080p (dual mode) | 160/320 Hz | 1 ms | IPSView Deal

I'm currently reviewing the Koorui G2741L, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a big chunk taken off the MSRP. That means you can get yourself a 4K dual-mode IPS I personally quite like, for a sweet discount.

If you want to pick up the monitor for yourself, you can get it for $280 at Amazon right now, which is a saving of $70.

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I look over our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitor deals every week, so I'm happy to report this Koorui pick is among the cheapest 4K monitors I'd personally recommend. You can, if you want to go very cheap, pick up the Acer Nitro VG270K L1 for $180, which is a strong saving, but you are getting just 72 Hz at 4K, which is really rather low. There's also the MSI Mag 275UPD E14 with a max refresh rate of 288 Hz for $250, but after a few weeks with the Koorui, my money would be going there.

First off, you are getting a punchy IPS panel, with a just-above-the-norm 400 nits of brightness. Though the HDR 400 compatibility is technically pretty barebones, I can attest that HDR performance is surprisingly good here. Color accuracy and consistency are super solid, and contrast is good for an IPS too. It does have a matte finish, which means less contrast than a glossy one, but you get better performance in natural lighting.

You are missing any sort of USB hub function, but you do get two DP ports, one HDMI, and one aux jack. The stand itself is also pretty strong, and despite being mostly made of plastic, it doesn't look or feel too cheap.

The main selling point here is the fact that, with just a few buttons, it can swap from 4K at 160 Hz to 1080p at 320 Hz. That means when you want your game to look good, or just plan on watching videos, I'd switch to 4k, and when you want to play competitively, I'd bump it down to 1080p for higher frame rates. In practice, dual-mode works well, though 1080p performance in dual mode is a little blurrier than the 1080p performance you would expect from a native, finely tuned 1080p panel (that's the norm for dual-mode right now).

If I were picking out a budget-oriented 4K gaming monitor for my personal setup, Koorui would be getting my money right now. The only opportunity cost I'd really have to think about is whether I'd want to throw an extra $20 on and get an OLED panel like the ASRock Phantom Gaming PGO27QSA instead. This only goes up to a max of 1440p, but you are getting deeper blacks and more vibrant colours. As has been the case for a while now, the hardest part of buying a gaming monitor is picking just one. Oh, and having the cash for it.

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As such, monitors are one of the few things I check over without rolling my eyes, and therefore, they're one of a handful of techie bits that actually excites me. But that doesn't mean even they can't improve; when I chatted to gaming monitor brand AOC a few months ago, even its designers are aware the software isn't up to snuff.

I've been testing out the Koorui G2741L, a dual mode 4K/1080p monitor, over the last few weeks, and all I can think is 'gosh, why aren't more companies doing dual mode,' and 'why aren't more companies doing dual mode better?'

The central argument for dual mode makes so much sense to me. When you want your games to look pretty, you swap to 4K at a lower refresh rate, and when you want something snappy and competitive, you drop it to 1080p with a much higher refresh rate. You can get dual mode monitors like this Acer Nitro 4K/1080p one for as cheap as $160, they're even pretty reasonably priced right now (even if the 4K refresh rate is a pretty tiny 72 Hz).

Sure, you can technically just swap the resolution of your monitor at any time, but dual mode gives you access to a max refresh rate that is above what you would get if you just turned down the resolution of a 4K monitor.

But dual mode monitors have a few problems. For one, the thing I spotted instantly with the Koorui is that the swap between 4K and 1080p is a tad slow. The swap happens with a physical button, and in the case of the Koorui, it's a series of physical buttons. These navigate through the monitor's built-in software to then switch modes. It also just takes a while to swap, and the more seconds it adds, the less convenient it feels.

Another problem with dual mode monitors is the added blur. 1080p on a dual mode monitor tends to look worse than 1080p on a 1080p native screen. The reason 4K dual mode monitors go down to 1080p is that dual mode traditionally reduces the resolution to a quarter while doubling the refresh rate (though some monitors now triple or quadruple the refresh rate).

Most gaming monitors seem to use some sort of interpolation algorithm. Our Jeremy said in his Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG review, "You wouldn't want to use this monitor's 1080p mode on the desktop. It's a little soft and blurry. However, in-game it actually works pretty well and is certainly preferable to 1080p interpolated in the normal fashion onto a 4K panel."

Gaming monitor companies do have the ability to make better dual mode monitors. The Alienware AW2725QF opts for a form of pixel doubling (doubling up pixels in both vertical and horizontal directions), getting you much closer to a 'native 1080p' resolution. This is called integer scaling.

So, right now, if you buy a dual mode monitor, you are likely making a compromise on the lower of the two resolutions. But even with that downside, I'd take a 4K desktop experience and 4K gaming in singleplayer games, then 1080p for competitive games over 4K for absolutely everything.

There's plenty of room for dual mode monitors to grow. Just look at how far OLEDs have come since their inception: Burn-in has become far less of a problem, and LG's latest RGB Stripe panel has effectively killed font fringing. Not only could interpolation algorithms get better, but integer scaling could become more commonplace with the growth of the dual mode market.

The same could be said for the process of actually swapping modes. The ability to swap between resolutions could benefit from being snappier and easier to access. I'd personally love a single button that makes the swap in just a moment. And I'd also love that the biggest downside of swapping to 1080p is simply the resolution, and no other artifacting or blur.

But even now, with its flaws, I quite like dual mode. 1080p for some gaming on a dual mode monitor, even with plain 'ol interpolation, works well enough, and 4K for a standard desktop experience isn't such a resource hog that I'd want 1080p for it anyway.

I particularly like the fact that the price point has become so good on dual mode monitors that it's almost just an added bonus, and not something you specifically pay more for. As even OLEDs are becoming downright reasonably priced, I'd love for dual mode to get the love it deserves. Now, a value-oriented dual mode OLED monitor with integer scaling and good software? That's the dream.

Once in a while, something comes along that recalibrates your expectations and also sort of ruins your enjoyment of what was once impressive. The Xgimi Titan Noir Max does just that. It makes mainstream projectors look positively pedestrian.

That's not to say it's perfect. There are a few niggles that take the triple-laser shine off this $5,000 beast, especially for gaming. But Xgimi's new big-screen beamer is an absolute stunner and deeply, deeply desirable.

The basics begin with triple-laser RGB technology that's good for an eye-popping 7,000 lumens. That's combined, inevitably, with DLP and pixel-shift tech to deliver full 4K resolution at 60 Hz, plus 1080p at up to 240 Hz. Running at the latter setting, Xgimi claims that the Titan Noir Max is good for just 1 ms of latency.

That makes it a pretty plausible proposition for online gaming and esports, at least in terms of response. The ergonomics of playing Counter-Strike on a projector might be pretty questionable, but in performance terms, well, the Titan Noir Max delivers the numbers.

If that's the broad brush of what the Xgimi Titan Noir Max offers, the details are arguably even tastier. Xgimi is using a new generation of DLP chip that enables improved native contrast. That's combined with a 50-laser light source and Dual Intelligent Iris technology to deliver 10,000:1 native contrast. Factor in other digital contrast enhancements and you're looking at 100,000:1 claimed dynamic contrast.

Then there are the optics. This thing has some very trick lens hardware. It's built around a 15-element lens system that's said to deliver consistent edge-to-edge focus. You also get very broad optical lens shift of 130% +/- vertical and 50% +/- horizontal. That gives this projector immense installation flexibility without the need to resort to digital keystone correction.

And you absolutely, positively don't want to use digital keystone correction on any projector. It does horrible things to pixel precision and in turn image sharpness. It's also worth noting that this is, essentially, a traditonal long-throw projector rather than one of those nifty short throw things that can sit right below your projection screen.

That said, it has 2x optical zoom and a throw ratio of between 0.98:1 and 2.0:1, so it's actually pretty configurable. It can create both a pretty large image at short distance and shrink the image from distance to fit your projection screen.

All of that is built into a beautifully lush looking alloy cube chassis that's presented in a nifty carry case and goes some way to justifying the hefty $5,999 MSRP. The real-world pricing of this projector is a bit more complicated than that on account of it being the subject of a Kickstarter campaign. But hold that thought, we'll come back to the value proposition later.

Connectivity includes three HDMI ports, LAN, both optical and 3.5mm audio, and Wi-Fi. Note that the latter doesn't indicate that this projector has built-in smart TV functionality. It does not. It's a pure projector and that's fine by us. Devices like Firesticks, after all, are so very affordable, if that's your use case.

Still, you do get a very slick remote control with, again, a lush metal chassis that lights up when you pick it up and allows access to the Xgimi's various menus and settings. And, boy, are there a lot of settings.

That's immediately obvious as soon as you fire the Titan Noir Max up. After choosing your language upon initial boot, the system goes through an automated setup and focus routine, powered by its triple-sensor TOF, which among other things detects the range to your projection surface and automatically focuses the image and optimises framing and geometry.

In testing, I found the auto-focus worked really well, but the rest of the automated setup is more problematic. For starters, the automated digital keystone is on by default. Especially in a computing context, that's a bad idea. The Titan also failed to frame the image correctly on my projection screen, albeit it's not absolutely clear to what extent the automated features are supposed to be capable of that.

Whatever, that's not really a negative given how excellent the manual lens shift functionality works. Lens shift, for the uninitiated, allows the image position to be adjusted without compromising geometry. In other words, it means you don't have to be as precise in terms of physically positioning this projector to achieve an image that lines up with your projection surface perfectly.

Not only does the Titan have a really wide range of adjustment, it also provides a grid pattern that makes it super easy to perfectly align the image. Slightly less user friendly is the rest of the settings menu. Part of the problem is that there are just so many options, whether that's features like so-called AI-enhanced contrast, iris aperture settings, colour spaces, and much, much more.

It's definitely a little bit more difficult than it should be to ensure whether features like digital keystone are enabled or not. To me it's also a bit of a worry that there are no controls on the chassis save for a power button. Lose that remote control and you really are in trouble. Though I suppose you could say the same of most TVs.

Anywho, this is a complex device and I've barely touched on a whole range of further features and functionality. There's the Harmon-Kardon audio, which produces pretty decent sound in a pinch when you don't have access to some speakers, for instance. Or the broad HDR support including Dolby Vision, the MediaTek image enhancing chip or even Xgimi's own X-Vision chip that powers the AI contrast capability, known as Dynamic Black Level Enhancement.

But let's get to what really matters, namely how good this projector actually looks. Xgimi has clearly configured Titan Noir Max projector to pop from the get go because the dynamic iris functionality is enabled by default and hence maximum brightness is essentially toggled when hooked up to a PC. And it is really, really eye poppingly bright.

In practice, the sustained brightness capability is actually 5,000 lumens. The 7,000 figure is something that can only be sustained for short periods. But, seriously people, 5,000 lumens is still awfully, awfully bright. Happily, the Titan Noir Max has such fantastic native contrast, that doesn't translate into washed out black tones.

The caveat here is that this thing is so bright, light reflecting back onto the screen from the general surroundings is an issue. If you have a dedicated black-out cinema room with low reflectivity walls, that's not a problem. But in a regular room with white walls, it's an issue.

Still, this is one heck of a bright projector and that means it works better in the daytime than dimmer alternatives, though I personally don't think any projector looks great when there's lots of ambient light around. At night, well, you can adjust the brightness to suit.

I won't get too bogged down into the movie watching experience. It's frankly stellar once you've got everything setup correctly, albeit I wasn't quite able to achieve a colour balance I was completely happy with, no matter what colour space or colour mode I chose.

And you do need to dig down into the settings to get a good result because there's far too much image processing on by default in the non-gaming modes. The MEMC (Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation) motion smoothing feature is on by default in most modes, and it looks like absolute crap.

For gaming, all that nonsense is mercifully disabled to achieve the lowest possible latency and, indeed, the very last word in colour calibration is likewise less critical. That said, most of the colour options while running in Game Mode are atrocious, even for gaming. After a bit of a panic, I eventually discovered that, for whatever reason, the only colour space in Game Mode that gives decent results is Rec.709.

That's a relief because you absolutely want to use Game Mode to game. There's noticeable latency in all the other modes, even the pared-back Filmaker Mode that supposedly disables all the image processing to "faithfully convey the film director's creative intent."

That initial caveat aside, gaming at 4K on the Xgimi Titan Noir Max is to die for. So many projectors look a bit weedy and washed out when playing games. Not this beast. It's so bright, the desert sun in Cyberpunk 2077 is actually kind of painful when you point your mouse at it.

The detail and precision thanks to the true 4K resolution is fantastic, too. Just to put this into context, a lot of digital cinema projectors are still 2K, so you're getting a far sharper image with this projector than you often do at the cinema. Of course, 4K support is pretty commonplace these days, so that's not unique to the projector by any means. But the high-quality optics make for an exceptionally sharp image thanks to the precision and consistency of the focus across the screen. It's pretty special.

At this point, so far so good. This is the best gaming experience I've had on a projector. But here come the caveats. First, the variable refresh rate support is problematic. Enabling VRR at 4K results in the image being downscaled to 1080p. The game itself is still running at 4K with all the GPU load that implies, and your PC will still be outputting at 4K. But the projector is downscaling the image. And that's pretty obvious. Long story short, you don't get true 4K with VRR enabled.

I assume this is related to the fact that, as with most 4K projectors, the Titan Noir Max uses a 1080p DLP chip to create a 1080p image that shifts the image four times per frame, very quickly, to achieve 4K. Doing that fast enough to make VRR viable at 4K is perhaps too much to ask, given the DLP chip is actually generating four different images for each rendered frame.

The 1080p modes are using the DLP chip at its native resolution, of course. So, there's no problem running VRR at 1080p 240 Hz. And, really, there's still decent image detail at 1080p. Like I said, a lot of commercial cinemas are still running 2K projectors today. Oh, and I found that there's relatively little visible rainbow effect in any mode, even without Xgimi's anti-RBE technology enabled.

All of which means it's hard to gauge the Xgimi Titan Noir Max as a gaming display. It has an MSRP of $5,999 which probably makes it irrelevant to nearly all gamers. It can currently be had for $4,999 and it was available to early adopters on Kickstarter for $2,999, though that early tranche of units is sold out. There are cheaper versions of the Titan Noir series available, too, starting from $3,999. But even that is a hill of money.

The things that the Titan Noir Max is really good at, aside from the sheer brightness, like achieving near perfect focus and geometry with absolute ease are certainly impressive. But are they worth paying thousands more for in a gaming context? I'm not so sure.

But, in all honesty, one of Xgimi's own cheaper projectors will almost certainly make more sense. The Xgimi Horizon 20, for instance, goes for $1,559, is a full 4K model with optical lens shift and 3,200 lumens and offers the same 240 Hz, 1 ms 1080p gaming mode. Indeed, the Horizon 20 is one of the cheapest 4K projectors currently available with lens shift and the projector I'd recommend to pretty much any mere mortal, even before seeing the new Titan Noir Max.

Money no object, then, the Xgimi Titan Noir Max is a stunning piece of engineering. It really is. But in the real world where money does actually matter, it's almost certainly overkill for gaming.

We’ve been reviewing some silly-priced gaming monitors in recent times but, some of the latest-and-greatest models wield premium features that are unnecessary for many buyers. Gigabyte’s GO27Q24A strives to keep things simple by stripping-away some of the less-universally popular, expensive technologies to produce a spartan gaming monitor that focuses on the category’s most-important facets, to keep the price down. Gigabyte has successfully done this before using WOLED and Tandem OLED panels in the same range, so how will this QD-OLED model fare?

Assembling the Gigabyte GO27Q24A is simple: the stem clips to the screen and the stand uses a single thumbscrew to attach to the stem without any tools being needed.

The stand is the same, solid, small-footprint unit that Gigabyte’s premium monitors use and it lets competitive types sit right up close to the screen. The stem is also the same seen on its superior siblings and affords a generous degree of manipulation to get the screen sitting just so: there’s -5°~+21° tilt, ±15° swivel and 90° pivot. There’s also 13 cm of height adjustment. Impressive.

All that comes in the box is a cable-tidy clip that attaches to the stem, and a DisplayPort cable (I rather feel an HDMI cable would be more universally useful). Still, you don’t actually need many cables as there aren’t many places to stick ’em—there are just two HDMI 2.1 ports, a DisplayPort 1.4 port and a headphone jack. Forget your USB-C, KVM hub and optical ports. There’s also no RGB. We’re on a cost-saving mission, here.

Once up and running, you’re presented with a 27-inch, 1440p Windows Desktop that offers plenty of real-estate for work, but displays text that’s a smidge spidery for all-day office use in this day and age—people who often squint at spreadsheets would be better served elsewhere. But, this monitor isn’t for them.

It’s a Samsung QD-OLED panel (likely Gen 3) which has the usual, impressive-sounding 0.03ms pixel response time and 1:1,500,000 contrast ratio. It also displays 99 percent of the tricky DCI-P3 colour space (so pernickety designer-types will warm to its colour accuracy). However, despite its support for HDR10, the (understated) standout spec is its peak fullscreen brightness of just 200 nits. In a market where everyone (not least Gigabyte) is yelling about their 1,000+ nit brightness, that’s unusually very low (for a QD-OLED panel especially) and likely related to where many of the production costs have been reduced. But, how does it actually perform when gaming?

If you don’t regularly look at super-premium gaming monitors, you could well be wondering where the limitations are. Contrast is excellent, colours are vibrant and, in HDR mode, both colourful and monochromatic transitions and gradients are smooth and step-free. The lack of peak brightness means HDR can be kept active all the time without melting your eyes. It generally does a good job of displaying bright and dark areas of content simultaneously and details still get revealed in darker areas (making it hard for enemies to jump out of shadows) but details can get lost in brighter highlights (not unlike many premium monitors, frankly).

Gigabyte veneers the screen with a semi-gloss, anti-reflective coating which, in some scenarios, does a physics-defeating job at eliminating reflections. However, when viewing dark content, or when you’re in a bright environment, it can still transform into a black mirror.

Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium technologies are present to help prevent image tearing, and VRR is present to stop brightness flickering. Gigabyte’s also states that its Ultra Clear motion-smoothness technology (black-frame insertion) will be present in a future firmware update, but we’ve heard that one before.

The GO27Q24A also has a fast (0.03 ms stated grey-to-grey) pixel response time and this marries with a 240 Hz refresh rate to keep very-fast-moving objects looking smooth, crisp and clear to the point where only elite-level eSports players might grumble.

Ultimately, it functions very well as a gaming monitor. The HDR peak brightness of 400 nits means the in-your-face, potentially eye-piercing impact of premium models is missing and technical, true-black performance is only very good rather than outstanding (a black screen can feel slightly washed out), but most gamers will care more about the excellent colour vibrancy, contrast and speed on offer.

Gigabyte packs in most of its premium gaming enhancements too. They’re activated by a joystick button at the rear (on the right) of the screen. Their degrees of usefulness will depend on the proclivities of each user and most detrimentally affect overall image quality in some way.

The AI Black Equalizer destroys contrast (to selectable degrees) by brightening dark areas to prevent enemies hiding in very dark shadows. Super Resolution enhances details in areas of uniform colour to make objects look bad but harder to miss.

Game Info features include adding an on-screen timer that counts up or down. You can add on-screen crosshairs of various designs and offset them from the middle of the screen if necessary. These can be useful when playing CoD in Hardcore mode. Also, unlike (for example) MSI, the crosshair won’t move around the screen every time you move the joystick button.

Night Vision turns the screen green for those who like to LARP as a Navy SEAL super soldier. Flash Dimming helps prevent flashbangs acting like in real-life, while Eagle Eye magnifies the middle of the screen like a sniper scope. I’ve found the latter to be unusably poor in past iterations, but the new implementation (which features a round-shaped ‘optic) feels increasingly like an unfair advantage. Still, it’s still some way off being a hacker tool.

Many of these settings can be activated using Gigabyte’s ‘Tactical Switch’ which sits just below the joystick button. However, the primary function of this is to transform the screen into a more competitive FPS-display. Using the menu, you can change the settings with one press to: 1920 x 1080 (16:9); 1280 x 960 (4:3); 1024 x 768 (4:3); or 1280 x 1024 (5:4) while (potentially) dropping the display-size down to 24 inches. This suits competitive eSports players who sit close to the monitor, want low resolutions for easier headshots and who don’t want to be distracted in their peripheral vision. Clicking the button simply acts like you’ve added a different screen (from Windows’ perspective). It works very well. Unlike other Gigabyte gaming monitors, it doesn’t increase the refresh rate, though.

Another feature that can be activated by the Tactical Switch is pixel cleaning which is part of the OSD’s OLED Care technology. This can automatically (or manually) scan the pixels of your screen and eliminate any dark or bright spots that develop over time. It can also detect static images and logos by arousing the relevant pixels to help prevent burn-in. It works in tandem with Gigabyte’s bespoke, fan-less cooling technology (which uses optimised heat flow channelling, a bespoke heatsink and a graphene film layer) to enhance longevity and back Gigabyte’s three-year warranty that includes burn-in.

At the end of the day, the Gigabyte GO27Q24A doesn’t put a foot wrong. Yes, there are brighter models out there and they might have features like KVM switches and even-faster refresh rates, but these are unnecessary and expensive embellishments to many gamers. The GO27Q24A’s RRP of $450 is low compared to many rivals (and Gigabyte siblings). It even launched at $299 via Newegg for its first month on sale, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see good deals on this again. Frankly, even at $450 it’s a bit of a bargain, but it's hard to look past the excellent Alienware AW2726DM, a monitor that uses the same panel but despite being an Alienware it comes in cheaper.

Nitro VG270K L1: was $229.99 now $159.99
This is on the budget end of 4K monitors, and in some ways you can feel it. 72 Hz at 4K is very low as far as refresh rates go, but still, getting 4K for a decent bit under $200 would have felt near impossible not that long ago, and now you're doing it with a decent size and fast response rate.

Key specs: 27-inch | 4K/1080p | 72/144 Hz | up to 0.5 ms | IPSView Deal

One of the few bright lights in the dark, dark cloud that is the component pricing crisis is the current state of the gaming monitor market. They are getting better and cheaper literally every single day, and be it an OLED pick, an Ultrawide so big it will barely fit on your desk, or a 4K panel, there are sweet deals to be found in pretty much every major genre of gaming monitor.

If you want a 4K gaming monitor and want to pay as little as possible, my money would be on the Acer Nitro VG270K L1, and I wouldn't even have to think about it. That's because you can pick one up for $160 at Amazon right now. That's only really tens of dollars above the price of a decent 1080p panel, which is pretty incredible when you think about it.

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I look over our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitor deals every single week, and this panel is such a good price that it is clearly the cheapest 4K gaming monitor on there. In fact, the next cheapest option is the MSI MAG 275UPD, which is $90 more.

Naturally, at such a low price point, you expect to make compromises, and the biggest one here is the refresh rate. At 4K, the Nitro is down to a rather pitiful 72 Hz. If you have a super beefy rig, or are a huge fan of frame generation, you may want to go for something snappier. But if you are on a modest machine like me, that refresh rate is fine.

And the Nitro is a dual mode monitor, meaning you can bump it down to 1080p at 144 Hz for more competitive focused games, and bump the resolution up to 4K for something pretty. At 27 inches, it's plenty big for a desk, and the up to 0.5 ms response time is pretty killer too.

As well as this, you get HDR 10 support, IPS panel technology for strong colors and wide viewing angles, plus AMD FreeSync to cut out screen tearing. The refresh rate is naturally a pretty big caveat here, but it will cost you nearly $100 extra for a good 4K monitor with a better one, and it's therefore an excellent budget pick.

But if you're not satisfied with that, there are some strong value picks all around today. Koorui's ultrawide 1440p 180 Hz VA panel is down to $250, and the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG027QSA OLED 1440p 240 Hz gaming monitor is just under $300. The biggest problem with picking up a gaming monitor right now is that there are simply too many great deals to pick from.

During the announcement, head of product Matt McGowan said that Alienware were aiming to offer "more price points people can actually reach," though that pricing promise isn't the only thing that piqued my interest.

First, something for the esports sickos: the AW2527HX. Head of product Matt McGowan pitches this as Alienware's "fastest monitor ever," featuring a 560 Hz refresh rate and a 0.03 ms response time.

Co-designed with 4-peat World of Warcraft Race to World First champions Team Liquid, McGowan said that "Every detail [of this OLED has been] informed by how pros actually set-up and compete." Pricing and release details for the AW2527HX OLED will be announced in early 2027.

Alienware isn't the only company who has set its sights on the competitive scene recently. Last month, Asus announced that the ROG Swift OLED PG259QWS Ace would be the official monitor for PGL CS2 Major Singapore 2026 later this year. Odds are, Alienware is hoping for a similarly lucrative slice of the tournament pie. But it's worth noting that the Asus OLED has a very slightly faster response time of 0.02 ms and a higher refresh rate of 720 Hz. Could Alienware be attempting to compete on price point instead? We'll find out next year.

Some of the AW2527HX's tournament-friendly features include a built-in headset hanger, plus a matte coating on the screen to minimise glare. On top of that, esports fiends can look forward to a screen with brightness to write home about thanks to Penta-tandem OLED tech. RGB Stripe subpixels will keep text sharp and offer overall improved image clarity too.

Alienware's second OLED, the AW3226Q, is much less mysterious. For a start, I can already tell you it's a 32-inch 4K OLED that will arrive this Autumn, and will set you back about $699. That's more than twice the price of our top pick for the best budget OLED, the AW2726DM, which is also from Alienware but only costs $350. That said, this cheaper option doesn't have the tandem OLED tech. The MSI MPG 322UR X24 that our Jeremy recently rated is a '5-layer tandem' QD-OLED (so that's Samsung's tech, not LG's) but will set you back over a grand from Newegg. With that comparison in mind, $699 is a good price for that level of brightness on the Alienware.

But what else is the AW3226Q offering for the money? Well, 1,000 nits of peak brightness plus Tandem OLED tech, though it may turn out to be slightly less bright than Alienware's esports monitor. This gaming OLED also has a lower refresh rate of 165 Hz, but the same 0.03 response time plus the same clarity of image offered by RGB Stripe subpixels. Overall, it's a less specialised bit of kit, with McGowan saying it will be "Stunning for gaming and equally impressive for everyday use." Well, us lot on the hardware team will be the judge of that.

For a new gaming monitor that ticks an awful lot of boxes, the Alienware AW3926QW has also arrived with an awful lot of controversy. Some early adopters of this epic 39-inch 5K2K OLED panel have reported numerous issues, including green tinting, so-called "vignette dimming" and adaptive refresh flicker.

We'll get into the specifics of what Reddit is losing its hive mind over with the Alienware AW3926QW later. But first let's consider the stellar on-paper proposition of this monitor. For starters, it's OLED. Not just any old OLED, but LG's fancy Tandem WOLED tech.

Oh, and it has pure RGB-stripe subpixels, it's a 39-inch ultrawide with sensible 1500R curvature for epic immersion, packs a 5K2K native resolution and thus excellent pixel density, has a glossy screen coating, DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification, a high-refresh 330 Hz dual-mode and, well, plenty more besides. Heck, it's even cheaper than you might expect, coming in at just $1,099 in the US and £999 in the UK, therefore undercutting LG's own $1,799 5K2K 39-inch OLED model by miles. And that LG monitor doesn't even get RGB-stripe tech. No question, this Alienware is absolutely stacked.

If that's the broad brush strokes of the Alienware AW3926QW's proposition, how about the finer details of its tech specs and configuration? The basic panel format is 21:9 aspect and 5K2K resolution, which means it's essentially a 32-inch 4K 16:9 panel widened out to 21:9 and with exactly the same pixel density, just on an even more immersive ultrawide panel.

As I've covered on several previous occasions, Tandem WOLED is LG's very latest panel tech. Confusingly, the "W" doesn't refer to the white subpixel that all previous generations of LG's monitor panels have included, but rather the white colour of the light produced by each subpixel, which in turn is passed through a colour filter.

Likewise, the "Tandem" bit as used here doesn't mean two full OLED panels sandwiched together as per, say, a tandem OLED panel in a Apple iPad Pro. Instead, it's a reference to the additional emissive layer LG has added, again within the sub pixels.

Anyway, this new Tandem WOLED generation is brighter than ever before. At least, it is in some cases. This is actually the fourth OLED we've reviewed this year with the new Tandem WOLED panel tech. The first two, the aforementioned LG UltraGear Evo GX9 39GX950B and then the Asus ROG Strix XG32UQWMS, use LG's traditional RGWB subpixel structure, cranked out 1,500 nits of peak HDR brightness and good enough for DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification.

But the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCWM adds a twist by taking that Tandem WOLED panel tech and inserting LG's new pure RGB-stripe subpixel structure that does away with the additional white subpixel in a quest for sharper, more precise rendering and broader colour coverage. In that Asus Swift, RGB-stripe comes at a pretty pointed cost when it comes to brightness.

Where the two RGWB Tandem WOLEDs I mention hit around 330 nits full screen, the RGB-Stripe Swift can only manage 250 nits. It also tops out at just 1,000 nits peak HDR and makes do with DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification. But here's where it gets really confusing. This new 5K2K 39-inch Alienware is also RGB-stripe Tandem WOLED just like the Asus Swift, but achieves 300 nits full-screen brightness, 1,300 nits peak HDR and DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification.

Long story short, then, what this Alienware seems to offer is the benefits of RGB-stripe subpixels, including more precise rendering at subpixel level and so crisper text and fonts, plus wider colour coverage more akin to Samsung's competing QD-OLED tech, while minimising the downsides in terms of compromised brightness.

Of course, all this also promises a monitor that might match QD-OLED's vibrancy without that technology's own downsides, which include purple tint and compromised contrast in bright ambient light, plus overly warm colour balance. Then there's the usual upsides that come with all OLED monitors, like perfect per-pixel lighting and ridiculously quick 0.03 ms response times. It's a lot to keep up with but a tantalising overall proposition.

For the record and just to cover off the broader feature set, the Alienware AW3926QW is very well specified beyond the core panel tech. You get DisplayPort 2.1, two HDMI ports and USB-C with 90 W of power delivery, plus a multi-port USB hub and a KVM switch. As for refresh rate, at the native 5K2K or 5,120 by 2,160 pixel resolution, the AW3926QW hits 165 Hz, while an alternative 2,560 by 1,080 resolution dual-mode ups that to 330 Hz.

There are also additional alternative resolutions of 4K at 165 Hz, and a couple of further 25-inch and 27-inch 330 Hz modes which run at sub-1080p. As you would expect, further gaming-friendly features include AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync support. It's all buttoned up by a full three-year warranty that includes the all-important cover for OLED burn-in.

Finally, the physical design is a dead ringer for other Alienware monitors. Gone is the Storm Trooper-style white plastic and retro lines, which is a bit of a pity. In is a more organic vibe and dark blue plastic throughout. Still, it's well enough built and looks modern with slim bezels on all four sides of the WOLED panel.

Hopefully that covers off the context, now we can consider how this display actually performs. And that performance is mostly incredible. It's immediately obvious that there are fewer compromises when it comes to brightness with this RGB-stripe Tandem WOLED versus the similarly equipped Asus Swift.

How Alienware has managed to make this huge 39-inch 5K2K model noticeably brighter than the 32-inch 4K Asus, I don't know. But it clearly has. It's punchier everywhere, whether you're talking SDR or HDR content. What's more, there's very little noticeable dimming when, say, you expand a small white browser window across the display. It's much less clunky than the Asus in that regard.

Subjectively, you lose very little compared with RGWB Tandem WOLEDs in terms of perceived brightness, too. But you gain loads when it comes to colours. This is not only a more vibrant display, it's more accurate. Gone is the slightly green-tinged colour balance of an RGWB WOLED. Overall, it's right up there with a QD-OLED panel for vibrancy, but with a more natural and accurate vibe. It's really super.

It's also bloody quick, like all OLEDs. The caveat to that is the 165 Hz refresh rate at native 5K2K. Some commentators have criticised this display for that supposed shortcoming. After all, most 32-inch 4K OLEDs run at 240 Hz.

Admittedly, the fact that you have to step down from the 240 Hz widely available from 32-inch 4K OLEDs doesn't sit comfortably with is otherwise a bleeding-edge monitor. Personally, I think the idea that 165 Hz is a major limitation given the huge resolution isn't terribly convincing.

Indeed, the immediate assumption is that you'd want at least an RTX 5080 to make the most of this display and even then you're probably not going to run into that 165 Hz limitation with a lot of games. With graphics card prices escalating by the day, that's a significant worry.

In practice, you might be surprised how usable this monitor is with an RTX 5070-level card, such is the effectiveness of the likes of DLSS upscaling these days. Okay, it's not a super slick high-refresh experience with an RTX 5070-level card, but you can get playable results and fantastic image quality with only minor settings tweaks. Of course, you have those higher refresh dual-modes to fall back on when frame rates really matter, too, though as ever with dual-mode features, image quality and sharpness take quite a hit.

Anyway, the general picture, no pun intended, with this monitor is very positive. I cannot tell you how lush it looks fully lit up running the latest titles with HDR enabled. The scale of the thing, the clarity and detail, the incredible contrast, the pixel speed, it's just fantastic.

It is, however, not perfect. Apart from the arguable refresh rate limitations, let's cover off those Reddit concerts. First, the claimed green tint. That's essentially a viewing angle thing. Yes, it is visible at the edges of the display, but it's really only clearly apparent if you shove your nose a few inches from the panel then crane your neck to view the edges.

Personally, I couldn't detect any VRR flicker, either. It's possible there are settings and frame rates I didn't try where it's more obvious, but I don't think that's a major limitation. The one Reddit-raised issue that I do think is more problematic, however, is the so-called "vignette" or corner dimming.

This is a tricky issue to isolate. But to summarise, during gaming the edges of the panel gradually dim ever so slightly. The best way to see this is to have an app displaying full-screen white on the Windows desktop that you can alt-tab out to. At which point you'll see the "vignette" effect of dimming around the edges with a brighter central area of the display.

If you remain on the desktop, the dimming gradually fades and normal full-screen brightness returns after about 30 seconds. Equally, the dimming takes about 30 seconds of bright-scene gaming to fully kick in. It doesn't seem to happen when gaming in darker scenes.

In terms of why this happens at all, the most likely candidate is a feature called CPC, or Convex Power Control. It’s an LG Display WOLED panel protection feature and dims all four edges of the display to help prevent burn-in. As far as I am aware, it can't be toggled on or off on this Alienware, but if CPC is causing the vignette issue, it should be easy to address in a firmware update. Broadly, I don't think this is a hardware limitation, but a configuration issue.

Exactly how much of an actual problem it is, on the other hand, is subjective. It's worth noting it seems to happen in all modes, SDR, HDR, the works. I'd say it's one of those issues you won't immediately spot, but once you are aware—either because you notice or because you've read about it—well, it does then niggle a little.

That said, the reported issues with this panel are generally pretty subtle in reality and fall into the category of minor flaws from which pretty much any monitor will suffer at least a few. The somewhat frenzied community discussion around this Alienware, then, probably comes down to the fact that it's an expensive panel with fantastic specs that has generated a lot of anticipation and scrutiny.

It's probably inevitable, therefore, that any minor glitch was going to be immediately jumped on by the tech community. But I've seen far worse flaws on displays that have generally reviewed very well, the obvious example being backlight oddities on just about every mini-LED monitor.

In the end, it's a very tough and subjective call to make. I'd say the vignette dimming is an issue that needs to be factored in to a purchase decision. It's by no means catastrophic, but it is a tiny bit bothersome. It's just enough, I think, to prevent a full, caveat-free recommendation and pull our score below the critical 90% mark.

This is still an incredible monitor. I personally prefer it to the other 39-inch 5K2K OLED option out there, the LG UltraGear Evo GX9 39GX950B, which also didn't achieve 90-plus percent for its own reasons. This Alienware is, as things stand, still the monitor that I personally would buy right now, money no object. But to attach an unreserved buy recommendation for everyone else, that vignette dimming issue, relatively subtle as it is, needs to be sorted.

AW2525HM: was $249.99 now $199.99
Our Jacob is a fan of this competitive-level budget gaming monitor, giving it 85% in his review. It's reasonably priced, incredibly smooth, and has solid HDR too. Naturally, 1080p is a bit low for casual gaming, but you can get started as a competitive gamer for cheap here.

Key specs: 25-inch | 1080p | 320 Hz | 0.03 ms | IPSView Deal

Though the memory crisis casts a dark cloud over the gaming PC hardware market, monitors offer a brief respite thanks to their killer technology and even better prices. No matter what type of gamer you are, there's a solid panel out there for you, and if you're looking for something for competitive play, I've got you covered.

Right now, you can pick up the Alienware AW2525HM IPS gaming monitor, with its 320 Hz refresh rate and 0.5 ms response time, for $200 at Amazon, which is a saving of $50 and its lowest ever price.

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Our Jacob Fox reviewed this monitor back in June, giving it an 85%, and he is particularly fond of the monitor's price point, as well as those great stats. 320 Hz refresh rate is likely too high for the average casual gamer, but if you have competitive aspirations, you likely want to get those numbers as high as possible. In Fox's testing, he also reckons 360 Hz is the point of diminishing returns for refresh rate, so you're getting pretty close with this Alienware pick.

Refreshingly, it's not a monitor that only cares about the refresh rate, either. It is fitted with an IPS panel (which I'd generally prefer over VA or TN), and we reckon its HDR10 (without VESA cert) compatibility is pretty solid too, offering an impressive experience.

Jacob's words: "I didn't expect much, but actually, after calibrating everything, playing Doom Eternal with HDR on is wonderful. Everything just feels that much more immersive and realistic with it enabled, thanks to the improved colour space and contrast."

We reckon the monitor itself looks nice, too, with thin bezels, an adjustable stand, and even a handy headphone hook on the left-hand side. It also has two USB ports with passthrough.

Naturally, you aren't getting everything for the price. At 1080p, the resolution is pretty much the absolute lowest you want to go for a modern gaming monitor. Generally speaking, a casual gamer will get more out of a less impressive but nicer-looking 1440p monitor (Like this MSI Pro with a 100 Hz refresh at $120 or this 200 Hz Acer Nitro at $150).

As well as this, we spotted significantly more motion blur than the much more expensive Zowie XL2586X+, but if you're looking for something competitive level on a budget, we really rate this one.

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Asus' new monitor, the ROG Swift OLED PG259QWS Ace, is going to be the official monitor of the 2026 PGL CS2 major. It's a glossy tandem WOLED with a response time of 0.02 ms (GTG), which is low even for OLED.

More relevant here, though, is that it's a 720 Hz, 24.5-inch panel. We've seen high refresh rate OLEDs before, but most of these (A) are 27-inch or bigger, and (B) only achieve their high refresh rates when dropped to 720p. Getting up to 1080p is ideal for pro gaming, especially in CS2, where some will want to stretch a 4:3 resolution, and 24/25-inch monitors are preferred.

It might seem silly to some, but I've tested some pro-level monitors and can confirm that 24/25-inch monitors can make playing CS2 a little more comfortable, allowing you to see the entire game scene without squinting in a way that pushing a 27-inch monitor further away somehow doesn't quite replicate. I did also find in that testing that there are diminishing returns to higher refresh rates above about 360 Hz, but hey, I'm not a pro. I have no doubt they can make use of those extra returns, diminishing as they are.

All this is to say, the fact that we've now got a 24.5-inch OLED reaching up to 720 Hz is really going to give TN panels like those from Zowie a run for their money. Especially given OLEDs don't need to use backlight strobing to reduce motion blur because their pixels already change incredibly quickly. And, of course, given they look gorgeous.

It seems PGL (the tournament organiser) agrees. According to Asus, PGL CEO Silviu Stroie remarked: "The first OLED Major on the fastest OLED ever made—it’s a new generation of competitive Counter-Strike."

And you know what? I actually don't doubt it. CS2 tournies have been run on TNs for, well, forever. And pros have been reluctant to switch away in part for this reason: it's best to practice on the monitors you'll be using in tournaments. So if tournies start switching over to OLED, this could indeed be the start of a new generation of pro gaming, at least as far as monitors are concerned.

And we couldn't really ask for a better kind of gear for such a change to happen to than the monitor. I love writing about monitors these days, as they're one bit of PC gaming kit that hasn't felt the pricing bite of the global memory shortage.

It also helps that technologies seem to be not only improving but also actually getting cheaper, and nothing highlights that more than the wonderful world of OLEDs—$299 for a 1440p, 240 Hz panel, anyone?

Phantom Gaming PGO27QSA: was $465 now $299.33
Take a second to look at the specs on offer here, then back to the price, then back to the specs again. That speaks for itself, and we've had a good run with Phantom Gaming monitors over the years. Affordable and effective.

Key specs: 27-inch | QD-OLED | 240 Hz | 0.03 ms | FreeSync Premium | 1440pView Deal

There are a few things I look for in a gaming monitor nowadays: OLED panel, high refresh rate, low response time, and some type of variable refresh rate technology. Lo and behold, this ASRock Phantom Gaming monitor has the lot, and for a very good price.

While most PC components keep getting pricier, gaming monitors, especially OLEDs, are only getting more affordable. This is a prime example of that trend: the Phantom Gaming PGO27QSA is just $299 at Newegg.

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It features a resolution of 2560 x 1440, within a 27-inch frame. That's 108 pixels per inch, for anyone counting, and provides a clear and crisp image overall compared to larger monitors.

A 1440p resolution is within reach for most modern midrange or better graphics cards; however, you will need a powerful GPU to reach the lofty refresh rate offered by this panel. That's 240 Hz. Though the inclusion of a variable refresh rate technology in AMD's FreeSync Premium helps there, matching the monitor's refresh rate to when the GPU is ready to fling another frame over.

This monitor is using a QD-OLED panel from Samsung, and as we've seen in our own testing, this panel technology delivers infinitely deep blacks and stunning vibrancy for gaming. With a typical SDR brightness of just 200 nits, this is sure to be an older generation panel compared to the latest and greatest found in MSI's MPG 322UR X24. We've seen Alienware taking a similar approach with its affordable AW2726DM: older panel, lower price.

The ASRock gaming monitor won't have the RGB Stripe subpixel layout we've come to enjoy on the latest panels, either. That means you can expect some level of text fringing across the panel. Generally, this has minimal impact on gaming, which remains just as glorious even on older QD-OLED tech.

With an option for black and white, and a surprisingly dextrous stand for the money, there's a whole lot of monitor here for the money. You don't get a USB hub, but you do get 2x HDMI 2.1 and 1x DisplayPort 1.4 ports. It also should come with a couple of cables rated to meet those specs in the box, which makes life a little easier.

👉Take a look at Newegg's entire Gamer Zone sale here👈

The biggest problem with shopping around for a gaming monitor right now is that there are too many deals to pick from, so I've whittled it down to just five.

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Starting at the bottom of the budget, we have a 1080p choice. Being VA, you aren't getting the wide viewing angles of an IPS or deep contrasts of an OLED, but you are getting a snappy monitor at a very good price.

Then, we've got two 1440p picks, one IPS and one mini-LED. Rounding out the list, we have a dual-mode 4K pick, and an ultra-cheap OLED gaming monitor.

I update our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitor deals every week, so I've developed a good sense of exactly how much you should expect to spend on a gaming monitor, and every one of these picks is a banger for the price point.

Gaming Monitor deals

The Full Details

However, RTings has some disappointing news. A long-term test of OLED TVs manufactured between 2020 and 2023 did not show significant reduction in burn-in compared to a 2017 LG model—and it's the increased screen brightness that is likely to blame.

The newly-tested OLED TVs are significantly brighter, which means any major improvement in burn-in resistance appears to have been offset—at least under these test conditions. RTings found that the average 2023 OLED was 28% brighter then the 2017 OLED's average in a 10% SDR window test, and 52% brighter in a sustained full-screen SDR test.

This higher brightness appears to have resulted in a stalemate when it comes to burn-in avoidance. The tested TVs were subjected to thousands of hours of non-stop CNN viewing, where the static banner at the bottom of the screen remained present for the entire experiment.

At the 10,500 hour checkpoint, the banner still burnt its way into the display of the newer models to a noticeable degree. Boo, hiss, etc.

However, there is some good news to take from this data. Each of the TVs were tested at their maximum SDR brightness settings, without adjustments to account for the higher brightness levels compared to the older model.

As the newer panels are capable of pumping out a much brighter full screen image, turning down the brightness may result in a longer burn-free lifespan. Or at least, less noticeable burn-in over the same period.

It's also worth noting that this is a deliberate, "worst-case scenario" test, which is far from representative of actual TV usage. The full 18,000 hours stint would be equivalent to 10 years of watching nothing but CNN for five hours a day. Mixed viewing over the same period would be very unlikely to create similar burn-in results.

"What's clear is that for most mixed-content viewers, burn-in remains unlikely to become an issue," RTings concludes. "Users with static-heavy SDR workloads can lower the brightness setting to reduce cumulative stress while still retaining more usable brightness than earlier OLED generations offered."

So, swings and roundabouts. It appears you can't have searingly bright OLED panels and significantly reduced burn-in at the same time, but if you're prepared to turn the brightness down a notch or two, things may well have improved.

For what it's worth, we've tested lots of OLED gaming monitors over long periods of regular usage without noticeable burn-in issues. And for those still on the fence, many manufacturers offer extended warranties for burn-in protection.

It's still worth taking reasonable precautions to extend the lifespan of your expensive new display, but OLED tech is developing at an astonishing rate. Here's hoping that anti-burn-in measures improve as time goes on—because how eye-scorchingly bright do you really need your TV to be, anyway?

Horizon Ultra: was $1699 now $849
This 4K beamer has been attached to my wall since I reviewed it back in early 2024, and it's been a mainstay of my media-devouring habits ever since. It's brighter than the Horizon Pro it replaced and delivers a pin-sharp Dolby Vision-bolstered image. In its game mode runs with a minimal 17 ms of latency, which makes it great for some big-screen antics, though its refresh rate is limited to 60 Hz. Use code 300SAVE for the full discount.

Key specs: 3840 x 2160 | DLP | HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision | 2300 ISO lumens | Android TV View Deal

The XGIMI Horizon Ultra is the brightest projector I've ever had the pleasure of using. Coming from the previous-gen Horizon Pro beamer, with its 1500 ISO lumens peak, the 2300 ISO lumens output of this thing feels almost searing in its brightness. But that makes it an outstanding HDR projector for both games (with HDR10 support baked in) and movies with Dolby Vision support as standard.

I reviewed this XGIMI projector back in early 2024, and I've had it attached to my wall ever since, delivering on both movie and gaming nights. I played almost the entirety of Baldur's Gate 3 plastered over a big ol' 100-inch 'screen' and it was glorious.

One of the big issues, however, is that at $1,700 it's a mighty costly bit of kit, even if beamers of this quality had previously come in at twice the price. But thanks to a handy dandy discount code (300SAVE), you can get $300 off the already discounted price, which brings the XGIMI Horizon Ultra down to $849 at Wellbots. And at half price, this is a lot of projector for the money.

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Both the image and the device itself look great. If you want a projector to fit into your home without being crazy intrusive, the Horizon Ultra's got a neat party trick. When it's turned off, the lens is covered by a fabric mesh screen, which slowly lowers itself down when you power it up. It looks pretty stylish when it's off, and I do love that little bit of theatre when it gets up and running. A small thing, but I'm a nerd, and those things please me.

It's got a set of Harmon Kardon speakers built into the projector housing itself, and they're genuinely impressive. The bass response on them is truly surprising, and the clarity and volume have meant I've never been tempted to trail more cables down my wall to run into some third-party speaker setup.

It's running Android TV out of the box (with Chromecast built in), though this is where the first of the slight niggles crop up. I don't pretend to understand the ring-fencing, but not all the apps in the Google Store are available on this device despite nominally being available on Android TV. So, Netflix is a no-no natively.

Personally, I've got a wee Nvidia Shield tube plugged into it to circumvent those issues, which also gives me easy access to GeForce Now and Steam Link for gaming fun times. Though the other niggle is that you're only getting a 60 Hz refresh rate out of the Horizon Pro, which puts it below the likes of the Dangbei DBOX02 Pro, which will hit 120 Hz at native and 240 Hz at 1080p.

But 60 fps at 4K is still a challenge for a lot of gaming PCs, so whether that's an issue you can live with will depend on you. For me, the glory of a huge game image at a smooth 60 fps still hits hard. The Horizon Ultra's game mode is pretty impressive too, cutting the input latency down to just ~17 ms, and that works whether you're keystoning or not.

And that is another area where the XGIMI beamer shines (see what I did there?) - the auto-keystoning. You can stick this projector anywhere and it will adjust the image and the focus to fit whatever flat surface you're pointing at, with simple manual adjustments so you can fit it to a certain area of your wall. It takes a ton of the hassle out of projector placement.

So, if you're after some big screen HDR thrills without the thousand-dollar-plus price tag, this half-price beamer is well worth a look. I can personally vouch for it.

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According to analyst firm TrendForce, shipments for OLED panels have increased 26.1% in the past three months. Comparing to last year's figures, they're up 98%. And the firm chalks that up to gaming, specifically, noting that adoption is strong for 27-inch QHD monitors, which sit at the top of the increasingly large pile of panels for popularity.

TrendForce says these "results underscore the rapid penetration of OLED technology in the gaming and premium display markets."

In the first three months of the year, TrendForce reckoned shipments for OLED panels increased 78% year on year. This suggests OLED monitor shipments are still on the rise through 2026.

The analyst firm lists the biggest companies in the space by market share, as it stands today: Asus at the top, then Samsung, MSI, AOC, LGE, and the rest. Samsung slipped due to a "gradual withdrawal" from the Chinese market, while MSI made some waves. Panel supply is said to be improving, too, with new brands entering the market as a result.

Though it's worth noting that most OLED panels for gaming monitors are made by Samsung and LG, even if rebadged under another company's name. We have seen some new developments in recent weeks regarding OLED panels from Chinese goliath TCL making their way into MSI's professional lineup; however, for gaming, we're mostly all in on those Korean-made panels.

Nevertheless, OLED monitors are becoming way more accessible for PC gamers as the technology develops and new products make it to market. Once upon a time, most OLED gaming monitors would demand upwards of $600–$1000. Yet our best budget OLED, the Alienware AW2726DM, has an MSRP of $350. That's brand new. Sure, it's an older panel tech than the very latest panel as found in our top pick, the MSI MPG 322UR X24, but an OLED looks fantastic either way.

We've said it a whole lot lately, but monitors are one of the few good deals left in PC gaming. You can thank the memory crisis for everything else sucking. That pox hasn't touched the monitor market. Prices are still coming down, the technology is still rapidly developing, and OLED monitor deals are still to be found.

Our James checks for deals every week and he's spotted this Samsung Odyssey G50SF for $350 over at Amazon. There's also this AOC Agon Pro for $350. Both 27-inch, 1440p monitors as was suggested to be the most popular by TrendForce. Though even the 4K-capable MSI MAG 321UP is down to $700 over at Newegg.

It's just nice to see a healthy market that's actually serving to the benefit of us regular consumers right now. Demand is high, supply is sufficient, and there's loads of competition; which all feels like a bit of a rarity right now.

34E6UC: was $359.99 now $249.99
This Koorui is currently our pick for the best budget ultrawide gaming monitor, and for good reason. It's well built, punchy, bright, and great value. Being VA, it's a little sluggish, but still strong for gaming.

Key specs: 34-inch | 3440 x 1440 | 180 Hz | 1 ms | VA | 1000R curveView Deal

Be it 1440p, 4K, OLED, or now even ultrawides, gaming monitors have become incredibly good value over the last year or two. The memory crisis may continue to drive up everything else, but now is the perfect time for a monitor upgrade.

If you've been wanting to test out an ultrawide, the Koorui 34E6UC is 34 inches and just $250 at Amazon right now.

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We gave this budget beast a solid recommendation in our review just a few months ago, and it soon became our pick for the best budget ultrawide gaming monitor you can buy. Pricing on the 34E6UC has flitted around quite a bit, with it going as high as $400 near the start of the year, and previously dropping to around the $260/$270 mark. It has stayed at its discounted price of $250 for a while now, but it is truly the best ultrawide you can get for the money out there.

Being a VA panel, it does have somewhat sluggish pixel response times, and you aren't getting the color accuracy of an IPS or the superior contrasts and near-instantaneous response times of an OLED, but one huge benefit is that price. And it's certainly not a bad panel otherwise.

It's plenty bright, it's punchy, and it's well built too. Our Jeremy said in his review, "This screen is all about context and value. Put it up next to the latest OLED panels, and the shortcomings in terms of contrast, black levels, lighting control, viewing angles, pixel response, and more are pretty stark. But they're also pretty irrelevant if your budget is $250, or thereabouts."

Still, where this monitor does stand out is its ultrawide panel. At a tight 1000R curve, you are getting a seriously immersive experience. For the unaware, ultrawide gaming monitors are well-liked because they get more information on the screen at once. In first-person games, this broader angle is quite immersive, and in strategy games, it can give you more information without having to move the screen around.

One obstacle to using ultrawide is that some games don't natively support the format. Street Fighter 6 and Elden Ring are among those that don't support ultrawide, but the likes of Flawless Widescreen can force the format on unsupported games.

Unlike memory, SSD, and graphics card, monitors don't have any pricing or stock issues. Instead, the problem is that there are simply too many options out there. I look after our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitor deals every week, and right now, you can get the aforementioned Koorui for $250, an MSI Pro 27-inch 1440p monitor for $120, an Acer Nitro 4K gaming monitor for $180, or even a Samsung OLED monitor for $350. Take your pick. They're all bangers for the price.

Every time a new OLED gaming monitor comes out of late, it seemingly poses pretty much the same question. Is this the one, is this the model that effectively "completes" the task of gaming monitors, that represents 2D panel technology perfected? Give it up, therefore, for the latest candidate, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCWM, a 32-inch 4K model.

There's a lot to keep up with when it comes to OLED panel technology developments, but big news here is the inclusion of a new LG Tandem WOLED panel with RGB-stripe subpixel structure. We've already seen LG's Tandem WOLED tech in 32-inch 4K trim recently in another Asus monitor, the Asus ROG Strix XG32UQWMS. But that didn't get the RGB-stripe version of the new panel type, instead retaining the additional white subpixel LG has long used to boost brightness in an "RGWB" configuration.

In theory, then, this new panel has it all. You get the very latest LG Tandem WOLED panel generation with all the benefits that brings, but applied to a pure RGB-stripe subpixel structure. That's it then, job done, the perfect OLED gaming monitor?

Not quite. It's not all pros with this RGB-stripe panel. There are some cons, too, at least on paper. The RGB-stripe subpixel structure—or red, green and blue subpixels arranged vertically in that order—should mean more precise rendering, especially for elements like fonts that rely on addressing the panel at subpixel level to achieve maximum crispness. It also promises more accurate colours and a wider overall colour volume, too.

However, LG has been using the white subpixel on all of its previous OLED panel generations for PC monitors for a reason. And the consequence of removing it is that this RGB-stripe 32-inch Tandem WOLED panel has lower full-screen and peak HDR brightness ratings than its RGWB cousin.

So, where the Asus Strix model was rated at 330 nits full screen and 1,500 nits peak HDR in a 2% window, this RGB-stripe Asus Swift clocks in at 250 nits and 1,000 nits respectively. It also makes do with DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification instead of True Black 500.

Just to confuse things, this new RGB-stripe panel tech is also being used in the new Alienware AW3926QW 39-inch 5K2K monitor, a review of which we also have coming. That has exactly the same pixel density, but somehow Alienware has managed to squeeze 300 nits, 1,300 nits and HDR True Black 500 from that panel. Odd.

Anyway, it should also be noted peak brightness specs aren't the whole story, in any case. As I've explained before in reference to monitors using Samsung's competing QD-OLED panels, which have never used white subpixels at all, peak brightness ratings are for pure white.

But panels with lower brightness ratings thanks to using pure-RGB subpixel structure can actually offer superior colour brightness. Put another way, if you want to show pure and accurate red, for instance, the white subpixel isn't much help in boosting brightness.

Speaking of QD-OLED monitors, it's notable that the likes of the MSI MPG 322UR X24 uses a Samsung panel with no white subpixel to achieve 300 nits full screen and True Black 500 certification. What's more, Samsung has also announced an even better 32-inch 4K QD-OLED panel with 360 Hz refresh and True Black 600 certification. Samsung hasn't quoted panel brightness, but the True Black 600 tier requires 350 nits full-screen at minimum. Like I said, it's a lot to keep up with.

One last note on the panel tech. LG's branding for all this stuff is getting really confusing. The "W" in Tandem WOLED doesn't refer to the white subpixel, hence its use here. It refers to the fact that each subpixel emits white light that is then passed through a colour filter. And the "Tandem" equally doesn't actually mean two full OLED panels stacked atop one another, but instead refers to additional emissive layers, again within the subpixels.

My actual final note on the panel is that it's glossy, not matte, which isn't always a given with LG-based OLED monitors. Anywho, aside from the panel specs, this is an Asus "Swift" model, which makes it more premium than the Strix version I reviewed recently and that has implications for the feature set. First up, that includes a 480 Hz 1080p "Dual" mode to complement the 240 Hz native 4K refresh rate.

Connectivity wise, you get full 80 Gbps DisplayPort 2.1, two HDMI 2.1 ports, plus USB-C with 90 W of power delivery. There's also full KVM switch support. Further gaming-friendly features include ELMB motion blur reduction and VRR anti-flicker. Oh, and there's not only HDR10 support, but Dolby Vision, too, albeit Dolby Vision is more relevant to HDR video than HDR gaming.

It's all wrapped up in a premium chassis that includes height, swivel and tilt adjustment, RGB lighting, including a down projector, and some nifty design elements. Most unusual is the partly transparent rear chassis cover.

It's a lot like the see-through rear cover on devices like Nothing's smartphones and headphones. It's pretty neat, albeit you're obviously not going to see it day-to-day on a monitor sitting up close to a wall.

Without further ado, then, how good, exactly is this new RGB-stripe Tandem WOLED panel? Pretty darn good, but not quite perfect, is the short answer. There's some subjectivity in this, but I have never personally much liked LG OLED panels with the added white subpixel. They lack colour vibrancy and suffer from slightly green-tinted white tones.

That's all fixed with the RGB-stripe panel. To sum up the experience, it's a lot closer to a Samsung QD-OLED panel in terms of how pleasing and punchy the colours are. But you don't have to worry about the purple tint that even the latest QD-OPLED panels suffer from in bright ambient light.

This RGB-stripe WOLED also has a more accurate and neutral colour balance compared to the slightly warm colour temperature of QD-OLED panels. Add in the precision of the RGB-stripe subpixel structure, especially as applied here to a super-sharp 4K panel, and all the usual OLED upsides, including ridiculously fast 0.03 ms pixel response, perfect lighting control and very wide viewing angles and, well, you have one heck of an experience.

For the record, the banding or "dirty screen effect" that some other lower resolution Tandem WOLEDs suffer from is more or less invisible here. So, that's good. And if you are wondering, yes this monitor does have something akin to MSI's EOTF boost mode that essentially enables maximum available brightness in both brighter and darker HDR scenes.

Asus calls it "Adjustable HDR" on this model, but it does basically the same job and works well enough, albeit with some limitations, which we'll come to in a moment.

Now, I know I go on about this routinely when it comes to OLED monitors. But the night time HDR scenes in CyberPunk 2077 really do look spectacular on this panel. Let me give you an example to get across the experience. You know those neon lights and signs that populate many of Cyberpunk's moody urban scenes? They don't look like images of neon lights and signs. They look like actual light sources.

That's actually the point of HDR done right. To recreate the true dynamic range of reality and that means light sources that look like actual light sources.

The reality is that most supposedly HDR-capable screens can't really do HDR. Well, this one can, and it looks epic at its best. But what about at its worst? Brighter gaming scenes inevitably show up the limited full-screen punch.

Again, we're into subjective territory here. Do you really want the screen to light up at 500 nits and beyond across the whole screen? That wouldn't actually be comfortable for extended use. But it cannot be denied that 250 nits full-screen is not hugely punchy and there are moments when this monitor can look a bit, well, dull.

Overall, I'd definitely take this RGB panel over the RGWB alternative. Where the choice becomes more tricky is versus a QD-OLED. I think the latest QD-OLEDs are still a touch punchier in brighter scenes and on the Windows desktop.

If you disable uniform brightness in order to max out the visual pop in SDR mode, there's more apparent dimming according to how much bright content you are showing with this LG RGB-stripe panel than a Samsung QD-OLED.

That dimming, as more and more of the screen is lit up, is also apparent in HDR mode when the Adjustable HDR setting is maxed out. And that dimming is more significant than you'll see on the latest QD-OLED panels, including that MSI MPG 322UR X24, which is something to think about.

On the other hand, there's no purple tint to contend with and, like I said, the colour temperature is more natural. In the end, it's now a very close run thing between this LG panel and the QD-OLED alternative. That's a major step forward given I'd have taken QD-OLED easily, before.

Really twist my arm and I'd probably pick this panel. There, I've said it. Wait, can I take that back? I've just remembered this LG RGB-stripe dims a tiny bit more than I like. Argh. Ultimately, it's probably too close to call. Both of the current LG and Samsung options have their own slight shortcomings, but both are also great panels.

More to the point, however, 32-inch 4K OLEDs of any stripe—pun fully intended— make fantastic all rounders. They're big enough to be really immersive, in-game, but also have sufficient pixel density to look crisp and sharp for daily computing.

So, really the main problem for the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCWM is how the value proposition stacks up. At $1,299 or £1,099 this is a very expensive display. You can typically get a first-gen 32-inch 4K QD-OLED for somewhere in the $600 to $700 range, currently. Yes, this new RGB-stripe Tandem OLED is better by several metrics. But not that much better.

Then there's the comparison with that Alienware AW3926QW. That isn't quite on sale yet, but it's expected to come in at $1,100. Okay, it doesn't have USB-C connectivity. But it's not only brighter, but larger at 39 inches and offers that ultrawide 5K2K upgrade.

Of course, you're going to need one heck of a GPU to drive this display at its full 240 Hz refresh at 4K and that challenge is only going to be stiffer with a 5K2K panel. But perhaps that's a separate issue to the reality that you're paying more for less with this Asus compared to that upcoming Alienware. The choice is yours, but I'd want a look at that Alienware before pulling the trigger, that's for sure.

If you are unfamiliar with what that means, inkjet printing is a cheaper process than the traditional deposition process used by LG and Samsung. LG and Samsung produce almost every OLED screen for PC monitors right now, but TCL, the producers of this MSI panel, have been looking to burst into the market for some time.

The new MSI panel offers a 120 Hz refresh rate, up to 1,000 nits peak brightness, and an optimised RGB stripe subpixel layout that MSI claims "closely resembles the uniform RGB structure of traditional LCDs." This should eliminate colour fringing and enhance image clarity, and is something we've seen arrive on LG and Samsung-made OLED panels only recently.

As you might be able to guess from the 120 Hz refresh rate and 'Pro' moniker, this MSI panel is not traditionally intended for gaming. We don't yet have the response rate, but it's an OLED, so it's likely to be good. Yet the focus on colour precision over speed implies a use case for professionals. The monitor offers "99% of the DCI-P3 wide color gamut with an exceptional Delta E ≤ 2 accuracy."

In a way, this new monitor for MSI will be a good testing ground for what more OLEDs could look like in the future. If inkjet-printed screens get a foothold in the market, it could make for some more budget options, and a third option away from the duopoly of Samsung and LG.

Unfortunately, though, we are missing the two most pertinent bits of information about this monitor. We don't know when it's supposed to release or what pricing will look like. The MSI Pro Max 271UPXW12G, which appears to be the QD-OLED counterpart to the inkjet monitor, seems to sit around the $700 mark. If it can cut away substantially at that price, then the swap to inkjet will be well worth it.

Still, as it's an early model for inkjet tech, I'm not expecting too big of a price cut. And non-inkjet OLED monitors are becoming more and more budget-friendly. I check over our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitors every week, and regularly spot OLED panels around the $300-$400 price point.

Even Alienware put out a $350 OLED gaming monitor as recently as this year, so here's hoping OLED only gets more competitive in the pricing arena.

Predator X32 Xbmiipphuzx: was $999.99 now $629.99
With only 250 nits to play with, this isn't the brightest OLED money can buy. Still, if your hardware can handle 4K gaming, this curved screen may well be the finishing touch for your setup that you've been looking for.

Key specs: 32-inch | 240 Hz | 0.03 ms response | QD-OLED

Price check: Acer $699.99View Deal

For most, a 4K gaming monitor is overkill. Trust me (or feel free to judge me), I have a 4K OLED at home and most of the indie darlings I play look just as stunning at 1440p. But if you're serious about 4K gaming and have the kit inside your rig to make a serious go of it—well, I'm guessing your funds are feeling a little depleted, and you'd probably appreciate a good deal on a gaming monitor.

To be upfront, the Acer Predator X32 is a curved, older generation OLED. Typically, that means you're looking at a slightly less face-melting brightness of around 250 nits for this type of QD-OLED in terms of full-screen brightness. This particular bad boy boasts up to 1,000 nits within a 3% window, so solitary points of in-game brightness—like a light bulb in a dark room or a far off bonfire—will still be faithfully rendered, which is what makes this an excellent HDR panel. Besides, the headline here is that you're getting a 32-inch 4K OLED for only $630 from Amazon.

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On top of a 0.03 ms response time, the Acer Predator X32 also enjoys a 240 Hz refresh rate. So, if your gaming PC can keep up with 4K gaming, then you're also looking at a fairly responsive screen to go along with it. Esports fiends may cry out for something speedier still, but that's why the sickos tend to go with much lower resolution TN panels. If competitive esports is not the name of your game, the Acer Predator X32 has plenty to offer.

As the X32 is an older OLED, you won't be getting the new RGB stripe subpixel layout enjoyed by Samsung and LG's latest panels. Though font-fringing isn't so much of an issue at the pixel pitch of a 32-inch 4K display, so it's not something you will hugely miss. Many modern gaming OLEDs tend to feature some font fringing because they use the subpixel layout of TVs, but characters in and out of game are crisply rendered here. That's good news should you need to spend just as much of time staring at documents as you do blasting back the demon horde.

The older generation of QD-OLED, however, does mean colour accuracy may be smidge off, with this older generation of OLEDs known for being a bit warm in terms of colour temperature. QD-OLEDs specifically are also known for having a slight purple tinge to them under brightly lit environments. Mind you, if you struggle to tell the difference between a duck egg blue and a maritime teal, then maybe the disappointing colour precision will be neither here nor there for you. Even as an older OLED, you're still getting those deep, true blacks thanks to HDR Black 400.

Mind you, with only 250 nits to play with, the fiery pits of hell will tend to look a little dull all the same. The problem can be exacerbated should you set this OLED in an uncharacteristically well lit gamer den; unfortunately, the finish on this screen tends to reflect a lot of ambient light, creating some unsightly glare and sapping the depth of those true blacks.

But let's talk about that 1700R curve. It won't be for everyone—much less all desk set ups—but for some, it offers an immersive gaming experience. If you've got the space for it, it's also meant to be fairly easy to adjust in terms of tilt angle and height. If you're in a side-by-side gamer arrangement, it's also easy enough to swivel this screen around for your player two. Any movement on my cluttered desk would absolutely take down about five different Miku Hatsune figurines, though.

👉 Check out all of Amazon's gaming monitor deals 👈

Our Jeremy adores the M27T6S and its eye-popping mini-LED performance. It's not the cheapest 1440p gaming monitor out there, but it is budget-friendly for a mini-LED one. It looks truly phenomenal, is genuinely bright, and has solid specs all around. Make sure to use code EDF37346 at checkout to get the discount.

Key specs: 27-inch | 200 Hz | 1 ms | IPS | mini-LED

Price check: KTC $300 (exc. shipping)View Deal

The memory crisis may be continuing to rage, and taking much of the internals of your PC with it, but gaming monitors have become some of the very best deals around.

If you're looking to get yourself the best budget mini-LED gaming monitor right now, KTC's M26T6S is $270 at Newegg with promo code 'EDF37346'.

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I have the honor of looking after both our picks for the best cheap gaming monitor deals and our picks for the best gaming monitors, and this little KTC wonder is in both right now. It's just that good.

With it, you're getting a 1440p 27-inch panel capable of a brightness of 1,000 nits, a response time of 1 ms and a refresh rate of 200 Hz. That's to say, even without that panel technology, it's no slouch in the specs department.

And, being mini-LED, you are getting absolutely sizzling HDR performance. As our Jeremy said in his 90% review, "where the KTC M27T6S really delivers is with HDR content."

KTC has done a wonder on its built-in algorithm to look great without zone popping, and it performs excellently in Cyberpunk 2077 in the areas where OLEDs tend to fail. Brightly lit desert scenes pop, and the in-game sun looks superb in action.

Now, just because it beats out an OLED in some ways doesn't make it the superior technology. Its lighting isn't as precise as an OLED, and OLEDs still take the win in their super wide viewing angles and true blacks. But then again, mini-LEDs don't have the risk of burn-in, which is certainly a concern for OLEDs in and around this price point.

Still, if you've been thinking of making the upgrade, this KTC panel is excellent, and downright budget thanks to its $80 discount.

👉 Check out all of Newegg's gaming monitor deals 👈

Can it really be well over four years since Alienware rolled out the AW3423DW, the first mainstream OLED gaming monitor? The AW3423DW wasn't perfect, but by many important gaming metrics, it absolutely monstered every LCD-based display. That model, of course, was a 34-inch ultrawide and now Alienware has released its most significant update yet for that form factor, the Alienware 34 AW3426DW.

So, what does four years of OLED gaming monitor development buy you? In really simple terms, some new threads, a bit more brightness, and a higher refresh rate. But when you dig down into the details, there's way more going on here.

Most importantly, Alienware has upgraded to Samsung's very latest QD-OLED panel tech, known as Penta Tandem. In terms of headline specs, that means a bump from 250 nits full-screen and 1,000 nits peak HDR brightness of that OG Alienware OLED, to 300 nits and 1,300 nits respectively. You also get an upgrade from VESA DisplayHDR 400 True Black to 500 True Black certification, again highlighting the punchier panel.

The refresh rate is up, too, from 175 Hz four years ago to 280 Hz today, albeit there was an interim Alienware 34-inch ultrawide OLED, the Alienware 34 AW3425DW, that upped the refresh to 240 Hz while keeping most of the other specs the same.

It's also worth noting that there are versions of this Samsung-sourced new-gen 34-inch QD-OLED panel with yet higher refresh, most obviously the MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36 which I reviewed earlier this year. Apart from the higher refresh, the MSI's panel specs are largely the same.

The MSI kicked off at $1,099 when I reviewed it back in January. Now it's available for $899. So, it's still $100 more expensive than the Alienware's $799 launch price. But let's park that value comparison for now and come back to the Alienware's overall value proposition later.

As with the MSI, the new-gen QD-OLED panel used here has plenty going for it beyond the simple brightness upgrade. The Penta Tandem emissive layer doesn't just produce more light. It makes the panel more resistant to burn-in. On that note, you get the usual Alienware three-year warranty including burn-in cover. So, you at least know burn-in isn't a worry for three years.

Next up is the RGB-stripe subpixel structure. Previous Samsung 34-inch ultrawide QD-OLED panels have used variations of a triangular subpixel structure. That can cause problems when the rendering pipeline is assuming the presence of a standard LCD-type RGB subpixel structure, where each pixel is composed of red, green and then blue vertical stripe subpixels.

The most obvious example is font smoothing technology like Microsoft's ClearType. The coloured text fringing that triangular subpixel structures can result in with ClearType enabled is most obvious with relatively low pixel density panels like this monitor, which comes in at 110 DPI. It's never really been an issue for gaming and, honestly, it was never that bad on the Windows desktop. But, in any case, it's now effectively a solved problem with the introduction of a true RGB-stripe subpixel structure.

Arguably more important are a couple of other panel tweaks. First, the characteristic purple tint that QD-OLEDs suffer from in bright ambient light has been reduced, albeit not actually removed entirely. That's welcome if, for instance, you position your monitor near a large window. In that scenario, this generation of QD-OLED maintains better contrast and black levels.

The glossy panel surface has also been revised with a tougher, more scratch-resistant surface. Owners of earlier QD-OLEDs with glossy coatings, which was nearly all of them, often reported that the screen scratched easily and extensively, for instance when cleaning the panel. This new gen panel should be more durable in that regard.

Elsewhere, this new Alienware AW3426DW looks pretty similar to its interim update sibling, the Alienware 34 AW3425DW. It uses the same AW30 design ethic with its rounded forms and deep-blue plastics. It's well enough slung together, though I actually preferred the slightly retro "Storm Trooper" vibe of the AW3423DW and its swooping white and black plastics.

Whatever, as with previous 34-inch Alienware OLEDs, connectivity is decent but not comprehensive. Along with a couple of HDMI 2.1 ports and a DisplayPort 1.4 interface, there's a USB hub that includes USB-A and USB-C data ports on the lower bezel.

However, there's no primary USB-C input and thus no option for single-cable connectivity to a laptop and likewise no KVM switch. Notably, the more expensive MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36 includes both of those features. So, you'd want to factor that in with the higher refresh into your value calculations.

Of course, what really matters is image quality and here the news is almost all good. Out of the box, the new Alienware 34 AW3426DW immediately has that little bit more pop that the OG Alienware OLED. It's not a life-changing difference in terms of full-screen brightness. But as with the MSI MPG 341CQR X36, it's getting awfully close to the point where it's hard to imagine anyone demanding more day-to-day punch from an OLED panel.

The reduced purple tint in bright ambient light is really welcome, too. This is a somewhat subjective call. But I'd say it will no longer be a nuisance for most users. It's also likely that whatever changes Samsung made to reduce the purple tint also contribute to improved colour balance. Previously generations of QD-OLED panels suffered a pretty obviously overly warm colour temp. This new panel is better, though again it still tilts a little warm.

If that all applies to regular SDR running, the HDR sizzle on offer is something special. On paper, LG's latest Tandem WOLED panel tech is brighter. But only because it includes an extra white subpixel to boost brightness. In terms of colour brightness and the subjective look of the panel, this new QD-OLED generation is absolutely competitive. It may even look more vibrant in some scenarios.

Alienware has also included just about every HDR mode you could wish for. Along with the standard VESA True Black 500 mode and the panel's Peak 1300 mode, there's a Peak 1300 Bright mode.

It's essentially the same idea as MSI's EOTF Boost mode. In both cases, it's an attempt to combine maximum full screen brightness, as per the True Black 500 mode, with the highest peak HDR brightness for small details. For the most part, it's very successful.

The monitor looks absolutely superb in contrasty HDR game scenes, the type where there's a mix of small bright details punctuating a dark overall vista. Nighttime sequences in Cyberpunk 2077 is the obvious example, here, and this panel absolutely rocks for that kind of play. It's so much better than any LCD monitor, it's not even funny. Once you're used to the vibrant, contrasty OLED experience, going back to the watery, light-bleedy LCD look is a bit of a bummer, that's for sure.

It's pretty darn good for daytime game scenes, too. I only hesitate slightly because full-screen brightness is still a slight limitation, even with this latest Penta Tandem QD-OLED generation. Would you really want the desert sun brighter than this panel can render it? It would feel a bit more realistic, but then you'd also be flirting with an uncomfortable level of brightness.

One thing that's for sure is that the SDR calibration in the Peak 1300 Bright mode is a little off. That's a pity, because it's very good in the other two main HDR modes and were it as good in Peak 1300 Bright, you could plausibly leave the panel in that mode for all kinds of content, all the time, rather than having to switch modes between SDR and HDR.

Unusually, Alienware has also included support for Dolby Vision. That's an HDR standard distinct from the HDR10 used by default by Windows. In truth, Dolby Vision is more relevant for video and movies than games, but it's a nice little extra.

Overall, the HDR implementation is really very good. But the deeper we get into these latest OLED panels, the more complicated the HDR proposition becomes in practical usage terms. Should most PC gamers really have to worry about things like multiple HDR modes, EOTF curves and all that stuff? Having options is great, but it's about time one of the major monitor brands had the confidence to work out an optimal HDR setup and make that a very clear default. And then perhaps bury all the other options in a submenu.

What else can I tell you? Well, there's good panel uniformity and none of the banding or "dirty screen" effect that some LG-based OLED monitors can suffer from. And as with pretty much every OLED, the pixel speed is fairly ludicrous. It's easy to gloss over pixel response given all OLEDs are so fast, but as the quoted 0.03ms response time implies, this panel is getting on for two orders of magnitude faster than any LCD monitor. It's a huge advantage in terms of in-game motion clarity.

While we're talking speed, Alienware has included an "Esports Mode" that will compress whatever signal you're sending to the display into a 25-inch 16:9 window. Obviously, the idea here is to mimic the typical 24-inch to 25-inch panels favoured for serious online shooter play.

LG offers a similar feature on its own monitors and while it works okay in both cases, I do struggle to entirely believe that anyone who is truly serious about esports is going to choose an ultrawide like this. Pretty obviously for the $800 launch price, you could have something running at well, well beyond the 280 Hz this Alienware offers, too.

More broadly, with this category of gaming monitor, you are making a trade off. The 110 DPI pixel density is relatively low. Even with the RGB-stripe subpixel technology, you're not getting super-sharp image detail and nice, crispy fonts. You could very much argue that a 32-inch 4K panel, like the Asus ROG Strix XG32UQWMS and its LG Tandem OLED panel, is a better overall compromise between gaming and general-purpose computing. It's certainly a lot sharper and clearer.

But then the immersion of a 34-inch ultrawide is something special, while the added pixel density of 4K comes with a lot more GPU load. For pure gaming, 34-inch ultrawide would be my pick. For a broader remit, it's a very close call, it really is.

So, this new Alienware is undoubtedly a very nice implementation of Samsung's new Penta Tandem QD-OLED tech. It's also cheaper than the 360 Hz versions of essentially the same panel, such as the MSI MPG 341CQR X36.

Personally, were I buying today, I'd still try to find the extra $100 for the MSI. The superior 360 Hz refresh isn't exactly critical, but it wouldn't hurt. And I'd want the USB-C connectivity and KVM switch for maximum utility and flexibility.

The thing is, the gap is only $100 because the MSI has dropped substantially from its $1,099 launch price to $899 of late. I doubt it will be very long before the new AW3426DW is offered at some kind of discount over its $799 launch price by Alienware. And it wouldn't take much of a haircut before it looked like the better deal versus the slightly better specified MSI.

Then again, if you think 280 Hz is plenty, and it probably is for most gamers, most of the time, and you don't care about USB-C, why pay more? Right now, and without any kind of discount, this is easily one of the most compelling gaming monitors on the market. It's seriously good.

Odyssey G50SF: was $549.99 now $299.99
Even reasonably good value at full price, over $200 off an OLED panel with 1440p resolution and a snappy 180 Hz refresh rate makes this a contender for one of the best-priced QD-OLED monitors out there.

Key specs: 27-inch | 1440p | 180 Hz | 0.03 ms | QD-OLED

Price check: Best Buy $349.54View Deal

The gaming PC market is in a truly horrible place. The memory crisis is sucking up tons of hardware, and causing memory, SSDs, and even graphics cards to surge in price as a result. Yet, the one single positive of the last six months of PC gaming is that monitors have only gotten cheaper.

If you fancy making an upgrade to an OLED gaming monitor, you can pick up a 27-inch 1440p Samsung one for just $300, almost half of its retail price.

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Though we'll get to its downsides, the upside of OLED gaming monitors is evident the second you turn them on. They offer great color reproduction, excellent contrasts with true blacks, and superb image quality. In fact, swapping to an OLED gaming monitor is arguably the greatest upgrade I've made to my gaming setup, making all my games look so much better.

And you aren't lacking on other specs either. 180 Hz is a strong refresh rate, and the 0.03 ms response time is super snappy too. Though you can technically get a 4K gaming monitor for less cash (like this Acer Nitro IPS one for $180), my money would be spent on this OLED here. A 4K resolution requires beefy graphics hardware, and even if you can run it, I'd often take 1440p on the lush OLED screen and enjoy superior frame rates instead.

OLEDs can suffer from burn-in (that and the price are the biggest downsides), but this display has got some built-in burn-in safeguarding tech and a three-year warranty if you're anxious it won't last you very long. We've also seen independent testing that suggests, while not a 10)% solved issue, you have to work pretty hard to burn in a modern OLED gaming monitor. Treat it right and you should get years and years without a hint of it.

You also get G-Sync and FreeSync here, so the Samsung is offering pretty much everything you want out of a modern gaming monitor, and at a price that genuinely shocked me a little when I saw it this morning.

I watch over our best cheap gaming monitor deals page every single week, so I'm used to checking the OLED market, but this is the cheapest I can remember seeing all year. This monitor is even cheaper than it was at the last Prime Day, and it was already an excellent deal back then.

If you want your games to really pop, and have a few hundred spare, I simply couldn't recommend the swap to OLED enough, and at 27 inches, it's also perfect as part of a dual monitor setup. I'd know, as that's exactly what I'm running at home.

The short version: that KTC panel is currently going for AU$177.64on Amazon, down from AU$208.99. It's much better than the AU$216.50 it was going for during Prime Day.

This, by the way, is our favourite budget 1440p monitor. It has a silky smooth 210Hz refresh rate, which is very good value in this price range. It has an IPS display, Freesync and G-sync compatibility, a 1 ms response time and 450 nits of peak brightness.

Honestly, it's above and beyond what you should expect in this price range.

Do keep in mind that this model seems to have received a cut to its RRP between now and early July: it used to be AU$289.99 at full price on Amazon, now that's dropped to AU$208.99.

In his review, Jeremy Laird praised this monitor's "punchy IPS panel" and the 200Hz refresh rate, while criticising its "limited" HDR capability and tilt-only stand. It's well worth reading the review if you want a fuller picture, but the H27T22C-3 is also a bit lacking when it comes to connectivity.

"The fear with a low cost monitor from a less familiar brand is that it might suffer from some or other really obvious flaw," Laird wrote. "Maybe the calibration is a mess, the overdrive doesn't work or the backlight is horribly dim. But none of that applies here. This isn't a perfect display, but it is pretty nice by any reasonable metric. And in the context of the price, it's pretty darn brilliant."

If that's not what you're after, check out our list of the best gaming monitors.

Asus isn't the immediately obvious pick when it comes to value-orientated PC hardware. But its mainstream Strix sub-brand does occasionally deliver some pretty sweet deals. Enter, therefore, the new Asus ROG Strix OLED XG32UQWMS.

It's a 32-inch, 4K gaming monitor based on LG's latest Tandem Primary RGB OLED panel tech, the specifics of which we'll come to shortly. And it's yours for $899, which is a pretty punchy price for a 32-inch 4K OLED with the very newest panel tech.

However, as a Strix model, the XG32UQWMS doesn't throw everything at the wall when it comes to features. Well, that's the theory. In practice, the XG32UQWMS has an awful lot of the stuff you'd want from a gaming display.

The one obvious omission is USB-C connectivity. But then that's not an unambiguously gaming-adjacent feature, albeit it is desirable for use with a gaming laptop and likewise if you're planning on sharing this monitor between a gaming rig and, perhaps, a work laptop.

Anyway, apart from the LG-supplied OLED panel itself, there's one little extra that's worth mentioning first. Along with the 240 Hz available at the OLED panel's native 4K resolution, there's also a 1080p dual mode running at fully 480 Hz.

Yes, these kinds of dual mode features are increasingly common on 4K gaming monitors. But given the Strix branding and relatively competitive pricing, not to mention the fact that not many OLED 4K monitors have yet offered it, you still might not have expected it on this particular model.

As for other specifications, this Asus represents a step up in terms of brightness compared with previous 32-inch 4K monitors with LG OLED models. The full-screen rating is now 330 nits, up from 275 nits on earlier models.

Asus is also quoting fully 1,500 nits for peak HDR brightness in a small window. Notably, both of those figures are well up on the 300 nits and 1,000 nits, respectively, that MSI claims for the MPG 322UR X24.

That MSI model uses the latest QD-OLED 32-inch 4K panel from Samsung. So, on paper at least, this new LG panel tech seems to have the edge over Samsung. For what it's worth, both this new Asus and the MSI get VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification. Despite all that, the MSI is quite a bit more expensive, at $1,099.

There are a few other upsides beyond mere brightness that come with this latest LG Tandem OLED generation. First, there's a glossy panel coating. That's not to everyone's taste, but it certainly heightens one of the main strengths of OLED tech, namely contrast.

There's also more colour performance, now up to 99.5% of the DCI-P3 gamut and much more competitive in that regard with Samsung QD-OLED. Asus also says this generation of LG OLED panel tech is 60% more durable in terms of light-emitting lifespan and so should resist burn-in even more robustly, an issue which is covered in any case by the three-year warranty.

What you don't get, however, is true RGB-stripe sub-pixel structure. Confusingly, the "Primary RGB" nomenclature LG applies to this new panel tech refers to the layers of emissive material actually within each subpixel.

The sub-pixel structure itself remains the RGWB or red, green, white, and blue layout seen in many recent OLED panels. Strictly speaking, pure RGB and without the white sub pixel LG adds to boost brightness offers both better rendering precision and superior colour fidelity. For the record, Asus has announced a monitor with LG's new Tandem OLED panel that does have pure RGB-stripe subpixels, the ROG Swift OLED PG32UCWM. But that monitor is not this monitor, and the Swift models always command a much higher price.

Whatever, as is usual for all these OLED panels, response is rated at a startlingly scant 0.03 ms. In short, pixel response is essentially a solved problem with modern OLED panel tech. Rounding out the main features are dual HDMI 2.1 inputs, DisplayPort 1.4, a USB hub and support for G-Sync adaptive refresh technology on Nvidia GPUs and FreeSync on AMD GPUs.

Incidentally, this may be an Asus Strix model and therefore not its most premium offering, but the build quality is still decent. Okay, you miss out on pivoting the panel into portrait mode. But all the other adjustments, including tilt, height and swivel are included and, frankly, it's every bit as well put together as an 8K Asus monitor I happen to have in at the moment that sells for an incredible $8,800.

With all those details covered off, well, it's time to get to the main event. How good does this new LG Tandem OLED panel tech look in 32-inch 4K format and, likewise, how does it stack up against the Samsung QD-OLED competition as represented by the MSI MPG 322UR X24?

Out of the box, it's immediately apparent that this new panel has both more punch and more colour vibrancy that the previous LG-sourced 32-inch 4K OLED panel. But there are caveats.

Subjectively, the full screen brightness is a little disappointing. With a large proportion of the panel being driven hard, it's definitely duller looking, subjectively, than the MSI. If that seems to contradict the paper specs, well, this Asus monitor has to rely on LG's additional white subpixel to hit that 330 nits full-screen figure.

In practice, the white subpixel doesn't automatically boost brightness for colours as opposed to pure white. So, much of the time, that 330 nits rating is a bit notional. As with most OLEDs, you can boost the brightness by disabling the ABL or automatic brightness limiter, which Asus refers to as the Uniform Brightness setting.

However, more than with QD-OLED panels, the overall panel brightness varies substantially depending on how much of the panel is being lit up. It only requires a disappointingly small application window, such as a web browser, showing a predominantly white image, to have the panel dimming quite noticeably.

Even using dark mode for most apps, the panel will quite often dim in a manner that the QD-OLED competition doesn't, not quite. That said, this monitor can still deliver some spectacular visuals for HDR content.

It's at its best when rendering small bright details on a dark background. That's when you'll get the full 1,500 nits and a truly eye-popping experience. That's not the reality for most games, most of the time of course. And for day-to-day gaming I'd give the subjective edge to the MSI monitor and its Samsung panel. It's that little bit more vibrant, that little bit more immersive.

Of course one thing the MSI lacks is a 1080p dual mode. So, how does that factor into the equation? Certainly, this Asus Strix is lightning fast running at 480 Hz. The motion clarity is pretty stupendous ripping your mouse around in an online shooter like Counter-Strike 2, ditto the lack of latency.

The image quality at 1080p is also among the best I've seen in terms of pixel definition on a 32-inch 4K panel running in dual mode. But the thing is, if you're really serious about esports, do you really want to be playing on a 32-inch monitor?

I suppose you could mimic the apparent size of the preferred 24-inch monitor by pushing this thing further away. But I'm not totally convinced that's a satisfactory solution for someone who plays loads of online shooters. And if you don't, I can't see you using the dual mode much.

What I can say for sure is that I still give the slight edge to Samsung's QD-OLED tech. Yes, even the latest QD-OLEDs have a slight purple tint in bright ambient light that you entirely sidestep with LG's Tandem OLED panels.

But, overall, QD-OLED still feels noticeably more vibrant and colour rich. Moreover, the variable brightness on this Asus's LG panel when you disable uniform brightness in order to get the best performance is also more noticeable and more distracting.

All that said, there's a price differential to take into account. This Asus goes for $899 to the MSI's $1,099. Personally, I think the MSI is worth the extra $200 for a bit more subjective pop and USB-C connectivity. But the value proposition is certainly very tight between the two. And if you don't care about USB-C but would like the 1080p 480 Hz dual-mode feature, well, the Asus ROG Strix OLED XG32UQWMS is pretty compelling.

Is this the monitor cashed-up PC gamers have been waiting for? At last, a 39-inch ultrawide with decent pixel density thanks to its 5K2K resolution, plus the latest LG OLED panel knowhow? The new LG UltraGear Evo GX9 39GX950B certainly sounds pretty sweet, even if it also costs a pretty penny at $1,799 or £1,549.

The sordid matter of money aside, there's just one snag. The Ultragear 39GX950B does indeed offer LG's hot new Tandem OLED technology. But there's another otherwise almost identical 39-inch 5K2K panel from LG Display that has one notable advantage over this monitor, the inclusion of true RGB-stripe subpixel structure.

It turns out Alienware has announced a monitor using that LG panel, the Alienware AW3926QW, and, to be frank, it looms large over this new model from LG itself. However good it is, you'd really want to see how that Alienware shapes up before pulling the trigger.

Still, the LG Ultragear Evo 39GX950B does look epic on paper. We're talking 5,120 by 2,160 pixels across that 39-inch diagonal. To provide a little context and to define this panel in terms of pixel density and vertical screen size, this is essentially a 32-inch 4K 16:9 monitor taken out to 21:9 aspect and 39 inches.

For many fans of high-end gaming displays, the basic proposition here is just about perfect. The 143 DPI pixel density is enough for crisp fonts and lots of space for day-to-day computing and multitasking while also delivering oodles of in-game image detail.

At the same time, the ultrawide aspect and huge 39-inch panel size makes for epic immersion. Then add in the latest LG Tandem OLED panel tech and, well, you get the idea. This thing promises to be a bit special.

Beyond the basic form factor, of course, there are plenty of other details to absorb. In terms of brightness, ever a key OLED metric, LG claims 335 nits full screen and 1,500 peak HDR in a small window. Those figures are as good as PC OLED monitors currently get.

Speaking of HDR, the 39GX950B has VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification, which is a hallmark of the latest LG Tandem OLED panels. Response comes in at 0.03 ms, which is standard for pretty much all current OLED panels and miles faster than any LCD-based monitor.

As for refresh, at the 5K2K native the 39GX950B tops out at 165 Hz. However, it supports various dual-mode alternative resolutions, the fastest of which can achieve 330 Hz. That's fairly nippy by any sensible measure, though it's pretty hard to imagine anyone really serious about esports and online shooters going for a huge ultrawide like this.

Having said that, the 39GX950B does offer the option of running at 1080p and 330 Hz in a 24.5-inch window, which pretty neatly mimics the preferred form factor for esports. The image quality is pretty clunky and pixellated, as it is in all of the dual modes. And I'm not totally convinced that many esports fans will actually want to play like that.

It certainly looks pretty odd to have a small 24.5-inch section of the huge panel active and rest fully blacked out. But there's no question it works and means this monitor is a thoroughly versatile gaming tool.

If the downscaling support is comprehensive with this panel, so too is the upscaling. Obviously, some kind of upscaling is now pretty much standard with any remotely recent graphics card, in the form of Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR or even Intel's XeSS. But LG has included its own "AI" upscaling functionality with the 39GX950B via an integrated image processor. But hold that thought, we'll come back to how effective it is and how it might compare with GPU scaling in a moment.

Rounding out the speeds and feeds, you get HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1 and USB-C connectivity, the latter with 90 W of power delivery for single-cable connectivity to a laptop, albeit a gaming laptop will typically need rather more than that.

Last and certainly not least on the specs, the panel has a matte anti-glare coating rather than glossy and a mercifully gentle 1500R curve. Most people know if they are glossy or matte fans, but suffice to say that the heavy majority of current OLED gaming monitors are glossy.

One further detail involves the warranty. Where most big monitor brands offer three-year cover, including burn-in, LG is only offering two years. That's disappointing on several levels. For starters, LG Display, the subsidiary of the sprawling LG empire that makes the actual OLED panel (as opposed to LG Electronics, which makes this monitor), says its new Tandem OLED panel tech is more durable than previous generations. So, why not back it with a three-year warranty?

Moreover, given the hefty asking price of around $1,799 or £1,549, the thought of being on your own when it comes to burn-in after just two years is pretty off putting. That alone makes this monitor tricky to recommend.

But let's park that caveat for a moment and consider this monitor's performance. What's it actually like? Well, it's definitely punchier than monitors based on LG's previous WOLED panel generations. Oddly, it's also a more consistent performer than the Asus ROG Strix XG32UQWMS I reviewed recently.

I say "odd" because that Asus uses essentially a 32-inch 4K version of the same LG Tandem OLED panel tech. But I found the brightness variability on the Asus to be awfully distracting if you disabled the uniform brightness feature in order to maximise performance.

The Ultragear 39GX950B does still suffer from that issue, and probably more than comparable OLED monitors based on Samsung QD-OLED tech. But not enough for it to be a major flaw. Overall, the full-screen brightness is pretty decent and this panel can actually be too bright if, for instance, you tend to run most applications in dark mode and then have a third of the screen lit up by a bright browser window.

Of course, that's a good problem to have. Turning brightness down is simple. There's not much you can do, on the other hand, if max brightness isn't good enough.

So, as a desktop general computing panel running in SDR mode, this LG is pretty sweet. Fonts are sharp and crisp, there's loads of desktop space for multitasking, and the panel is plenty bright enough. If you really want to split hairs, I think the latest Samsung QD-OLED panels still look a touch more vibrant and saturated. But it's not a huge delta.

For HDR content, meanwhile, it's likewise mostly good news. LG's OSD menu is a bit baffling, but once you've got everything properly set up, the results can be spectacular, especially on a panel this size.

As ever with an OLED panel, it's at its best showing small bright details on a dark background. Neon lights in a nightclub scene, fireworks in the night sky, a large flame burning in the inky darkness, that kind of thing. Then the full impact of the 1,500 nit peak HDR brightness really hits home.

It's a touch less impressive for outdoor daytime video and game scenes, where the full-screen brightness limitations can leave it looking just a tiny bit underwhelming. To be clear, it's far better than earlier LG OLED panel generations in that regard. But, again, my preference for that kind of rendering remains Samsung QD-OLED.

That said, it's an open question just how good LG's new RGB-stripe panel as used by the aforementioned Alienware will be by comparison. In theory, and because it doesn't rely on an additional white subpixel to boost brightness, that RGB-stripe panel should have superior colour saturation and look more vibrant. Exactly how that pans out, well, we'll have to wait and see.

While we're talking HDR visuals, the SDR calibration in the best HDR mode is pretty wonky to the point where you'd never leave it in that mode, day-to-day. You can actually get decent SDR visuals in one of the other HDR modes. But then that compromises HDR performance. Long story short, you're going to have to switch monitor modes depending on the kind of content you are viewing, which is a bit of an annoyance.

As for the AI upscaling feature, it's awfully hit and miss. For instance, it doesn't work at all at 3,440 by 1,440, which you'd think would be the ideal alternative setting to 5,120 by 2,160 native in terms of knocking the res down to release some performance.

At other resolutions like 1080p, meanwhile, it only works at certain refresh rates. Once enabled, yes it does make things a bit crisper, but it's really not comparable to DLSS or FSR. In short, in its current form the built-in AI upscaling feels pretty underbaked.

Still, if you add panel speed to this monitor's other qualities, the overall experience is frankly epic. It's so huge and so super sharp and so immersive and just so awesome. And yet I can't help having a few reservations.

First, I'd love to see the latest Samsung QD-OLED tech applied to a panel this size and resolution. I'd likewise like to see this monitor with a glossy coating. That could be fantastic in terms of heightening the sense of visual pop and contrast.

And, again, I'd really want to see that upcoming Alienware with its LG Tandem OLED RGB-stripe panel before pulling the trigger, especially as the Alienware looks like it could be as much as $600 cheaper.

Then there's the disappointing two-year warranty. It really is hard to look past that at this price point. All of which leaves me in a state of cognitive dissonance with this monitor. In some ways, it's the best gaming monitor I've ever seen. And yet it's ultimately impossible to issue a strong buy recommendation. At the very least, anyone considering the LG UltraGear Evo GX9 39GX950B really has to wait and see how that cheaper RGB-stirpe Alienware turns out.

The plant will produce 10 million OLED panels this year alone, according to FlatpanelsHD, and significantly more in the second year of its operation. The plant took just over two years to build, cost roughly 63 million RMB (around $9.3 billion) and resides in Chengdu.

Representatives from Lenovo, Asus, MSI, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, ZTE, Transsion, Xiaomi and Nothing reportedly attended the opening ceremony, indicating that each will be using the OLED panels produced.

One of the first is said to be a 14-inch OLED panel for Asus, Acer, and Lenovo laptops. The high-end products (being 8.6-gen offerings) will feature stacked tandem panel layers utilising Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Oxide (LTPO), and support 240 Hz VRR refresh rates.

At first, the focus will be on small to medium-sized OLED panels, with no timelines currently announced for TV-sized variants. The plant will also have competition, as Samsung Display booted up a similar 8.6-gen facility in South Korea earlier this year. TCL and Visionox also have 8.6-gen OLED panel plants in the works, so it looks like it won't be long before we're flooded with even more OLED displays from a variety of sources.

This is likely a very good thing for those of us with a tasty new OLED in mind, particularly in our next gaming laptops. Vast numbers of new, high-specced panels entering the market will hopefully lead to some very competitive pricing, and we've already seen some smaller OLED gaming monitors dropping to much more reasonable money over the last few months.

Bring on the OLED pricing revolution, that's what I say. It's been long enough coming, at the very least.

And for this sort of cash, I think it's time those of you on 1080p displays start thinking about an upgrade. Yes, it'll be slightly more taxing on your graphics card, so that's worth taking into account. But otherwise, the leap from an old 1080p panel to a shiny new 1440p model can be surprisingly significant in terms of your gaming experience.

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I've tried to make this a wide-ranging selection, so I've found a 100 Hz MSI IPS display for $130, a 180 Hz 27-inch Acer Nitro model for $160, and even a speedy 200 Hz Gigabyte panel for $180, among others.

Each of these gaming monitors represents fantastic value right now, and means you can pick up a relatively cheap upgrade for your gaming setup in 2026. Which, let's face it, is something of a rarity these days. To the pixelmobile!

Cheap 1440p gaming monitor deals

Nearly, that is, but not quite. The glimmer of hope in the barren wasteland that used to be affordable PC gaming? That'll be monitors. They keep getting cheaper and better at the same time, a bit like computer chips used to. In fact, in the last few months I've reviewed the most affordable examples yet of two cutting-edge display technologies, mini-LED and OLED.

Both can now be had for under $350 in 27-inch 1440p format. Representing mini-LED is the remarkable KTC M27T6S, a monitor so good it actually shifted my view on mini-LED technology in general.

Stepping up for OLED is the Alienware AW2726DM. Alienware has form when it comes to bringing OLED display technology in at a lower price than the competition and the AW2726DM makes what many gamers see as the ultimate display technology more accessible than ever before.

We're not quite at price parity, of course. The mini-LED KTC monitor comes in around $290 to the Alienware OLED's $350. But they're close enough for cross shopping to be pretty plausible. So the question is, should you make budget mini-LED or budget OLED your PC gaming panel of choice?

What are OLED and mini-LED?

First up, it's worth understanding just how dramatically different these two display technologies are despite the fact that they both exist for essentially the same reason. The name of the game for both mini-LED and OLED, after all, is improved lighting control.

What you might call traditional PC monitors in the flat-panel era have typically used LCD technology with a big, dumb monolithic backlight. OK, you could vary the brightness of that backlight. But that isn't much help if you want to display both bright and dark image elements at the same time.

Mini-LED is actually still an LCD-based display tech. But it attempts to fix the lighting issue courtesy of an array of individually addressable backlight zones allowing different brightness levels across the screen. Current mini-LED monitors usually have in the order of 1,000 to 2,000 such zones, enabling much better lighting control.

Of course, the ultimate in lighting control would be on a literally per-pixel basis, with each pixel acting as its own light source. And that's exactly what OLED panels deliver. Indeed, it's worth noting just how much more precise OLED is than mini-LED in that regard.

While the KTC M27T6S's 1,152 mini-LED dimming zones might sound like a lot, the fundamental resolution of the backlight is extremely low, something in the order of 40 by 25 zones. With a native image resolution of 2,560 by 1,440, the result is over 3,000 pixels in each zone. But with OLED, each of a 1440p panel's 3.7 million pixels has individual lighting control. That's a huge difference.

OLED panel tech comes with other fringe benefits, too. They have much faster pixel response, not far off two orders of magnitude faster. LCD panels generally come in at about 1 ms claimed response, while OLED is typically rated at 0.03 ms. OLED also has better viewing angles.

Not everything goes OLEDs way, however. Full-screen brightness is a notable weakness and it just so happens that's something mini-LED does very well. Even the very latest OLED monitors top out under 350 nits full-screen, while some mini-LED monitors can exceed 1,000 nits.

OLED also comes with the worry of burn-in. The evidence is building that OLED burn-in is something that the vast majority of users won't have to worry about for many years. But it is a real problem and something you don't have to think about at all with mini-LED.

What's better for gaming, budget mini-LED or budget OLED?

On paper, the Alienware AW2726DM looks like the faster, more responsive monitor. It's got a slight edge when it comes to refresh, hitting 240 Hz to the KTC M27T6S's 200 Hz, or 210 Hz if you want to use the slightly silly "overclocking" feature.

The Alienware's Samsung-supplied QD-OLED panel also offers massively faster 0.03 ms claimed pixel response. The KTC's IPS panel is only good for 1 ms, and even that's only for the less demanding MPRT metric as opposed to the Alienware's grey-to-grey rating.

In practice, the subjective gap isn't nearly as big as the objective specifications. Yes, the Alienware is faster. But the difference isn't nearly as dramatic as 1 ms versus 0.03 ms would have you expect. That says a lot about how far IPS panel tech has come and the fact that the KTC has sourced a pretty nippy example of the IPS panel breed.

Put it this way. If the KTC M27T6S was superior in most other ways, you wouldn't take the Alienware AW2726DM just for its speed. It is faster, but that speed isn't a killer blow. A possible exception here is esports, where refresh is king in terms of latency. But then if competitive online shooters are your absolute priority, you don't want either of these monitors. You're better off with the fastest 1080p panel you can find for this kind of money, and it's probably going to be a TN.

Instead, where the Alienware really delivers is HDR visuals, albeit with some caveats. The Alienware AW2726DM is actually only rated at 400 nits for peak HDR brightness, where the KTC will hit 1,000 nits. But the way we dumb humans perceive brightness isn't as simple as comparing specs.

Contrast matters just as much for perceived brightness as outright brightness. And the Alienware absolutely nails contrast. It can do a single pixel hitting 400 nits right next to another putting out basically zero nits. That means it's far, far better at achieving precision lighting across the whole image and a subjective sense of contrast. Small, bright details actually look brighter because they are surrounded by greater contrast.

In other words, OLED black levels are actually, well, black. The go-to test that really emphasises the difference here is a starfield panning across the display. The Alienware's OLED panel has no problem perfectly lighting individual stars as they scan across the sky.

Mini-LED monitors always involve some kind of compromise with that kind of image. The KTC M27T6S actually does the starfield test better than any other mini-LED monitor I've seen, which is pretty remarkable when you consider it's a budget model. KTC has done a really nice job on the M27T6S's backlight algorithm, that's for sure. But it's still nowhere near as good as OLED.

If all that seems a little abstract, what this all translates into is a much more natural and immersive game world using an OLED panel. There's no backlight bleed, no glowing at the edges of the screen, just what feels like a window into a stunning game world.

The Alienware's glossy panel coating actually heightens that sense, it's so clear and crisp. KTC has gone for a fairly coarse matte anti-glare coating and it both slightly softens the image and further compromises perceived black levels and contrast. In darker game scenes, the Alienware QD-OLED therefore absolutely hammers the KTC mini-LED.

However, ramp up the brightness and the tables are somewhat turned. There are some desert scenes in Cyberpunk 2077 that really show what mini-LED can do with HDR enabled. The KTC M27T6S absolutely pops, it renders the afternoon so bright that it almost hurts your eyes.

Running the two monitors side-by-side, the Alienware OLED looks awfully dull by comparison, it simply runs out of pop when you try to light up a large proportion of the panel. Meanwhile, the KTC never looks anything but retina-searingly bright.

The thing is, however, the QD-OLED panel's deficiencies are much less obvious in isolation than they are when you've got the super-bright mini-LED monitor sitting right next to it. Your eyes adjust to the light levels, to at least some degree cancelling out the objective brightness advantage of the KTC. On the other hand, you never stop seeing the washed out black tones, the lack of contrast, the glow at the edges of the panel, with an IPS panel, even one with a mini-LED backlight.

What's better for daily computing?

First, let's square away something that is often overstated. Just as OLED's speed isn't quite as massive an advantage in the real world as you might expect, the mini-LED KTC M27T6S's font rendering is not, in truth, dramatically better than the QD-OLED Alienware AW2726DM.

Yes, that QD-OLED panel has a suboptimal triangular subpixel structure, as opposed to conventional RGB-stripe. And yes the KTC's fonts are clearer, but only marginally. The bottom line is that neither monitor has particularly good pixel density and even the KTC doesn't render terribly nice fonts. If that's what you care about, you need something like a 27-inch 4K panel or even a 5K model.

For daily computing, both monitors are likewise plenty fast enough. So, it's more the static image quality where the differences lie. As ever, the QD-OLED Alienware has much better black levels and contrast, the mini-LED KTC can run brighter.

There are caveats to all that, however. For starters, there's the question of how bright you actually want a monitor, day-to-day. Arguably, the KTC is too bright for daily comfort in SDR content when set to full reheat.

But what if you do tend to prefer a really punchy looking monitor? Does the QD-OLED Alienware fall short? The simple answer is yes, but it can be mitigated. In SDR mode, the Alienware only hits 200 nits. However, if you switch to HDR mode and then max out the SDR content brightness in the Windows Display Settings menu, you can get pretty good results.

It works best if you prefer to run apps and view websites in dark mode. As with pretty much all OLEDs, the more of the screen you light up in HDR mode, the lower the peak brightness you can achieve. With both monitors running Windows in dark mode, HDR enabled and SDR brightness maxed out, the brightness gap is substantially closed and the Alienware feels really very punchy. And at the same time, it retains its contrast and black level advantage.

The exception to that involves the characteristic purple tint of QD-OLED panels in bright ambient light. This can be problematic during the day, if you, for instance, situate the Alienware right near a big window that lets in lots of natural light. In that scenario, the QD-OLED will also look a little overly warm in terms of colour temperature, while the KTC's IPS panel looks more neutral.

So, what's the best budget panel technology overall?

This is going to sound like a massive cop out, but much of this comes down to personal preference. No question, there are some objective pros and cons. The Alienware and its QD-OLED panel is definitely faster, it has better black levels and contrast, plus superior viewing angles.

The mini-LED KTC, on the other hand, is clearly the brighter of the two and renders fonts more precisely thanks to its RGB-stripe subpixel structure. But what you, personally, make of those pros and cons will be another matter.

The fact that it's not an absolute slam dunk for one or other of the two options is in itself telling. But if you absolutely twisted my arm for a verdict, it would go something like this. It all comes down to brightness.

The QD-OLED option is better in almost every other way, so the question is what you make of its outright brightness. In standard SDR mode, I'd say the brightness of the Alienware AW2726DM is problematic. If I had to use it in that mode all the time, I'd still take it over the KTC M27T6S because of the far superior contrast, black levels, speed and viewing angles. But it would be a close run thing.

On the other hand, if I am allowed to switch on HDR mode, ramp up the SDR brightness in Windows and view basically all my apps in dark mode, then it's a much clearer win for the Alienware and thus for cheap OLED tech. But there would be times in games when it looked just a little bit dull and I'd know, deep down, the KTC and its sizzling mini-LED backlight would have given a more vibrant experience in that moment. As ever, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Good luck!

Most recently, KTC has proven particularly outstanding in this field. Take the recently reviewed KTC 25M1 24.1-inch gaming monitor, for instance. Sure, it's a TN panel, so don't expect outstanding colour or plenty of viewing angles. That said, it's still a decently fast screen with a 400 Hz refresh rate and an advertised 0.5 ms response time. If you're a fiend for the competitive gaming scene, you could do much worse than the KTC 25M1—especially as it's squeaking under $333 from Amazon right now.

Quick list

• KTC 25M1 | 24.1-inches | 1080p | 400 Hz | $333 @ Amazon
• KTC M27T6S | 27-inches | 1440p | 210 Hz | $300 @ Amazon

Gaming monitor deals

Now, to be clear, the KTC 25M1 is just a 1080p monitor, and if the thought of paying $300+ on a 1080p TN then you are not the target market for this panel. But if you are seriously into the competitive shooter scene and understand the 400 Hz sweet spot for monitor refresh rates, then this will be like cat nip to you.

Our Jacob (back in his latest Counter-Strike epoch) has recently tested the screen and gave it a heady 89% score.

"KTC has managed to deliver an outstanding monitor for competitive shooters here at a very reasonable price," he says. "It's not the best for casual gaming, but if games like Counter-Strike or Valorant are your go-to, you'll struggle to hit this sweet spot refresh rate in a nice panel for a better price."

If you only have a need for speed, this TN panel will have you more than covered for the money. However, if becoming an esports pro doesn't happen to be your dream, I've got a 1440p option for you too.

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The KTC M27T6S is a 27-inch, 1440p IPS panel you can scoop up right now for $300 (provided you remember to tick the tricksy ticky box for the $50 off coupon on Amazon). Our Jeremy isn't usually a fan of LCD panels with full-array local dimming, but really rated this mini-LED gaming monitor; he wrote in his KTC M27T6S review, "It's definitely a surprise to discover that one of, if not the best mini-LED monitors I've yet seen is this new budget-priced model."

Now, as an IPS panel, it's not as fast as the TN option; alongside a 200 Hz refresh rate, it also enjoys the "rather pointless" option to overclock up to 210 Hz, plus a comparatively slower pixel response of 1 ms. But like I said before, this is the option for those with a much less pressing need for speed.

"Where the KTC M27T6S really delivers is with HDR content," Jeremy explains, "There are all kinds of drawbacks to local dimming technology applied to LCD panels. You get blooming around bright objects, dimming zones visibly popping on and off, the inability to light up smaller bright objects on a dark background, weird brightness gradients across the screen, and so on. The KTC M27T6S doesn't solve or avoid all of those issues. But the algorithm KTC has come up with to control the zones does it as well, or better than any other monitor with a full-array mini-LED backlight that I've yet seen. At this price point, that's remarkable."

To put it another way, not everyone needs a swish OLED when the KTC M27T6S manages to "really light up your retinas" at such an affordable price point. Sure, an OLED still has this IPS panel when it comes to rendering deep inky blacks, and lighting precision. But if you're looking for a budget gaming monitor with full-screen brightness performance that's "on another planet, and one awfully near its host star," the KTC M27T6S steals the spotlight.

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This is the monitor I've been waiting for. As someone who has just entered another Counter-Strike arc that is sure to last an epoch, as my arcs tend to, I've been on the look-out for a 1080p monitor around the 360 Hz (ish) sweet spot that doesn't break the bank. Enter stage left: the KTC 25M1, at just $350. And I've already seen it on sale for under $300, which bodes well.

Of course, this price-to-refresh-rate ratio wouldn't matter if the monitor sucked, but I'm happy to report it doesn't. Far from it, I'm finding it a genuine pleasure to use for my late night Faceit matchmaking sprees. In what is proving to be both a blessing and a curse, gameplay is so smooth, clear, and snappy that I find it impossible to blame any blunders on the panel. Even if I could convince myself my opponents are using the $1,000, 600 Hz Zowie panel I recently tested, it wouldn't matter because the difference in practice is so slight that I highly doubt it would actually make my enemies any better.

The 24-inch, 1080p monitor, clad with detachable flappy side-wings (to prevent distraction), rear-side headphone stand, cable management feed, and the usual smattering of ports including a 3.5 mm headphone jack, is bred for one purpose: competitive shooters.

No matter how fast it is, you're probably not getting a TN panel for casual gaming or even competitive non-FPS gaming. Even though this panel's colour is damn good for TN, it's not as lush as an IPS and certainly not as vibrant as an OLED.

While it offers a solid 98% sRGB coverage, its DCI-P3 is only rated to 85%, meaning its HDR content is average at best, which is what I'd expect from a TN panel. That fits for my experience turning HDR on in Doom Eternal and eyeballing it: lighting seems a little more natural, but it's hardly night and day between that and sRGB mode.

The sRGB mode thankfully seems pretty well calibrated to my eyes. In addition to making casual gaming pleasant, this makes day-to-day use outside of gaming surprisingly comfortable, too—surprising, that is, for a TN panel.

HDR, though, is certainly not as good as what you get on the 320 Hz Alienware IPS panel I tested. Still, that was an IPS, not a TN. And more expensive esports TN panels like the 600 Hz Zowie one don't have it as an option at all.

For this monitor's real purpose, though, HDR is irrelevant. Sticking it in FPS1 mode but raising brightness a little, Counter-Strike displays flawlessly: enemies are clear and easy to spot, and movements are incredibly smooth.

I used an Nvidia Latency and Display Analysis Tool (LDAT) to test end-to-end latency—thus indirectly testing the response time—and it reported an average of 6.42 ms in-game over 150 muzzle flashes. That's well within a threshold where shooting feels and appears instantaneous to my eyes.

Latency performance

End-to-end latency

KTC 25M1

6.42

Alienware AW2525HM

6.09

Zowie XL2586X+

6.81

012345678910

Time (ms)

End-to-end latency Data

Product	Value
KTC 25M1	6.42
Alienware AW2525HM	6.09
Zowie XL2586X+	6.81

Tested using Nvidia's LDAT over 150 muzzle flashes in-game.

It's even quicker than the 600 Hz Zowie panel (6.81 ms), and only a little slower than the 320 Hz Alienware one with overdrive on (6.09 ms). These differences are all sub-millisecond, though, meaning they're imperceptible and for all intents and purposes we can say they perform about as well as each other when it comes to response times. I certainly didn't notice any difference in snappiness between the three when playing Counter-Strike.

For whatever reason, with this KTC monitor, I can't seem to find a mode that allows me to enable its 'Ultra Fast' overdrive, the fastest setting. But that's okay, because the middle 'Advanced' setting is snappy enough, and it's usually inadvisable to use the fastest overdrive mode in monitors anyway, as it risks inverse ghosting/halo effects. With the Advanced mode enabled, I haven't noticed any pixel overshoot.

Motion clarity is impeccable to my eyes, too, thanks to that 400 Hz refresh rate. As you can see from my slapdash moving photo of an also-moving UFO test, the high refresh rate really does make a difference. The top animation shown was running at 400 fps, the second at 200, the third at 100, the fourth at 50, and the bottom one at 25.

This difference is visible when eyeballing the moving alien targets, too: 400 Hz is just that much clearer than the rest. Admittedly, playing at 240 Hz in game will still be plenty clear, but this is just another example that goes to show what I've argued previously: around 360 Hz (or 400 Hz, in this case) is the sweet spot for competitive gaming.

To my memory, this monitor is also a bit clearer than I found the 320 Hz Alienware monitor to be when I tested it. I simply can't fault it for smoothness and snappiness.

The bonus here is you're getting the 360–400 Hz sweet spot for a damn good price. The 400 Hz Zowie equivalent costs $650, while this KTC monitor costs about $350 and can even be found for just shy of $300 when it's on sale. The 320 Hz Alienware monitor comes in cheaper than this, but honestly for the extra refresh rate and motion clarity boost, I'd say the KTC is worth it if you can afford it. If not, the Alienware will serve well.

With the KTC 25M1, you're hitting the refresh rate sweet spot just before diminishing returns kick in, which means you're getting some of the absolute best competitive/esports performance you can hope for before prices start to soar.

I feel KTC has struck the balance very well, keeping the price as low as possible for the performance on offer, and keeping things within a budget that doesn't only cater to pro players but also to your average competitive FPS gamer like yours truly. This would be the monitor I'd choose for competitive FPS gaming right now if my own money were on the line.

As noted by TechSpot, user Mags_Smash took to the PCMR Subreddit last week to show that the LG Monitor App Installer was prompting them to get a free 30-day trial of McAfee. They claim the LG Monitor App Installer was silently installed via a Windows update without their consent. After searching through the technical details of the reliability monitor in settings, they found the LG app had been downloaded via one of their three LG monitors.

They urge users to not only disable this from happening by clicking through settings and activating the 'prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata' option, but also suggest users should completely disable the Windows Store, where the app was downloaded.

The comments section on this thread has many other users complaining about seeing the exact same pop-up, linked to the silent installation of LG's software. One user claims they don't hate Windows for its bloatware, "but this is the first time I've had it install bloatware without my knowledge and genuinely made me think it was a virus."

Notably, LG isn't the only brand accused of doing this in the thread. One user complains their Alienware monitor asks to install Dell/Alienware software, and we've definitely had experience of continual pop ups from Alienware screens reminding us to download the Alienware monitor software, however nothing has ever automatically installed without our consent. Though they aren't the only user to name-check Dell in the comments section.

However, one thing does make LG stand out above the rest here, in a negative sense. Where some peripherals prompt users to download their software, or just download it without asking in the worst cases, LG is prompting users to get a subscription to a service it doesn't directly own. As well as this, users would have to pay for McAfee after the 30-day trial, so LG is incidentally prompting users to spend cash.

I have reached out to both LG and Alienware for comment on this story, but have not yet heard back. Either way, companies being able to serve ads to your PC without asking and prompt you to get a subscription to a separate service, because you've bought a monitor from them, certainly rubs me the wrong way. I don't particularly like anything installing software without asking, but attempting to get me to download even more bloatware is more than a minor annoyance in my book.

KA272U: was $199.99 now $109.99
If you're on a tight budget, this will get you a decently sized 1440p monitor for a real bargain price. It even has a higher-than-60 Hz refresh rate. Okay, 100 Hz isn't spectacular, but it is still notably smoother than 60 Hz. It's also not the brightest screen, rated at 250 nits peak, but the compromises will have to come in somewhere.

Key specs: 27-inch | 100 Hz | 1 ms | IPSView Deal

It seems gaming monitors are one of the only bits of PC hardware still available at reasonable prices, with the memory crisis taking so many components down with it. The silver lining here is that 1440p gaming monitors are finally starting to approach 1080 prices.

If you have been looking to make the upgrade for yourself, the 1440p Acer KA272U is down to a strikingly cheap $110 at Best Buy right now. That's even cheaper than its recent Prime Day price.

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Naturally, given it's at the low end of the 1440p market in regard to price, you aren't getting top-of-the-line specs here, but they certainly aren't bad either. The 27-inch size is serviceable as a main monitor and perfect in my eyes as a second screen.

The 100 Hz refresh rate is on the lower end for a gaming panel, but it's by no means bad, and the 1 ms response time is super solid too. It won't noticeably lag behind other gaming panels.

But let's face it, the reason you would pick this monitor is for its resolution, and 1440p IPS panels sit in an excellent sweet spot right now, being relatively rig-friendly, yet providing enough visual clarity to make games pop.

4K is nice to have, but it's a resource hog, and sometimes not worth the extra effort. And 1080p is only something I'd really recommend if you're on a super low-end rig or have a very tight budget.

This Acer monitor is a bit of a steal at nearly half its original price. I check our roundup of the best gaming monitor deals every week, and this Acer monitor is no stranger there, but I can't remember the last time I saw it dip down to such a reasonable price. It's so reasonable, in fact, that there's not a single 1440p monitor for cheaper that I would recommend right now.

It does, unfortunately, have a rather low 250 nits of full-screen brightness, so I wouldn't recommend putting it against a window, but that's a common compromise monitors make at this price point, and well worth it here. It's not a whole pile of money to make your games sing just that little bit more.

Oops: that's a rant.

One thing this Prime Day has been good for is gaming monitors, especially if your budget is under AU$300, and especially if you're after a 1440p display.

The highlight is probably the Alienware AW2725DM 27-incher, at least in terms of the amount you're saving. The QHD display has a Fast IPS panel, a 180Hz refresh rate (more than adequate for mere mortals) and the usual adaptive sync compatibilities. It's usually AU$449.90, but Amazon is flogging it for AU$284.05. That's a good price for an Alienware display with these specs.

If that's still a touch pricey, you can pay around AU$70 less for the KTC H27T22C-3, which has comparable specs. Again, it's QHD, but the refresh rate gets pushed upwards to 210Hz.

I know what you're thinking: KT-huh? They're a Chinese monitor company who you may not have heard of, but this particular model is something PC Gamer can vouch for: it wins best budget 1440p display in our list of the best gaming monitors. You can read more in our full review, but the short of it? "This isn't a perfect display, but it is pretty nice by any reasonable metric. And in the context of the price, it's pretty darn brilliant."

Anyway, the already budget AU$289.99 price has been cut to AU$216.50 for Amazon Prime Day.

If you have less than AU$200 to spare, amazingly, there's an option just for you. The Lenovo LOQ 27Q-10 is, as the name kinda implies, another 27-incher with a QHD resolution. Like the Alienware above it has a 180Hz refresh rate on a Fast IPS panel.

This screen, usually bearing an RRP of AU$299, is currently AU$170 for Amazon Prime Day.

If you're looking for more expensive discounted monitors or, indeed, anything else going cheap during Amazon Prime Day, check out our rolling live blog.

You can't have too many screens. That's pretty much been the guiding moral in my life. Enter the new Asus ROG Strix XG129C and a minor existential crisis. This is a screen, but I have to ask—I can't believe I'm saying this—is there any real point to it?

For starters, this "gaming monitor" (Asus' words, not mine) measures just 12.3 inches. So, it's pretty puny. Actually, it's worse than that. It sports an ultra-wide 24:9 aspect ratio and thus isn't even as big as those 12 inches might imply. In terms of vertical viewable screen height, we're talking sub-4.5-inch.

But here's the thing. While I came in decidedly sceptical about the Asus ROG Strix XG129C, this isn't a proper monitor. It's a device for keeping track of, say, your PC's operating status or providing space for some supplementary application controls. Somehow, I ended up quite liking it. And not just because I'm a total sucker for screens. But more on my journey in a moment. First, let's cover off the core speeds and feeds.

The 24:9 aspect translates into a native resolution of 1,920 by 720 pixels and a pixel density of 166 DPI, the latter being about the same as a 27-inch 4K monitor. So, it's pretty crisp.

It uses IPS panel tech and tops out at 300 nits for brightness and 75 Hz in terms of refresh rate. Oh, and quite importantly, it supports capacitive 10-point multi-touch input. For the record, the touch functionality works essentially out-of-the-box provided you are connecting via USB-C.

Speaking of which, there are two USB-C ports. Both will drive the display, while one doubles as power in and the other supports 20 W of power out. So you can, for instance, connect via a single USB-C cable to both drive the display and power it, which is the ideal in terms of cable management.

That's easy from a laptop, but less of a given with a desktop PC. There are desktop graphics cards with USB-C out that support up to 30 W of power delivery and so would be able to power the display and drive it. But that setup would not support the touch functionality, which requires data passthrough.

So, for a true single-cable solution on a desktop, it all gets a bit complicated. In theory, you could do it with a motherboard that supports Thunderbolt and DisplayPort passthrough from the iGPU and thus have the Asus ROG Strix XG129C running from the iGPU in your CPU and your main monitor running off your graphics card.

I understand this setup is supported, for instance, on Intel Z890 motherboards, again in theory. In practice, results seem to vary and there can be issues with the Thunderbolt port supplying sufficient power. In a worst case scenario, then, you might need to use the HDMI port for the video signal, one of the USB-C ports to power the display and another to send touch data to your PC, which is pretty messy.

But I think a decent chunk of users will be able to get it working with two of the three ports hooked up. If one of those is the HDMI port, you'll then have one cable coming out of the side, one out of the top. It would have been tidier if Asus had located all the ports on one side. Never mind.

That ergonomic glitch aside, this is otherwise a really nicely built display. It feels high quality and the screw-in kick stand is very sturdy and capped with a rubberised foot to provide grip, as is the base of the display itself.

You also get a proper OSD with a joystick controller and full set of features, just like a conventional Asus monitor. What's more, you can control the OSD with the touchscreen input, which is a nice, well, touch.

If that's the features covered, what is the Asus ROG Strix XG129C like in use? Asus bundles a year's subscription to an OEM version of Aida 64, so you've got something to play with immediately.

That's handy, because it would be a nightmare to configure the standard version of Aida 64 to fit this display perfectly. As it is, you can use it to track CPU and GPU operating speeds and temps, storage use, that kind of thing. You'd have thought a permanent license would be part of the deal, but at least you have something to run immediately.

Outside of that, your mileage will vary depending on your preferences. You could use this display to do anything from keep track of social media feeds or work collab' platforms like Slack while you game, to using it to situate secondary controls or a timeline for video editing.

Much will depend on the exact applications you use and what kind of tools and controls they offer, how much configurability they support and so on. But what I would say is that, for this display to really deliver, those tools and controls need to be touch friendly.

That's generally quite a big ask, given that so many applications are either poorly or not at all optimised for touch. Ironically, that includes Asus' own Display Widget Controller app, which really doesn't work at all well on this display. Whatever, it's the ability to use the touch interface, as opposed to needing to "mouse over," and the immediacy that offers, that is most compelling.

Of course, that in itself can create problems with application focus, in-game. And there's no doubting the Asus RoG Strix XG129C works most reliably and consistently as a status display rather than something you directly interact with. But the shortcomings there are largely down to how Windows operates, rather than the display itself.

In the end, this little display is very much in the nice-to-have rather than must-have category. It's also the sort of device where your benefit from and use of it will depend on a whole range of factors.

Some people may be able to get quite a bit of value out of it as a touch device for controlling application tools and menus, such as video, image and music editing. But I would advise caution in that regard. You'll need to do a little homework to see what really works. Don't assume too much.

On the other hand, if you just like the idea of a small secondary display for keeping track of your PC's hardware status or viewing work and social feeds, you can be more confident that the Asus ROG Strix XG129C will deliver.

What's more, as someone who prefers a single ultrawide monitor to a pair of more conventional 16:9 panels, what this mini monitor offers is a way to have the status-tracking functionality that a second screen offers, but keep it small and ergonomically tidy. I don't need a huge screen to watch a bit of Slack or keep track of emails arriving in the background, in other words. The Asus ROG Strix XG129C does that kind of job rather nicely.

Which brings us to the final important factor, namely price. At $199, the Asus ROG Strix XG129C is either pretty reasonable for such a specialised device or crazy money given what 200 bucks buys you these days in the monitor market. This year during Amazon Prime week, I found some KTC 34-inch ultrawides for barely over $200, while $250 will get you a 27-inch 4K dual-mode panel and $150 a decent 1440p panel. It's all a bit bananas.

In that context, the Asus ROG Strix XG129C is definitely a luxury item rather than a value proposition. You'll certainly have to specifically want a smaller, and in some ways less functional, screen to choose it over a 27-inch 1440p panel for less money.

But, personally, I actually might. I already have a large ultrawide for my primary viewing. I don't want another full-sized screen hanging miles off to the side. This nifty little accessory display can sit below my main monitor and would be just the thing to have running discretely, keeping me up to date. I've just got to decide if that's worth $200 to me…

Sometimes, though, you do need to wait to get a really good deal, but just like buses, when they do land, you get a whole pile of them at the same time.

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That's what you've got here: two top displays from ASRock and one from Asus. Whether you want 1080p or 1440p, super high refresh rates or curved immersion, any one of these three gaming monitors is well worth considering. And best of all, all of them are sporting a very nice discount.

The full details

👉Check out all of Newegg's gaming monitor deals here👈

MAG 322URDF: was $459.49 now $344.99
Until recently, 32-inch 4K monitors were a big step up, price-wise, over 27-inch and even then you had to suffer VA panel tech. But this MSI is IPS and under $350. It has dual-mode support, too. Nice.

Key specs: 32-inch | 3840 X 2160 | 160 Hz / 320 Hz | 0.5 ms | 400 nits | IPSView Deal

Listen, don't fight me on this one. There's a sweet spot for 4K gaming monitors. And it's not 27 inches. It's 32 inches. Enter the MSI MAG 322URDF, a 32-inch, 4K, IPS beauty that's one of the very cheapest gaming monitors of its type, and yours for $345 on Newegg.

Of late, 27-inch 4K gaming monitors have been making lots of headlines, primarily on account of price. We've got models starting at as little as $190 on our Prime Day deals page, albeit the cheapest offering that'll do triple-digit frame rates at 4k is around $250.

But here's the thing. 4K is overkill for gaming at 27 inches. 32 inches is a much better fit. You still get good pixel density and therefore razor sharp-in game visuals, but with that comes a larger, more immersive vista.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Go larger than 32 inches at 4K, on the other hand, and pixel density really does begin to suffer. Likewise, 32 inches is great for general computing, allowing more physical space to make the most of all those pixels, again while maintaining good image detail and crisp text rendering.

If that's my elevator pitch for 4K gaming at 32 inches, generally, what about the MSI MAG 322URDF in particular? First up, it's IPS not VA. Until very recently, everything 4K and 32 inches at anything even close to this price point had a VA panel.

The usually meant sluggish pixel response and smeary motion clarity in games. But not the MSI MAG 322URDF. It's rated at fully 0.5 ms GtG, which gives it about the best pixel response currently available from IPS technology.

What's more it'll run at both 160 Hz native 4K and 320 Hz at 1080p. So, you could actually use this thing for competitive esports on the side.

Personally, I'd be all about graphically-intensive adventure titles and maybe a dash of military strategising. This thing will be great at all of that.

Of course, at this price point something has to give and HDR support is very much entry level. There's no local dimming. But then if you want proper HDR, you want OLED and that means spending at least $600, even on Prime Day.

The other obvious omission is the lack of USB-C connectivity. That's something I personally value, it makes it so much easier to share a monitor like this between a gaming rig and a laptop.

But USB-C would undoubtedly make this a more expensive monitor. So, I'm on board with the bares bonesness in that regard in order to achieve that spectacular price.

👉Check out Newegg's gaming monitor deals👈

MO27Q28GR: was $599.99 now $454.99
This standard sized OLED is great for gaming, boasting a 0.03 ms pixel response and a 280 Hz refresh rate. It's unfortunately less great for lots of reading of on-screen text, as the use of RGWB subpixels leads to some font fuzz.

Key Specs: 27-inch |2,560 x 1,440 | 280 Hz | 0.03 ms | Glossy WOLEDView Deal

Very recently, our Nick wrote about the Ultrawide Asus ROG Strix XG34WCDG for $649, and yes, I'm back with yet another cracking deal on an OLED. Two gaming monitor deals back to back may feel a bit much but, oo, I do love it when a bit of kit we gave a 90% comes tumbling down in price mere months later. The Gigabyte MO27Q28GR is a 27-inch gaming monitor that our resident oligarch of OLEDs, Jeremy, was particularly taken with. Now, you can see what all the fuss is about for even less ahead of the Prime Day sales.

In his Gigabyte MO27Q28GR review, Jeremy pitches this W-OLED panel as bringing "very nearly all of LG's latest OLED tech to the table, with the notable exception, despite the confusing 'RGB' branding, of RGB-stripe subpixel structure." Long, twisty story short, this is an excellent 1440p screen for the price—which is now only $455 from Amazon.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

The Gigabyte MO27Q28GR is a show piece for LG's W-OLED tech, with this gaming monitor delivering "a seriously punchy HDR experience" according to Jeremy. He elaborates, "That's most notably the case in darker scenes with some small, bright highlights, where the details absolutely zing. And, of course, as with all OLED panels, there's perfect per-pixel lighting where off actually means off and thus there's zero light bleed, no halos around brighter objects, no backlight zones clumsily pinging on and off. You get the idea."

Speaking of shadowy scenes, Marathon's first proper season just started, and I'd say that's as good an excuse as any to really soak in all of its dark cyberpunk vibes by diving into Night Marsh with this gaming monitor. Jeremy did feel that Samsung's more recent QD-OLED monitors still have the edge when it comes to brighter scenes, but that doesn't mean the Gigabyte MO27Q28GR is a dull looking OLED by any means.

He, ahem, highlights the Gigabyte MO27Q28GR HyperNits feature in particular, explaining, "It's essentially the same as MSI's EOTF Boost mode, as included with the MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36 panel [...], and what it aims to do is maintain broader scene brightness in the HDR 1500 mode. Typically, the maximum peak HDR brightness modes on OLED panels allow for really high peaks but tend to crush overall scene brightness; HyperNits addresses that by boosting the EOTF curve."

Add to that this 1440p monitor enjoys a 0.03 ms pixel response plus a 280 Hz refresh rate, and the Gigabyte MO27Q28GR is great whether you're skulking in the dark or blasting Rooks in the cold, clinical light of day on Tau Ceti IV. But let's bring this short-story-made-long home by looping back around to what the lack of RGB-stripe subpixel structure means for this monitor.

Basically, while this is a great monitor for gaming, the choice to stick with RGWB subpixels means that fonts can be rendered a little fuzzily, although in this case you have to really get in close to notice. Sure, that will be far from a deal breaker for most PC Gamers, but as someone who spends all day everyday writing, reading, and editing text, my eyes sting just thinking about even a little bit of OLED font fuzz.

👉Check out all of Amazon's gaming monitor deals here👈

Strix XG27JCG: was $849.00 now $699.00
This dual-mode monitor offers both a supremely crisp 5K resolution mode alongside a 1440p mode that may be the more realistic option for gaming depending on what other hardware you're rocking. Its 600 nit brightness doesn't hold a candle to most OLEDs, but its 15 million pixel density definitely does.

Key specs: 27-inch | up to 330 Hz | 0.3 ms | IPSView Deal

You'd be forgiven for thinking 5K resolution is a bit overkill for a 27-inch gaming monitor—and I'm not going to dissuade you from that notion. Squeezing 15 million into that space is perhaps one way to ensure you're getting the most bang for your buck this Amazon Prime Day.

The Asus ROG Strix XG27JCG is the smaller scale frame we're clapping our eyes upon today. This 27-inch IPS panel may be small, but Jeremy found it to be sufficiently mighty in his Asus ROG Strix XG27JCG review, awarding it a score of 80%. While we're on the subject of heavy-hitting figures, you can get this 5K gaming monitor for only $700 at Amazon this Prime Day.

• We're keeping track of all the early Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

So, you already know you're getting plenty of pixel density for that price, but on top of that you'll also enjoy a fairly decent refresh rate of 180 Hz at the 5K native resolution. Again, that's not the speediest refresh rate out there, but as Jeremy puts it "180 Hz at 5K. Bananas, isn't it?"

But I've got good news for those desperate for a higher refresh rate; this is a dual-mode monitor with a refresh rate that goes all the way up to 330 Hz in its 1440p mode. It's definitely more than just a neat bonus, as Jeremy explains, "[The 1440p mode] promises to make this monitor usable with vaguely affordable GPUs and also a decent option for esports.

"After all, running at the full native 5K native in the latest games is a very big ask in terms of raw PC performance, not to mention largely pointless for online shooters where frame rate rather than image detail is king."

To reiterate, this is not an OLED, but even so this IPS panel can get decently bright. Enjoying HDR 600 certification, this screen can get to 600 nits of brightness which will be bright enough for most gamer dens, I reckon. Also unlike many OLEDs our Jeremy has reviewed in the past, this IPS panel enjoys crisply rendered fonts—especially if you happen to plug it into an Apple Mac, apparently.

What's more outstanding about this particular IPS panel though is the response time, which is 0.3 ms—couple that with the high refresh rate in the 1440p and you've got a real esports contender. That said, Jeremy does also note, "If online shooters are your priority, the problem is that you can get a higher refresh and faster responding 1440p OLED at this price point, and that's got to be a better fit."

To sum up, this is a small screen with some big screen ambition and pixel density that gives even the odd OLED a run for their money—though this panel won't melt your retinas with its 600 nit brightness.

👉 Check out the rest of Amazon's gaming monitor deals 👈

H34S18S: was $269.99 now $203
A 34-inch, 180 Hz ultrawide gaming monitor for barely over $200? Yes, please. This KTC looks identical to many other budget ultrawides on paper. And that's just fine because it's cheaper than all of 'em.

Key specs: 34-inch | 3440 X 1440 | 180 Hz | 1 ms MPRT | 300 nits | VAView Deal

Andy rightly pointed out on Wednesday that there's never been a better time to buy a gaming monitor. There have been some stellar deals this Prime Day. Well, here's another pair of corkers, the KTC H34S18S and KTC H34S5, both 34-inch ultrawides, the first for $203 on Amazon, the other $212 and also on Amazon. They both look like rippers, but which is the budget gaming panel I'd go for from our current crop of Prime Day gaming monitor deals? Hold that thought.

34-inch ultrawide is one of my very favourite gaming monitor form factors. I love the immersion of an ultrawide screen and the 3,440 by 1,440 resolution delivers a sweet compromise between image detail and tolerable GPU load. You don't need an RTX 5090 to use a 34-inch ultrawide.

It's also great for daily computing duties and particularly for multitasking. Personally, I prefer a single ultrawide monitor to dual 16:9 panels. OK, the pixel density of this class of monitor is a little lacking. But then 4K comes with so much GPU pain.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Anywho, what exactly are getting for your mere $203? Apart from the basic size and resolution, the specs of the KTC H34S18S go something like this. It's a VA panel with 180 Hz refresh, 1 ms MPRT rated response and 300 nits brightness.

These are not, it has to be said, spectacular numbers. Buy they are essentially the same as every other entry-level 34-inch ultrawide out there. It's just the KTC H34S18S costs less, for now at least.

Of course, despite the 1ms rating this monitor claims, pixel response is the one aspect that might just disappoint thanks to the VA panel technology. If that has you worried, well, there's a possible solution. KTC has another 34-inch ultrawide, the aforementioned KTC H34S5.

That uses an HVA rather than VA panel. Yes, it's still basically VA panel tech, but it's optimised for faster response. The specifics are pretty technical, but as I understand it HVA panels "pre tilt" the liquid crystals which makes them faster to respond.

Whatever, guess what? The KTC H34S5 is currently available on Amazon for just $212, and thus barely any more money. It's the one I'd go for. $9 for faster panel tech is the textbook definition of a no-brainer.

One last thing you might be wondering about is the KTC brand. It's a bit of an up and comer. I've reviewed two KTC monitors and come away mostly impressed on both occasions, most recently by the KTC M27T6S, which brings mini-LED to a remarkably low price point.

So, while I haven't reviewed these two ultrawides, I'm pretty confident they should perform largely as expected.

👉Check out Newegg's gaming monitor deals👈

MPG 321URX QD-OLED: was $829.99 now $744.99
Exceptional in almost every way, MSI's QD-OLED 321URX already tops our best 4K gaming monitor list, and that was before it had its price snipped by $85. Outstanding color accuracy, 240 Hz refresh rate, insanely quick response time, and exceptional pixel density. It's the ultimate high-end gaming panel for good reason. This deal is for Prime members only.

Key specs: 32-inch | 240 Hz | 0.03 ms | QD-OLED

Price check: Newegg $744.99View Deal

This is without a doubt the best monitor deal I've seen during this year's Amazon Prime Day… week… thing. And we're coming to the end of it, too, for at least a few months.

MSI's MPG 321URX QD-OLED is an absolute spectacle of a display (seriously, check out Jeremy's review). Uncompromising in practically every element of its design. 4K, 32-inch, perfect pixel density, 240 Hz refresh, and an astonishingly quick response time, backed up with fantastic color accuracy to boot. There's just everything you could want in a 32-inch 4K panel here.

Right now, (although for how long I don't know, because they're selling faster than second-hand SSDs on Facebook Marketplace), you can pick one of MSI's 321URX QD-OLEDs up for an impressively low $745 at Amazon, down from $830.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Now that's not a huge amount relatively in the grand scheme of things, but it's actually far more than that when you look at how this screen is already positioned in the market. The 321URX uses the same Samsung panel that you can find in Asus's ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM, Alienware's equivalent, Gigabyte, and all the other gaming brands who've managed to snap a contract up off of the big Korean giants.

The difference is that those screens already cost $500, $300, $200 more than this thing did at launch, for effectively the same quality, the same monitor. That makes the price difference just massive by comparison.

Let's talk about the screen for a second here, and ignore the brand that's packaged it up in that cute little chassis, because it truly is a monster. You might be asking, why is this better? What's so good about QD-OLED compared to your stock standard LG OLED affair? And it mostly comes down to that quantum dot layer that sits on top and how both panel techs optimize for peak brightness in scenes.

Say you have an explosion, or you're casting Giant's Flame in Elden Ring, and the game demands high brightness on a rich and saturated color palette. A traditional OLED screen is actually comprised of four subpixels, RGB, and then an additional W (white) one to boost the brightness up. The issue with that is that the white light tends to almost desaturate a lot of the color on the fringes of that explosion or effect, leading to seemingly pastel colors instead of what they should actually be.

QD-OLED instead uses a global blue backlight that's shifted through the quantum dots into red and green to effectively pump up the brightness without impacting the color.

There's also some magic going on at the sub-pixel layer as well, that improves font and detail clarity at smaller sizes (more critical on a desktop PC than your mom's OLED TV), and there's some smart ambient-light reflection tech in here as well, stopping darker tones from refracting ambient lighting and changing tone.

In essence, QD-OLED is just that traditional OLED tech, but dialled all the way up, and bloody hell is it good. There's a reason this is our top 4K gaming monitor, and how MSI can afford to package all of that into the 321URX, and then discount it on top of that, is a mystery.

Oh, and one last mention, burn-in, because I know you're thinking about it, I'm thinking about it, everybody's thinking about it. MSI still provides a hefty three-year warranty cover, the same as everyone else, and there's plenty of tech in there to keep your UI in-game and not etched into your shiny new $745 screen for all of time.

Now, where exactly did I put my special SSD stash? Papa needs a brand new monitor.

👉Check out all the best Amazon Prime Day Monitor Deals👈

Odyssey G93SC | 49-inch: was $1149 now $854.99
Samsung's silly-wide OLED monitor is simply HDR gaming on a ridiculous scale. The older QD-OLED panel tech isn't without its flaws, but if you want an outrageous 32:9 aspect ratio on a punchy panel, well, this is your best shot.

Key specs: OLED | 49-inch | 240Hz | 5120 x 1440View Deal

Do you look upon your everyday ultrawide monitor and scoff at its diminutive wingspan? If so, you'll probably want to check out the whopper that goes by the Samsung Odyssey G93SC, as it's at its lowest ever price of $855 at Amazon for Prime Day.

I say 'whopper' because this thing has a 49-inch panel making for a ridiculous aspect ratio of 32:9—that's 5,120 pixels on the horizontal and 1440 on the vertical. Oh, and did I mention it's a (slightly) curved OLED panel, too? Of course it is, it's got 'go big or go home' written all over it.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Our Jeremy reviewed it back in 2023 and called it 'outrageous', and that's about the best word for it. It's pretty much the same as the G95SC (with a '5', not a '3'), but it doesn't have all the fancy smart TV gubbins nor the IR remote.

The OLED tech here isn't the newest. It shares the same pixel density and kind of QD-OLED panel as other, less extreme monitors you might be familiar with like the wonderful Alienware 34 AW3423DWF. But it's still plenty punchy. And you just can't overlook the sheer scale factor. Here, I'll let our Jeremy explain:

"This monitor is simply gorgeous. It looks ultra modern and minimalist and feels very nicely put together... In truth, the actual image quality on offer probably isn't any better than the QD-OLED Alienware and Philips panels we've reviewed previously. But the added scale of the 49-inch form factor subjectively ramps up the subjective drama."

In addition to its scale, you're also getting a snappy, 240 Hz experience. And as I've argued elsewhere, jumping up to this refresh rate is substantial, literally improving end-to-end latency and potentially even improving how well you play in games that require quick reactions.

It's not perfect, of course. There's no power delivery for the USB-C-attached hub, for instance. It also has a gigantic power supply, and it can be hard to reach the sockets on the rear of the chassis.

It's also worth noting that in very bright conditions the panel can look a little grey, but that's not the case in normal lighting. And outside of gaming, as with all older OLED panels, text fringing can be an issue, given the subpixel layout and the fact the pixels aren't dense enough to prevent it.

Those caveats don't take away from the sheer outrageousness of this monitor, though, and that's pretty much why you get it: you want to experience ultra-ultrawide gaming on a punchy and snappy OLED. You're still paying a pretty penny for it, but this Prime Day discount makes it as cheap as we've seen it. So if you want something truly outrageous, it's worth a look.

And two, gaming displays have resisted the current memory-induced price increases, thanks to being... well, displays. That means there's never been a better time to pick up a gaming monitor for cheaper than you might expect.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I've picked out 15 gaming monitor deals, three in each major category, for your consideration and approval. The exception is 4K monitors, where I've added a load of dual-mode 4K/1080p displays, as these are the one's I'm finding for the best prices.

Highlights? Well, how about a 25-inch, 250 Hz, 1080p MSI for just under $100? Or a 27-inch, 4K/1080p IPS display for $250 at Newegg? Or, if you're going ultrawide, I've found a 34-inch 160 Hz LG monitor for $230. Should you wish for something ultrawide and QD-OLED, no less, may I suggest this magnificent Alienware display for $615 at Amazon? Lovely, isn't it?

But the cream of the crop is probably this Acer Predator X27U, which offers a 26.5-inch, 240 Hz QD-OLED panel for just $315. Whichever you pick, each of these monitor deals represents excellent value—so let's get cracking.

Amazon Prime Day 1080p gaming monitor deals

Amazon Prime Day 1440p gaming monitor deals

Amazon Prime Day 4K dual-mode gaming monitor deals

Amazon Prime Day Ultrawide gaming monitor deals

Amazon Prime Day OLED gaming monitor deals