I got my first 4K monitor around 10 years ago, and it cost me a small fortune, just as every PC monitor with more than eight million pixels did back then. It finally died an electronic death earlier this year, with the backlights and other circuitry croaking under the constant abuse of a decade's worth of gaming and content creation.
What you have here is Gigabyte's almost-entry-level 4K gaming monitor, the GS27U, for the very decent price of $330 at Amazon—a display that our chums at Tom's Hardware highly rate. How I wish monitor deals like this existed a decade ago!
So what are you getting for your money? Well, it's a 27-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 3840 x 2160. It has pretty decent color reproduction out of the box, and if you have the necessary equipment, you can easily have it all set up for professional content creation, with a spot of calibration.
As with all IPS screens, you do get some backlight bleed around the edges, and the contrast ratio isn't as good as a decent VA panel, and it's obviously not a patch on OLED ones. But this one is fast, with a maximum refresh rate of 160 Hz, variable refresh rate support in the form of FreeSync and G-Sync compatibility, and an average grey-to-grey response time of 1 millisecond.
What Gigabyte has dropped to keep the price low are USB ports and speakers, which is the right thing to do—much better to not offer something that only certain people will use and keep the screen all tip-top, which everyone will want.
The GS27U has been cheaper in the past, reaching $300 at one point, but the tech market is all over the place at the moment. If you're worried that prices will suddenly jump up due to import tariffs, now's the perfect time to make the switch to 4K.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
