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.

After a day-long battle with one of Valheim's big bosses, I return to my modest cabin in the woods to recover. I'm exhausted, my weapons and armor are mostly broken, and I've burned through my meager supply of food and arrows. I don't even have a spare torch left to light my way home. Even though I was victorious, the cold and rainy night doesn't put me in the mood for a celebration.

Then I spot a shadowy figure in the gloom, leaning on a walking stick, one blue eye gleaming from beneath its hood. Odin. It's frickin' Odin himself, y'know, Thor's dad? He's visiting the exiled tenth world of Valheim to peep me in person. Suddenly my mood lifts and I feel like a complete badass. Odin knows who I am.

This isn't my first visitation from the ancient god: I've been playing Valheim since its early access release in 2021, and I've seen Odin a few times before. But darn it, it's still a thrill whenever he appears to silently approve of my valor. And after a long wait, I can finally prove myself worthy: Valheim 1.0 is here, and even though I've been playing this game for five years, it's still got plenty of magic.

Ragna rocks

I'm a fallen norse warrior, delivered via Valkyrie into a cursed world to vanquish Odin's enemies. But this is no RPG, it's a survival game, and those always start with a lot of backbreaking work: chopping down trees, shattering boulders, hunting deer, and constructing a base where I can sleep and do some crafting. There's no rest for the dead.

The procedurally generated world of Valheim is a massive disc, separated into biomes and split by oceans, and the deeper you explore from your starting point at the disc's center, the more dangerous the world becomes. Originally with six biomes (including the ocean), more were added over the past several years, culminating in the deep north: the frozen final realm where you finish your work for Odin. And yes, rare as this is for a survival game, there is an actual ending, though you can continue playing in your world once you've seen it.

For such a massive world, there are no quests in Valheim, not really: early on you'll stumble across an altar that will summon the first of several boss monsters, each which drop an item you'll need to survive and thrive in the next biome. But other than an occasional marker on your map, Valheim is a self-guided tour that leaves progression to your discretion and motivation.

In that, it succeeds wonderfully: I've spent nearly 150 hours in the game and I've never felt a need for NPCs to fill my ears with exposition nor wanted a quest log to give me direction. Valheim 1.0 does add animated dream sequences after each vanquished boss, and while they're pretty cool, the game was perfectly fine without them. The world is beautiful and mysterious and the urge to explore it comes simply from wanting to discover what's across the sea or on the other side of a mountain range.

Hearth and home

Most survival games have a cozy element to them, but I find Valheim the coziest of all. I've never been much of a builder, but I still love my creaky, crude little bases: one in the meadow, one in the forest, and even a small stone hut I built in one of the more dangerous biomes just so I could grow a particular crop. The horrors of the world, from the icky monsters of the swamps to the almost comically hellish swarms of furious skeletons in the ashlands makes for a nice contrast with how relaxing it is to be at home after a long, brutal adventure.

There's a real joy to puttering around my base, tweaking and decorating the structures I've built, doing some farming and animal breeding and putting off the next dangerous expedition until I'm good and ready for it. I especially love cooking: searing enormous lox drumsticks over the roaring hearth, baking bread in my huge stone oven, and brewing mead in my distillery—which takes multiple in-game days. Hey, fine. I'm in no rush to leave my comfy little homestead.

The food system of Valheim is still one of my favorites in any game (and has inspired similar systems in other survival games that have launched since 2021), where your stomach functions like a three-slot inventory: stuff a mushroom, a blueberry, and some cooked meat down there and your health and stamina bars will be fuelled until you digest them. Simple, at first.

I still remember the first time I ate a proper meal in Valheim. I'd left my starter island on a tiny raft, sailing across the sea to unknown lands in the middle of the night, to eventually find a rotting town full of undead Vikings. After barely escaping with my life and a handful of entrails dropped from the few draugr I'd managed to kill, I sailed cautiously back home. In my kitchen I stuffed the entrails with boar meat and thistle and cooked my first sausages in my cauldron, then chowed down—watching wide-eyed as my heath bar abruptly grew twice as tall as it had ever been. I had no idea I could be that strong. From then on, downing draugr was a snap and I never left home without a pocketful of sausages.

In Valheim, eating meals made from your enemies gives you the freedom to boldly tread in extremely dangerous places, and every new recipe unlocked is a chance to take on tougher challenges. Food is as important, if not more, than your armor, making your kitchen the mightiest crafting station in the game. In any forum post where a player complains that they keep getting their asses kicked, the first question Valheim veterans ask is always the same: "What are you eating?"

Where Valheim gives you a break in some aspects of survival—as important as food is, for example, you can never starve to death—it restricts you in other ways. Even when you build fast-travel portals around the world, letting you teleport to different biomes in an instant, you can't pass through them carrying precious metals like silver or iron (at least not until much later in the game).

I'm grateful for that restriction because it's led to so many great adventures. In co-op, we spent hours sailing our longboat across the ocean while battling sea serpents (their meat makes for a fantastic stew, btw), enduring blizzards as we fended off werewolves and ice-spitting drakes on a mountainside, all to mine silver from one of the biome's frozen peaks.

Then we loaded up as much ore as we could into a cart, had a chaotic time trying to safely steer it down the nearly-sheer side of the mountain while still intermittently battling monsters, transferred it all to our ship's hold and had a tense trip back across the stormy sea to our little island base. It's so much damn work, so much time and effort, just to gather a bit of silver, yet so incredibly satisfying to succeed. Enduring hardships is what survival games are all about, and even on a little resupply mission, Valheim always makes you feel like you've been through a major trial.

Norse north

And so five years after my journey in the Norse afterlife began, I finally sailed to Valheim's final biome, the deep north. My ship slowly smashed its way through ice floes as I noted the wreckage of dozens of similar Viking vessels, until I stepped onto the new continent, crossing slippery ice to stand waist deep in blinding white snow.

Truthfully, I found the deep north a bit disappointing at first, especially because there's a quite a bit there that feels like recycled material: more greydwarfs, those squat little dummies we've been mindlessly massacring since our starter biome, more narrow underground tunnel networks to fight through, and yet another iteration of the blob-type monsters that always felt like a placeholder for something better.

But there's also a rather surprising overland enemy that's genuinely exciting to see every time you fight it, some new underground structures that are shocking in their size and scope, and a new type of crafting bench that operates differently than the ones we're used to.

And I love (but won't spoil) the method of gaining access to Valheim's final boss. Talk about hardships to overcome: if I can cross mythologies for a moment, it's a Herculean task, as if Odin wants to be sure you've really mastered the world of Valheim before you do your final round of ass-kicking. I didn't particularly care for the final boss battle itself, but the journey to reach it was a real adventure.

Odinson

There are things I don't love about Valheim, like the swamp biome, where mining its precious iron requires spending ages in dank and cramped underground corridors smashing a pickaxe into a bland heap of metal, a task with zero enjoyment. I don't like the mistlands, either, one of the biomes added in early access, which combines the ickiness of the swamp with fog so thick that just walking around is a frustrating endeavor.

I'd also hoped certain elements of Valheim would have evolved alongside the survival genre it's been so inspiring to. Somehow, there's still no way to craft directly from storage chests, despite it being a pretty common feature in most survival games these days. And despite fans begging for years for armor to have dedicated equipment slots so it doesn't take up precious inventory space, that's still not a feature—though in 1.0 there is finally a way to increase the size of your inventory by a couple of rows, at least.

But my few complaints don't stack up to much. I love this game, and it's going to be one I return to again and again. Whether it's looking up during a terrible thunderstorm and spotting Thor speeding across the sky in his chariot, or seeing my health bar double because I've eaten a powerful new meal for the first time, or catching a glimpse of Odin's glowing eye watching me on a cold and gloomy night, these are moments that never lose their thrill. As familiar as the world of Valheim has gotten over the past five years, it's still filled with the same magic that enchanted me the first time I played it.

In recent years, Scuf controllers have lost some of their purpose to me. I distinctly remember wanting a Scuf controller to play Call of Duty as a teenager, as they were one of the only brands making solid pro controllers with distinct visuals and partnership deals with pro players.

Now, you can get a pro controller from most major gaming brands, like Asus, Turtle Beach, and Razer, and you can even get cheaper pro controllers from the likes of GameSir.

As such, it's no longer good enough to just offer a few extra buttons; you need to do something truly unique… or truly affordable.

The Scuf Omega attempts the former and gets no way near the latter. Its central selling point is dual compatibility with PC and PlayStation, plus some extra triggers on the grips. But things have changed in recent years, and it needs strong build quality, great feel, and a host of other features to really justify that price.

Features

Perhaps the most notable thing about the Scuf Omega is the fact that it's sort of a Sony DualSense controller. Being officially licensed by Sony, it has a PlayStation button slapped on the front of it, and its curved sides, shape, and touchpad are all reminiscent of Sony's pad. Triggers and buttons sound different, but in the hand, it feels very familiar. Well, except for the five buttons down the bottom, the two buttons on the sides of the controller, and four paddles on the back. Oh, and also you can take the faceplate off. Okay, maybe it's closer to the DualSense Edge, actually.

With the Scuf Omega, you also get most of the modern trappings of a pro controller. TMR sticks? It's got 'em. Extra buttons? You betcha. 8,000 Hz polling? Well, no. The Omega only goes up to 1,000 Hz on PC, and is locked to 250 Hz on PS5.

It's true that the average gamer does not need 8,000 Hz polling, as reaction time isn't great enough to actually justify it. That goes doubly so for wireless devices, which will see a reduced battery life the higher the polling rate goes. It's also true, though, that when you are paying up to $200 for a controller, you should probably expect competitive-level specs.

And that's strange, as all the extra buttons are intended for a more hardcore audience. If you can click buttons more efficiently, you can click them quicker. So, in some ways, it feels like a competitive device, and in others it doesn't.

Scuf has kitted the Omega with Omron mechanical switches, which allow for snappier, more responsive controls, and it has five 'G-keys' at the bottom of the controller that can be customised to do whatever control you like.

With around 15-20 hours of battery life, the Omega is better than Sony's offerings but offers less than the pro controllers from Razer and GameSir.

In the box, you get the controller's 2.4 GHz connector, a carry case, a 6 ft braided cable, plus three extra thumbsticks and blanking plates to replace the inner paddles and side buttons. That means the Omega can look like a relatively standard controller with some light tweaking.

Ergonomics

I really quite like the Scuf Omega in the hands. It's light, comfortable, and its buttons are easy to press. It's the closest I've ever seen a competitor get to Sony's pads in size and feel, and that's not a bad thing. If it weren't for the DualSense's habit of getting stick drift, I'd use them much more than I do now.

I spent a few weeks trying to get the most out of all the Omega's buttons, and I give myself a pass on that test. The buttons on the side default to the bumpers. This control scheme means you can keep your fingers on the bumpers indefinitely and control both by squeezing on the controller.

In this position, I struggle to get purchase on the controller to hit the very bottom paddles. The side triggers didn't make their way into my regular rotation, but I did find myself using the bottom four buttons for games like Fortnite, and even as a quick-fire parry button in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy.

The problem with having so many buttons is I could never quite find a way to hold the controller where I could comfortably hit them all. But then again, there are so many buttons that you can afford to miss some and have backups in other places. It requires a little fine-tuning and customising, but I did find myself to be a tad quicker on the Omega than a traditional controller without any spare buttons.

Performance

Sony locks polling down to 250 Hz for non-official controllers on PS5, so that's the max there, but the 1,000 Hz polling feels like a noticeable miss on PC, given many high-end gamepads have now stepped things up to 8K. The controller has competitive intent with all those buttons, but you can find other options like the GameSir G7 Pro offering the same polling, plus stick drift-resistant sticks, and it even comes with a charging dock, too. The battery life on the Omega is okay for a controller, but a smart charging system would fit it much better.

As well as this, it has dual connectivity with Sony and PC, but only comes with one connector. The likes of the Turtle Beach Stealth 700 Gen 3 and Stealth Pro II come with two connectors to seamlessly swap between devices, and I wish Scuf went in the same direction here. You also swap connections by taking the faceplate off, which adds even more time to the process.

Buttons do feel smooth under the fingers, though; the D-pad is well defined and clicky, while the triggers feel snappy and consistent in both the linear and long-press mode. Scuf's Omicron mouse-like switches make snappy shooting in the likes of Fortnite super easy, and the TMR thumbsticks are easy to use.

I played the entirety of Onimusha: Way of the Sword on the Scuf Omega, and the abundance of buttons plus the comfortable feel made parrying, attacking, and running a breeze.

Build quality

Though I'm not afraid of breaking the controller if I squeeze it too hard, I do find this gamepad to be notably behind Razer's pro controller offerings in its firmness. It just doesn't have the same strength of materials. It also has a light rattle if I shake it. Admittedly, I don't spend much time shaking controllers, but it contributes to the controller feeling a little cheaper than its competitors.

Aesthetics

The Scuf Omega I've been testing is the Smoke model, and apart from the RGB strip down the bottom, it's pretty understated. There's a block pattern on the touchpad, and some light branding on the grips, but nothing too loud, especially when considering the other Omega options. And, in fairness, the RGB serves a purpose here. The five buttons at the bottom are a mute button, a volume up and down button, and two customizable keys, so the RGB lighting helps signal which button is which.

The Smoke model is like a cross between black and grey. It's semi-transparent so you can kind of make out the internals, but it's not so transparent that it's reminiscent of the see-through console trend that was popular in the 2000s.

There's no hiding the mass of extra buttons on the controller, but Scuf has done a decent job blending them into the natural shape of it. The only part that feels odd is the two most central paddles on the back of the controller. I do quite like that you can take off the faceplate, meaning you could feasibly replace it, but there are no Omega faceplates on the Scuf store as of the time of writing.

Software

Scuf's software situation has always been a bit confusing to me. It does have software, but only software you can customise on its mobile phone app. So, if you want to toggle something for it while playing on your PC, you have to take your phone out and customise it from there.

The app lets you customise brightness, change polling rate, set SOCD, update firmware, and adjust calibration. The app itself works really well. It pairs your phone to your controller very quickly, is intuitive to use, and didn't falter during my time with it.

Value

The Scuf Omega is a mighty tough sell. If you specifically want a PC and PS5 pro controller, the Razer Raiju V3 Pro is the same price, offers stronger build quality, and a higher polling rate on PC. The Omega does have two buttons on the side, and five extra on the bottom that the Raiju doesn't, but my grubby mitts would be reaching for the textured grips of the Raiju instead.

Then, if you simply want a strong pro controller with extra buttons, I'd be picking the Wolverine V3 Pro and its 8,000 Hz polling rate for the lower price of $200.

Finally, if you simply want something well built with a few extra buttons, I'd go significantly cheaper and pick up either the GameSir G7 Pro or GameSir G7 Pro 8K for $70 and $80 respectively. These two GameSir picks also include a charging dock.

At 70% of its current cost, Scuf could have been on to a real winner here, but it's simply too expensive for a good but not great pad.

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.

If you skipped buying that coveted stick of RAM or 2 TB SSD this time last year, you must be feeling understandably morose. Most things are getting more and more expensive, but crucially, not all things. Components like headsets and gamepads conform to the fast antiquating dictum that, with time, value will rise while costs decrease.

That's pretty much the case with the Corsair HS35 v3. At the level of raw specs at least, Corsair's new mid-range headset has a touch more to offer than the SteelSeries Arctic Nova 3X, which is our favourite mid-range gaming headset. It came bearing a $90 price tag at launch (though you wouldn't pay full price for it in 2026).

Like the Arctis Nova 3X, the HS35 v3 has 2.4 GHz wireless connectivity, Bluetooth, and a wired option. It has a detachable mic, and reasonably comfortable memory foam ear cups. Both models have 50mm drivers and a 20Hz - 20kHz frequency response. But the HS35 v3 is 10 grams lighter and $10 cheaper. Shots fired!

I enjoyed using the HS35 v3 despite underwhelming first impressions. An obviously plastic frame puts a dampener on appearances but keeps things admirably light: it weighs a pretty astonishing 250 g, which is 50 g lighter than the boastfully light Turtle Beach Atlas Air. The memory foam cups, which pivot 90 degrees, sit comfortably over my oversize egg, while the floating headband keeps plenty of berth between my skull and the plastic solid headband.

On the headband design, the outer plastic headband isn't adjustable on rails like a lot of other headsets. Instead, the inner floating headband connects to three notches: you have to remove the floating band and reapply it according to the size of your head. This would seem to offer fewer gradients of size adjustability, but the floating band is nicely malleable. I found it comfortable, and my 8-year-old son—whose head is, naturally and mercifully, smaller than mine—found it comfortable too. Still, if you have an outlier-sized head, whether small or large, it might be worth trying the set on first.

Despite first impressions I actually came to like how plain the HS35 v3 design is. Corsair has some pretty outré cup designs (take the bulky HS80 RGB as an example) but the HS35 v3 sticks to a conservative oval that won't stand out on public transport or in the office, if you're taking the mixed purpose route. I'll say again, it really is extraordinarily light: I wore it for most of the day and didn't feel too much strain.

Connectivity is mostly a cinch, and I liked that the 2.4 GHz dongle has both a USB-A connector, inside which a USB-C connector is neatly nested. Here's an alert for those hoping to use the HS35 v3 with a console, though: while it supports wired connectivity, it does so with a USB-C to USB-A connector. In other words, no 3.5 mm connectivity here, so you won't be able to connect it straight into a gamepad.

Complementing its potential as a multi purpose headset is that the boom mic is removable, which is nice at this price point. It's also usefully bendy and—most importantly—delightfully crystalline where audio fidelity is concerned:

Note that's using 2.4 GHz wireless. Mic output quality noticeably deteriorates over Bluetooth, though this is a common issue to do with Bluetooth's narrower bandwidth.

Sonic Assassin

But what I liked most about the HS35 v3 is its remarkable sound, which punches above its weight in this price range. This isn't a noise-cancelling affair but the sonics are nevertheless enveloping, probably thanks in part to the secure embrace of those pivoting earcups. Pummelling theatrical bass leaves plenty of room for the mid-range and all the environmental detail that entails.

I tested the HS35 v3 with The Blood of Dawnwalker and a wide personal collection of sicko electronic music including Autechre and Aphex Twin. I mean, this is not an audiophile set of headphones, nor is it a high range gaming headset, but it handles spiky complexity extraordinarily well, with no clipping or distracting sense of compression.

In Dawnwalker, subterranean dungeons sound genuinely remote and cocooned to a near stifling degree; outside, birds serenely tweet in the foreground as rabid wolves moan in the distance. The HS35 v3 can easily meet the scale of an open world, just as it can capture the cavernous warrens of R6 Siege where audible directional prompts— footsteps, destroyed barricades—are important and not just nice to have.

Sweetness and light

While it performs very well where input and output are concerned, this headset definitely feels mid-range, despite rubbing shoulders with pricier budget affairs. There are some things you'll just have to cope with. Onboard controls are minimal, though we do get a volume wheel which can be pressed to mute the mic, and we do get a single lonely, albeit capable button that can toggle between connectivity modes and pause music. There is no software, which is great news to me, but maybe you like to fiddle with audio profiles.

Battery life is determinedly mid-range as well: expect 30 hours, which does not compare favourably to more expensive models like the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless' supernatural 300 hour battery life. But 30 hours is still a long time for anyone but endurance streamers.

The other thing about it is that, well, it's pretty boring. It looks boring and it does what it says it'll do and nothing more. I think this is fine, and I'm not marking it down because it just does the bare minimum, but maybe you like your headsets fancier, in which case: better start saving. For its price, the HS35 v3 does pretty much everything it needs to do with better-than-average performance.

The Plague Tale series were puzzle-stealth games about kids trying to survive a Horrible History version of France during the Hundred Years War, sneaking past soldiers and using light to frighten hordes of rats that could strip them to bones in an instant. I loved their atmosphere of pulpy Grand Guignol supernatural history, but didn't love a lot of the actual videogame parts.

Too often a fussy sneaking section would end with an accidental step over an arbitrary line, then back to a checkpoint at the start of the area. In the second game, A Plague Tale: Requiem, I once had to skip through two cutscenes to get back to the beginning of the section I died at—a sin I might have uninstalled the game for if I were less invested in the story.

If you were expecting another game of hide and squeak from this spin-off, you'll be disappointed. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a prequel that takes pirate-adjacent smuggler Sophia, a popular character introduced in the second game, and dives into her past without feeling the need to throw in a plague, slingshot, alchemy, or other hallmarks of the series. Though it does include stealth in the back half, the focus of Resonance is a Mediterranean treasure hunt with a brand new sword combat system. It's Tomb Raider with stabbing instead of shooting.

Lara Corsair

The stabbing's quite good. I'm sick of parrying in games, but while the enemies in Resonance have a stagger bar that fills the more of their combos you deflect, you can also fill the bar by picking up a random object and smashing it in someone's face. Grabbing a bottle and hurling it into a soldier's gob makes you feel like a proper rogue, and there's a meaty kick too, which not only staggers enemies (and makes ones with shields drop their guard), but can push them off ledges to their death if you can't be bothered mastering parry and dodge timings.

I liked the kick so much it was the first thing I upgraded with the "resonance points" you earn from defeating groups of enemies or finding seashells lying on the ground. Though it's linear, sometimes a side passage or optional puzzle will hand out rewards like resonance points, a new sword, or jewellery that might increase your crit chance or parry timing window. Sophia actually wears the jewellery you find, and by the end of the game I'd put on so many bracelets it was a wonder she could lift her arms.

The Minoan ruins you're exploring are gated by puzzles that can usually be solved by manipulating lenses to shine light at the right spot or standing on symbols in sequence. It's pretty rote stuff, with a couple of properly bullshit leap-of-logic headslappers thrown in to keep you on your toes. (The Black Temple door puzzle can go and do one.)

The structure will feel familiar to anyone who has played prestige videogames with cinematic pretensions. You struggle through a crack squeeze so the camera can be nicely lined up to show you an impressive vista that's just finished loading; you slide down or fall off things so the previous area can be dumped from memory safe in the knowledge you can't turn around and go back. Where the first two Plague Tale games were mid-budget medieval Last of Us minus Joel, this is more of a mid-budget melee-combat Uncharted.

Don't mess with the bull

The predictable structure is the worst thing about it. Though Sophia has a book of clues and a special sphere that lets her read hidden messages and manipulate beams of light to get ahead of the generic soldiers racing to the treasure, every time you arrive in a new area it turns out you've been beaten. The soldiers have rammed through a wall or found an inlet so you've got opponents to fight, and previous plunderers have also made it through and filled the area with precarious scaffolding so you've got something to platform off and have collapse beneath you. It really dampens the exploration vibe to know you'll never actually win the race, because if you did the formula would break.

Still, Resonance is a competent example of the playbook it's following. A gorgeous one, too. Characters look great, with expressive faces and glistening eyes, and the contrast between bright blue-water outdoors and tunnels full of bones lit by glowing spores emphasizes the claustrophobia as you descend further into the ruins. Returning composer Olivier Deriviere has turned in another banger, moving on from spooky strings to Greek-Cypriot chorals that suit the change in location.

While plenty of things have changed, and this time the checkpoints are well-placed enough that I didn't ragequit even once, Resonance does preserve the series' trend of getting more gruesome as it goes on. By the final hours it's essentially a horror game. The jolly pirate treasure hunt becomes a mythic journey to the heart of darkness, and while it'll seem a weird shift if this is your first Plague Tale, the series has always been bleak and wilfully ambiguous about what's really going on. We finish these games with as many questions as answers, and that one defiantly arthouse element is a valuable thing Resonance has chosen to preserve as it otherwise shifts to popcorn blockbuster.

I've made my feelings about Micro-OLED displays pretty clear: these tiny screens are the future of high-end virtual reality. They're stunning; with deep blacks, a stunning range of colours, and none of the usual pitfalls of non-OLED displays. The Pimax Dream Air has two of them, hidden away beneath a compact pancake lens system. It's the only VR headset I've worn as of late that made me say "wow" out loud—I haven't done that since, well, probably the first time I wore a VR headset.

The Dream Air is tiny, too. It more closely resembles a pair of ski goggles than the company's other VR headset, the Crystal Super, which looks more like a prop from an '80s sci-fi movie than a modern-day wearable. Both are impressive in their own way—my first time experiencing Micro-OLED was in the Crystal Super—but the Dream Air's diminutive size and light build make it far more comfortable to wear over long periods.

So, it's the best VR headset, right? I wish it were that clear cut. I've not tried anything that gets close to the Dream Air in terms of visuals, size, and comfort; however, it lacks finesse in tracking. The model I've been testing uses Pimax's own inside-out tracking technology called SLAM, and whether it's this or the run-of-the-mill controllers that Pimax bundles with all its headsets, it's not up to the job as well as others. I wish that weren't such a dampener on the whole thing, but it really is the Achilles' heel of the Dream Air as it stands today.

Not every VR game requires controllers. Flight sims, racing sims, and anything with immersive, non-standard controls are best suited to the Dream Air. Though these games often come with their own set of challenges to deal with. While the Dream Air doesn't have the widest field of view (FOV) for these sorts of experiences, it has something even better, in my opinion. So, let's get into the details.

Pimax Dream Air - Features

The Pimax Dream Air has an enviable specs sheet. The stuff one could only dream of when first trying on a HTC Vive or Oculus Rift.

Let's start with the optics. It comes with twin 1.35-inch Sony Micro-OLED panels with pancake lenses over top. Pimax calls these 'ConcaveView'; the first of three lenses making up the pancake optics has a deep, recessed design, as if someone pressed a golf ball into the glass just as it was out of the kiln. Two further lenses together adding up to a 110-degree horizontal FOV.

That's the same FOV as the Crystal Super Micro-OLED, using the exact same optics in a much larger optical engine such as the Quest 3, and Steam Frame. With a 140-degree FOV, the Crystal Super QLED has it beat (Ultrawide version), but I prefer the Dream Air for one key reason.

Binocular overlap. This is the portion of a frame that is displayed across both screens in a VR headset. It's noted as a percentage: the higher this percentage, the more of a frame is shared by both screens, and the easier it is for your brain to blend the two images into one. After all, humans have stereo vision, and the brain is constantly trying to match up two slightly differing views of the world into one complete image. It's also very important in how comfortable and convincing a virtual reality experience is.

It varies person to person, but generally, a higher binocular overlap is best. It's a big deal for me, anyways, which is why I'm more than happy with the Dream Air. It has an excellent binocular overlap of 86%, far in excess of something like the Quest 3, which only comes in at 69%. That headset has a notably low binocular overlap, which I personally find leads to more eye strain and me reaching for my ever-so-slightly corrective glasses.

I can't wear my glasses with the Dream Air, as it doesn't offer much wiggle room for the frames, but I needn't worry. I've not found any need for them, even over longer periods of play, and I chalk that up to its high binocular overlap.

Here are the figures from my most recent round of testing in 'What is my Field of View?', or as it's more commonly known, WimFov.

• Dream Air - 86%
• Dream Air (Wide FOV mode) - 77%
• Crystal Super QLED (50 PPD) - 77%
• Crystal Super Micro-OLED - 86%
• Quest 3 - 69%

At a resolution of 7680 x 3552 (each eye at 3840 x 3552), the twin Micro-OLED displays are razor sharp. Using the Pimax Play software, these can be configured to run at either 90 Hz or 72 Hz, with the latter being a benefit if you're lacking suitably powerful silicon. This headset is very demanding and will require a high-end graphics card at its native resolution.

There's also eye tracking built into the Dream Air. This can also be configured in the Pimax Play application. It feels snappy and responsive in that tool, and though the uses can be a little limited, depending on what games you play, it is also a must-have for some titles; games like DSC, for instance, which support Quad Views rendering for the best performance and visuals with eye tracking. Similarly, it's pretty useful if you can figure out Pimax's own in-house center rendering tool, which runs when it's selected as the OpenXR runtime. That can be a bit tricky to sort game-to-game, in my opinion, but it is an option if you're willing to tinker.

The Dream Air tracks your movements through either inside-out or Lighthouse tracking, depending on which version you buy. I have the inside-out version here for review, what Pimax boisterously calls the SLAM version, which includes four cameras; each one covering a quadrant of the area in front, below, and above the headset. This version also reportedly supports hand tracking, though I'm yet to figure out how to turn it on.

Two controllers are included in the box. These are one and the same with the controllers included with the Crystal Super, and as such are pretty mediocre. They're comfortable enough, though they use a design that's more common among older VR headsets with a halo around the hand. They're rechargeable using USB Type-C, at least, which saves on buying AA batteries like the rest of them.

There are two speakers nestled into either side of the strap, in a fashion similar to the Quest lineup. They're pretty decent, which is a relief, as they're all you're gonna get without running another cable from your PC—there's no 3.5 mm jack on the headset. Speaking of cables, the device has one tethered to both sides of the headset, for better balancing, that combines into a roughly four-metre long flexible and not-too-chunky cable into a breakout box. The breakout box requires a USB 3.0 and DisplayPort connection from your PC, and power from a supplied adapter.

Pimax Dream Air - Optics

The Dream Air has the best optics of any headset I've used. It's truly next level. A potent combination of contrast, colour, and clarity that only Micro-OLED can so far deliver.

Every object is rendered in absurdly crisp detail within the Dream Air. Even an instructional pop-up looks good. They're very readable, too, as text rendering is greatly improved between this and older, cheaper headsets. I've been replaying Half-Life: Alyx—still the best game you can play with a VR headset—and the difference between the Dream Air and a Quest 3 is startling. Namely in how vibrant and immersive the former feels.

The Quest 3 appears washed out, lacking clarity, and jittery. The Dream Air feels like you're experiencing the game as the developers intended; like seeing the game world in full detail, rather than a facsimile. I personally feel a lot closer to the action when the quality has been improved by so much. In darker environments, the individually-lit pixels of the Micro-OLED produce incredibly atmospheric contrast. It's really creepy when you're hunting for headcrabs under shelves and around corners.

There's a pretty extreme difference in price between the Dream Air and Quest 3, so how about something more its own speed? The Pimax Crystal Super with a couple of QLED displays certainly comes closer to the Dream Air due to its equally high resolution and impressive optics. Yet it's the depth of colour and contrast that places the Micro-OLED on a rung above.

I generally find pancake lenses have a little more visible glare compared to more traditional aspheric lenses, and that's certainly true of the Dream Air. It's noticeable in the TestHMD test environment; less so while actually playing games, but it is definitely present either way. Though it's not quite as bad as the Quest 3 in this regard.

There's no visible aliasing due to the sheer number of pixels on the screen, nor does the screen door effect raise its ugly head. The teeny tiny pixels on the teeny tiny 1.3-inch Micro-OLED displays see to that. They are, after all, manufactured directly onto silicon substrates, achieving pixel density often in the thousands, where traditional screens are only in the hundreds. The Sony ECX344A used here has a pixel-per-inch (PPI) of 3,389. A standard 27-inch 4K monitor has one of just 163.

That also translates into a high pixel per degree (PPD) of over 50. With a field of view within the same sort of range as other high-end VR headsets, at around 110 degrees, it's not alone at the top of the pile; however, it is an excellent rating. Much higher than a Quest 3 or the upcoming Steam Frame.

The FOV, at around 110 degrees, isn't breaking any records. That's pretty standard for a VR headset today, and I measured the effective FOV with the provided facemask and IPD at 64 to be more like 90 degrees horizontal (88 vertical). There is a wide FOV mode in the Pimax Play advance settings, which extends that to around 98 degrees, closer to the given rating; however, it drops binocular overlap from an excellent 86% to 77%. It's also not anywhere close to the Crystal Super QLED Ultrawide at 140 HFOV, but that's pretty wild.

The biggest downside to all of this? The hardware required to run it all. With over 27 million pixels to deal with, you'd better have a very high-end and modern graphics card in your gaming PC. Even an RTX 5080 can struggle in my experience, and I've had to roll out render scaling in the Pimax Play application, sharpening, and even upscaling to try to ease the performance hit with some demanding titles. So, if you think the VR headset is already too expensive, think again; the PC required to run it is much, much more.

Pimax Dream Air - Controllers and tracking

A reality check for any potential buyer: The controllers included with the Dream Air aren't great, with consistently inconsistent tracking. Or perhaps it's the SLAM tracking. Either way, the interplay between the controllers and headset is a little clunky.

There are two controllers included with the Dream Air. They're identical to what's included with the Crystal Super, and include a halo around the top, four buttons, one trigger, one grip button, and a thumbstick on either side. They're rechargeable via a USB Type-C on the underside, and come with fairly standard wrist straps with an adjustable size. Due to the halo around the top, I have smacked the two controllers together a few times, as is tradition with this sort of design, but that's not a huge issue. What does wear thin after a while, however, is the tracking.

Between these controllers and the four tracking cameras on the headset, the tracking is inconsistent. It's not game-breaking but it does remind me of much older VR headsets in terms of accuracy and dexterity.

The issue is present most of all at the extremes of human movement, ie, trying to raise my hands above my head or down at my waist. Climbing a cliff in Blade and Sorcery turned into an exercise in mental resilience, as my hands would often get stuck or feel unresponsive, jittering or wobbling to and fro, as I tried to make my ascent and slipping back down the hill like Bennett Foddy. It's quite realistic, in a way, as my own vertigo would cause me similar jitters in real life, but as a VR experience, it's quite frustrating.

Reaching toward holsters located at your waist in other VR titles also proves a tricky scenario for the Dream Air. Any action that requires the controllers moving close to your body seems to put the tracking at a disadvantage. As it stands, I prefer the Quest 3 for games that require any level of dexterity in controls.

Case in point, I've been on a mission to defeat a cat in the game Eleven Table Tennis. My AI opponent, a cat who stares blankly at me as it serves and returns with laser-guided precision, is only set to the second difficult level, but I'm yet to defeat it. Though this hasn't been helped by the Dream Air. I can barely even serve with the Dream Air, due to both an inability to toss the ball into the air to begin my serve with any accuracy, or return the ball with a controlled speed. The Dream Air's controllers seem unable to judge the speed and inertia to a required accuracy. Meanwhile, I can serve and genuinely compete with (but not beat) the smug cat while wearing the Quest 3.

Room-scale boundaries also need to be set-up pretty much every time you put down and pick up the Dream Air. It tends to 'lose' its place in the real world once it's down on the ground, and while the process to make a new one is fairly slick, it's a real frustration when you have to do it over and over again during play.

Ideally, you'd use the Pimax Dream Air with a sim rig, which would cut a lot of the hassle out of using its insufficient tracking. Though I've been attempting to play a few sim racing games in VR over the past week, and I've been reminded just how convoluted and messy trying to get my sim racing wheel, pedals, and shifter working in a game alongside VR. That's not on Pimax; it's just an issue seemingly shared by many racing games over the years. Sim racers may prefer a headset with a wider FOV, anyways.

Pimax Dream Air - Ergonomics

The Dream Air has a dual-adjustable headband, but lacks any over-the-head strap for added support. Usually, I'd say that's a big miss, but when you get down to this sort of weight class for a VR headset, it doesn't make a difference. This thing is hella comfy.

The Dream Air weighs just 280 grams. That's on my own scales, with the cable still connected, but not taking the weight of the entire 4-metre cable as well. Pimax has it listed as sub-170 grams without the cable connected. Comparing its weight to others on my scales and it's clear nothing else comes close:

• Dream Air: 280 g
• Quest 3: 437 g
• Quest 3S: 454 g
• Crystal OLED: 848 g
• Crystal 50 PPD: 837 g
• Sony PS VR2: 499 g

Some of these VR headsets have their own system-on-chip and play games without a PC, but even compared to Pimax's own Crystal Super Micro-OLED, using the same optics as the Dream Air, the weight savings are astounding.

I can wear the Dream Air for hours and not feel the strain. It moves around the least on my face of all the headsets I've tested over the past week, including the Quest 3/3S and other Pimax units. It gets a little hot along the top edge of the headset—right where the exhaust vents are for the two fans inside, so that checks out—however, I don't feel like it warms up enough to make it uncomfortable, even after hours of testing. Combined with the stellar optics and binocular overlap, it's the one VR headset I feel I can wear without glasses for hours on end.

Though, speaking of which, you cannot wear glasses in this compact headset. It does come with frames should you wish to buy prescription lens inserts.

The cable is well balanced, too. Ultimately, any VR headset with a cable is going to be less convenient than one without, but I do find not worrying about battery life to be a boon most of the time. In this instance, at least, the Dream Air's twin-cable approach helps prevent the cable from tugging one side of the headset. It's a simple solution to a problem many VR headsets have had over the years—a sign of some quality of life improvements for the previously slightly clumsy company.

My one small complaint is that the strap has a rather sharp edge to it, on both sides, where it terminates at the speaker housing. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be an issue, as you can position the headset and straps in such a way to avoid the sharp edge resting on your ears or head, but it does slightly limit the comfortable range of the headset a little. Other than that, the Dream Air is very comfortable. Top marks.

Pimax Dream Air - Software

Pimax Play is the one-stop shop for features and settings with the Dream Air. It's a Spartan application, with a plain interface and minimal bloat, and it's easy to use.

You'll find the usual suspects in the settings menu within Pimax Play: IPD adjustment, firmware updates, and ways to pair controllers and trackers. But there is also more than meets the eye here. Pimax has a pretty complete feature set tucked away under device and advanced settings, which are key for unlocking the Dream Air's full potential.

One important setting is render scale, which Pimax recommends adjusting down to lessen the load on the hardware. Combined with a sharpening filter, it's easy enough to finely balance performance and fidelity. If performance is still an issue, there's even upscaling support with FSR and NIS (Nvidia Image Scaling) to boost frame rates; though in doing so, hurting the overall clarity that you are paying a lot of money for in the first place.

Dynamic Foveated Rendering (DFR) is one way to increase performance that is supported through Pimax Play and the Dream Air's eye tracking functionality. There's also Quad Views support, which needs to be supported on a per-game basis to have an effect (namely in DCS). Finally, there's Center Rendering, which has three modes: Quality, Balanced, Performance. In Pimax's own words, this "Reduces rendering quality at the edges of the field of view while keeping the center in high resolution to save performance."

I admittedly didn't notice this was even functioning until opening up testHMD and noticing a distinct circle at the center of my vision, outside of which, lines and text were a little less defined.

With an RTX 5080 under the hood, I was able to combine a lower render scale, a touch of sharpening, and Center Rendering for a smooth 72 Hz—and in many cases, 90 Hz—experience in all of the games I played with this headset. There's lots of flexibility here, which helps with performance on a range of PCs, though you're going to need a PC that is resolutely high-end for a good experience across the board.

Though Pimax could maybe do a better job of signposting how these settings work and what they are dependent on in the application. VR still feels clunky at times, especially with per-game support for eye tracking, and it takes longer to get au fait with all the settings and what they do than I'd like.

Pimax Dream Air - Value

The Dream Air costs $2,299 ($1,999). A price tag like that sets very high expectations for the headset.

The Dream Air offers the best visual experience I've had in VR. It's only matched by the Crystal Super Micro-OLED with the very same optics, but the Dream Air absolutely wins out on overall comfort and fit. The bulking behemoth of the Crystal Super compacted down into a headset the size of some ski goggles—the Dream Air is both impressive and selling at a similar price point.

The headset is genuinely pushing what's possible in VR, and I have to say, I'm here for it. Virtual reality can feel a bit stagnant at times, stuck with the same games and tech for years, but the richness of detail, colour, and tone from the Dream Air does a lot to dispel that feeling. This is seriously impressive tech at an unattainably high price—it is, ultimately, a price I could not afford myself.

Then onto the tracking. This is one aspect of the Dream Air that doesn't feel remotely high-end or worth $2,299. It's clunky, old-fashioned, and a detriment to the experience. A pretty big one, too, in my opinion. I shouldn't really be reaching for the $599 Quest 3 in order to play a game with more accuracy than the $2,299 headset currently on my head, nor having to reset my play area every single time I remove the headset. That is a big deal for me—I expect better at this price point.

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W is in many ways the polar opposite of the other MSI laptop I recently tested, the Stealth 16 AI+ B3W. The latter is an ultra-expensive, sleek and subtle machine that limits its power for the sake of thermals, efficiency, and form factor. Not so with the Crosshair: it's a gaming laptop, and it knows it.

I could tell as much as soon as I unboxed it, thanks to its glossy—and I would later discover, RGB-lit—embossed MSI logo on the lid, plus the general thickness, key styling and so on. It's not particularly obnoxious and still has some subtlety to it, but it's not hiding the fact that it's a gaming laptop.

Nor does it hide this fact when it comes to performance, eking as much as it can out of the RTX 5070 GPU and Core Ultra 7 251HX processor, saying to hell with thermals and battery life. I can certainly respect that, but it has to deliver in other respects, too, including price. And in other respects this laptop is not quite so pretty.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W features

The particular Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W that I tested came with an Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX, RTX 5070, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, but there are different versions. The ones I can currently spot online have a more powerful Core Ultra 9 290HX with 32 GB of DDR5, or the same 251HX CPU but an RTX 5060 and 32 GB of DDR5. All of those come with 1 TB of storage.

In the case of the 16 GB of RAM in the version I have, it is at least 2x8 GB of fast 6,400 MT/s memory, rather than a single stick of slow RAM. This presumably helps a bunch with CPU-intensive tasks, as I found the laptop to perform even better than some others with 'better' CPUs.

A big draw here is also the OLED panel, which is gorgeous. I'm not used to seeing OLEDs on such gamer-y gaming laptops, as I've only really seen them on gaming laptops that are going for 'sleek and refined', so it's a nice surprise to see such a great panel here. It's only 165 Hz, but it's a perfect match for the RTX 5070 mobile GPU inside the Crosshair.

At first I thought there weren't many ports on this laptop, but before long I found the rest hidden on the rear side and breathed a sigh of relief. I particularly like the inclusion of a Thunderbolt 4 port as well as a port for an Ethernet connection.

Getting to how it is to actually use the laptop, I don't have any real complaints but equally no specific praises. It's no behemoth, but it's hardly a slimline laptop, either, and its keys feel simply… fine. WASD keys are translucent and there is 24-zone RGB, again signalling to the world 'I am definitely a gaming laptop'. I do wish MSI had foregone the numpad to make things a little less cramped, though. The trackpad is quite small, but it is at least central, which is the correct choice (fight me).

The big downside is audio, just as was the case with the Stealth. However, in this case it's even worse. There's definite (but not catastrophically high) latency over the default audio device, but unlike with the Stealth I tested, this wasn't resolved by switching to a different USB-connected audio device.

As such, if you play games that really benefit from snappy and responsive audio such as shooters, and especially sensitive to a little audio delay, I'd steer clear unless and until MSI discovers what the problem is and how to fix it (the company is investigating). I tried disabling/uninstalling Nahimic as well as Norton antivirus to see if that helped, but doing the former proved difficult and the latter didn't resolve it.

The speakers themselves are nothing to write home about anyway. They're not the worst I've heard, but they've definitely got a little bit of that tinniness in them that you expect out of a lot of laptops or cheaper Bluetooth speakers.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W performance

The Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W performs very well for an RTX 5070 laptop, often beating other similar lappies. MSI has clearly opted for a performance-oriented machine here, and it shows.

1080p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1080p resolution.

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High)F1 24 (1080p Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

46

33

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

34

24

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

32

20

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

43

33

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

36

24

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

55

32

015304560

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070	46 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	34 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	32 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	43 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	36 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)	55 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

85

52

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

74

43

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

63

32

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

69

41

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

60

27

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

68

39

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070	85 Avg FPS, 52 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	74 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	63 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	69 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	60 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)	68 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

68

59

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

45

37

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

53

30

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

64

55

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

57

39

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

73

47

020406080

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070	68 Avg FPS, 59 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	45 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	53 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	64 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	57 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)	73 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

83

57

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

62

55

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

60

34

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

75

58

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

65

34

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

100

50

0255075100

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070	83 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	62 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	60 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	75 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	65 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)	100 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070

87

54

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

83

64

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

66

20

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

82

51

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)

63

46

MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)

102

42

037.575112.5150

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070	87 Avg FPS, 54 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	83 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	66 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Nvidia RTX 5060 (115 W)	63 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+| RTX 5080 (125 W)	102 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max performs incredibly well at 1080p, often beating other RTX 5070 laptops and almost keeping up with an (admittedly power-limited) RTX 5080 laptop.

1600p (native) gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p (native) resolution

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High)F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

26

19

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

9

2

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

18

8

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

12

5

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

34

22

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	26 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	9 Avg FPS, 2 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	18 Avg FPS, 8 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	12 Avg FPS, 5 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	34 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

79

51

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

65

39

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

67

37

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

54

33

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

67

39

020406080

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	79 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	65 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	67 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	54 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	67 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

66

57

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

94

69

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

72

62

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

57

49

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

57

49

0255075100

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	66 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	94 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	72 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

47

37

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

35

29

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

41

32

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

34

18

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

62

43

020406080

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	47 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	35 Avg FPS, 29 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	41 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	34 Avg FPS, 18 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	62 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

59

41

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

53

31

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

54

39

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

45

17

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

74

48

020406080

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	59 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	53 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	54 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	45 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	74 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS

The Corsshair 16 Max does very well at native res, offering playable frame rates in almost all of these games. In most of them, it leads other RTX 5070 gaming laptops. (Note the MSI Stealth listed here has an RTX 5080 that is power-limited compared to some other RTX 5080 laptops.)

At both 1080p and 1600p (native), the MSI performs better than other RTX 5070 mobile laptops and even comes close to the (power-limited) Stealth with RTX 5080 mobile. This is more so the case at 1080p where things are less GPU-bound and the CPU can have more of an effect, but it's still great at native.

Real-world gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution with Quality upscaling enabled, and frame gen where applicable

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%))F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

80

51

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

27

18

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

58

35

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

75

58

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

97

53

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	80 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	27 Avg FPS, 18 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	58 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	75 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	97 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

75

64

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

94

69

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

57

49

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

72

62

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

87

74

0255075100

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%)) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	75 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	94 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	72 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	87 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)

118

82

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)

52

42

Framework 16 | RTX 5070

92

70

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)

147

56

037.575112.5150

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	118 Avg FPS, 82 1% Low FPS
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | RTX 5070 (115 W)	N/A
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | RTX 5070 (85 W)	52 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Framework 16 | RTX 5070	92 Avg FPS, 70 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W)	147 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS

Again, the MSI Crosshair 16 Max performs well. With upscaling and/or frame gen, expect smooth frame rates even in pretty demanding games at native resolution on max settings. (Note the MSI Stealth listed here has an RTX 5080 that is power-limited compared to some other RTX 5080 laptops.)

When upscaling and/or frame gen is enabled, even pretty demanding games become smoothly playable at native res on max settings. Saying this, you might still want to drop your settings a little just to reduce any latency incurred by frame gen, as higher starting frame rates improve this.

I'd say this laptop is ideal for gaming on high (but not max) settings at 1600p with upscaling and, in some games, frame gen. That will be how to make the best use of the 165 Hz refresh rate on offer here.

Interestingly, this one seems to perform even better in most games than the previous MSI Crosshair we tested, the Crosshair 16 HX AI (2025), which has the same GPU and a more powerful Core Ultra 9 275HX processor. That could be due to driver improvements over the past year plus the fact that this new one gets hotter, ie, allows for a bit of extra performance at the top.

System performance

The laptops are here tested against intensive benchmarks that mostly test the CPU, but also the GPU, for productivity tasks.

7zip 24.07Cinebench 2024Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop)Procyon

Decompressing (GIPS)

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

120.254

135.177

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

121.787

130.822

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

77.91

87.77

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

108.822

128.355

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

65.22

105.78

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

105.399

98.828

037.575112.5150

7zip 24.07 Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	120.254 Compressing (GIPS), 135.177 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	121.787 Compressing (GIPS), 130.822 Decompressing (GIPS)
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)	77.91 Compressing (GIPS), 87.77 Decompressing (GIPS)
Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070	108.822 Compressing (GIPS), 128.355 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)	65.22 Compressing (GIPS), 105.78 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)	105.399 Compressing (GIPS), 98.828 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1638

129

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1320

134

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

800

78

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

1158

105

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

812

101

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

1221

124

05001,0001,5002,000

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	1638 Multi-core index score, 129 Single-core index score
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	1320 Multi-core index score, 134 Single-core index score
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)	800 Multi-core index score, 78 Single-core index score
Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070	1158 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)	812 Multi-core index score, 101 Single-core index score
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)	1221 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

112.66

1046.74

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

108.15

1028.98

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

65.55

1017.59

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

93.15

1026.08

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

62.87

1014.05

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

79.43

1691.37

05001,0001,5002,000

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	112.66 CPU (samples/min), 1046.74 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	108.15 CPU (samples/min), 1028.98 GPU (samples/min)
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)	65.55 CPU (samples/min), 1017.59 GPU (samples/min)
Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070	93.15 CPU (samples/min), 1026.08 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)	62.87 CPU (samples/min), 1014.05 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)	79.43 CPU (samples/min), 1691.37 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1750

57.12

3.57

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

1508

66.27

4.14

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

1418

70.52

4.41

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

1789

55.9

3.49

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

1490

67.11

4.2

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

2472

40.44

2.53

07501,5002,2503,000

Procyon Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	1750 Overall index score, 57.12 Duration (Sec), 3.57 Sec/image
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	1508 Overall index score, 66.27 Duration (Sec), 4.14 Sec/image
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)	1418 Overall index score, 70.52 Duration (Sec), 4.41 Sec/image
Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070	1789 Overall index score, 55.9 Duration (Sec), 3.49 Sec/image
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)	1490 Overall index score, 67.11 Duration (Sec), 4.2 Sec/image
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)	2472 Overall index score, 40.44 Duration (Sec), 2.53 Sec/image

The Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX in the MSI Crosshair 16 Max is better for productivity tasks than a lot of other RTX 5070 laptops

Much as with this laptop's gaming performance, its productivity performance is impressive. When allowed to run so hot, the Intel chip here can plough through tasks such as decompression and other multi-core-heavy tasks.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W thermals

Real-world gaming temperatures

Gaming temperature results recorded during multiple Metro Exodus EE runs

Gaming temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

91

104

81

84

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)

55

98

28

69

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)

55

87

57

71

Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070

65

73

68

71

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)

58

71

59

72

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)

92

100

81

87

037.575112.5150

Gaming temperatures Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W) | Core Ultra 7 251HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	91 Avg CPU (°C), 104 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 84 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI) | Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5070 (115 W)	55 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 28 Avg GPU (°C), 69 Max GPU (°C)
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot | Ryzen AI 7 350 | RTX 5070 (85 W)	55 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 57 Avg GPU (°C), 71 Max GPU (°C)
Framework 16 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5070	65 Avg CPU (°C), 73 Max CPU (°C), 68 Avg GPU (°C), 71 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10 | Ryzen 7 250 | RTX 5060 (115 W)	58 Avg CPU (°C), 71 Max CPU (°C), 59 Avg GPU (°C), 72 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | Core Ultra 9 386H | RTX 5080 (125 W)	92 Avg CPU (°C), 100 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 87 Max GPU (°C)

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max does run very hot on Extreme Performance mode (and, as an aside, still pretty damn hot in Balanced mode). That's especially the case for its Core Ultra 7 251HX CPU.

This laptop is indeed particularly toasty. This obviously helps in the performance department, but don't expect it to win any efficiency medals. 104 °C for the max CPU temp is hot, as is 84 °C for the GPU, though the new MSI Stealth runs a little hotter on that front.

That being said, during all my time gaming, I didn't notice my fingers getting too hot on WASD, and given the performance is so good, I doubt the high temps indicate too much throttling.

The Crosshair can get pretty loud in Extreme Performance mode, which these benchmarks were taken in. However, as with the new Stealth, this Crosshair's fans don't sound grating at all. You just get a pleasant, loud whoosh. Though it will make it difficult to hear your game through the speakers if you're opting for built-in audio.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W aesthetics

I don't have a ton of praise for the way this laptop looks, unfortunately. It's not awful, just not my particular cup of tea. There's a splash of the old-fashioned, angular, gamer-y look to it, but it only leans kind of half-heartedly in that direction, which ultimately means it looks a little confused about what it wants to be overall.

You're getting some funky RGB lighting on the keys, including a translucent WASD if that's your jam, and you're also getting the logo on the lid which lights up and a particularly angular design on the underside, but the rest of the chassis is plain. To be honest, I'd rather it leaned in one direction or the other: gamer-y, or subtle. Still, it's far from an outrageous design and doesn't offend my aesthetic sensibilities too much.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W software

The main bloatware on this laptop is Norton antivirus, which I'd personally promptly uninstall just because Microsoft Defender is fine and Norton, in my historical opinion, can be a bit of a pain.

Apart from that, you get MSI Center to control all the settings such as lighting and performance modes. You can install a bunch more modules to fiddle with different settings if you wish, but I just stuck with those and the default system info and options pages. It runs well and isn't too difficult to navigate once you get used to it, but it definitely feels like a 'set it and leave it' kind of software that you don't need to load up very often.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W battery life

Battery life

Testing how long the battery lasts in Balanced mode, medium brightness, Wi-Fi disconnected, in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test.

PCMark 10

MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W)

72

MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI)

101

Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot

109

Framework 16

131

Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10

89

MSI Stealth 16 AI+

104

037.575112.5150

PCMark 10 Data

Product	Value
MSI Crosshair 16 Max (E2W)	72
MSI Crosshair 16 HX (AI)	101
Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot	109
Framework 16	131
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen10	89
MSI Stealth 16 AI+	104

The MSI Crosshair 16 Max perhaps unsurprisingly doesn't do very well when it comes to battery life. It seems oriented around eking out as much performance as possible from its CPU and GPU, without much care for efficiency.

You probably already expected this given the laptop ekes out as much performance as it can from its components, not to mention that it runs mighty hot, but battery life is not great. This isn't a laptop for those of you who primarily want to game while out and about using battery power, but for short sessions or light work it's fine unplugged.

The RTX 5080-boasting MSI Stealth laptop I tested has a 90 Wh battery and lasted for 104 minutes in a gaming battery life benchmark, whereas this one has an 80 Wh battery and lasted for just 72 minutes. That's 31% less time up and running, and less than a bunch of other RTX 5070 laptops we've tested.

MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX E2W Value

You're looking at about $2,600 for the 32 GB version of this—$2,000 on offer—and I can't see the 16 GB version that I tried for sale anywhere. Looking at some of the best deals on gaming laptops right now, that $2,600 is pretty expensive for an RTX 5070 machine.

On the one hand, this isn't a corner-cutting machine, as you're getting a lovely OLED panel and some very convincing performance that pushes the CPU and GPU as far as possible. But on the other hand, even $2,000 on sale is a lot for an RTX 5070 machine, even during a memory shortage. You can often pick similar but non-OLED gaming laptops up for well under $1,500 on sale.

As such, unless and until there are bigger discounts on it, I don't think the price tag fits what's on offer. If the normal retail price were a couple hundred lower and the discount price was a couple hundred lower, too, I would consider it for the OLED panel and great performance.

But as it stands, it's a tough sell, especially if you want any kind of battery or thermal efficiency, or just a laptop that looks a little more dashing. Not to mention one that doesn't suffer from audio latency issues. Considering performance alone it's a great machine, but the price is not quite right.

35 hours into The Blood of Dawnwalker I'd already witnessed the aftermath of many barbaric slayings and village razings. I'd cleared out a site of industrial-scale slaughter, and partaken in an obscene medieval take on The Running Man. I'd sucked countless kiloliters of blood from humans, rats and monsters alike. But somehow, this exceptionally morbid horror RPG still had another novel way to make me wince.

I was exploring the depths of a troll-infected cave deep in the Carpathians. Coen of Laslea—me, the player-character—and his sketchy companion were looking for someone important. I hardly expected them to be living well, but the way I found them, pinned to a wall and half-consumed, exceeded my expectations for mainstream videogame cruelty.

For two years this human-shaped creature had been constantly eaten alive by grotesque kobalds. By dint of being a vampire, their flesh always grew back. They were a wall-mounted, self-replenishing feast of human meat, lost in a network of caves where they were unlikely to ever be found.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is one of the best blockbuster action RPGs I've played for years, probably since Elden Ring, but it's unrelentingly violent and bleak to the point of sometimes being unintentionally funny. There is no hope in Rebel Wolves' blood-slurried take on 1300s Romania, where brutal feudalism has been supplanted by populist vampirism. The Witcher 3 feels like daytime melodrama by comparison. I respect its severity, but I did yearn for a gutful of the Transylvanian white wine crowding my inventory.

Eerie vrakhiri

When we meet him, Coen is an everyman peasant working the land in Laslea. Years ago, Skender Dragosti, the murderous lord who formerly ruled over Laslea and the greater Vale Sangora region, had been conquered by Brencis, a century-old warfaring vrakhir, or vampire, sick of watching all that blood go to waste.

Brencis is not as outwardly cruel as Skender but his manner of industrially harvesting the blood of Sangora's peasants is frowned upon by some, while for others it's a reasonable price to pay for the execution of their former oppressor. But when the slightest hint of resistance is detected in Laslea, Brencis and his men swoop on the village, raze it, and abduct Coen's family. The Blood of Dawnwalker is about trying to get them back and, to varying degrees depending on your choices and temperament, also taking the fight to the vrakhiri.

Which is easier than it might otherwise be for a peasant, because Coen soon becomes a Dawnwalker: vampire by night and regular human by day. In this way, Rebel Wolves has its cake and eats it too. Coen can fight with swords at all times, but witchcraft and vampire powers can only be used by day and night respectively. He doesn't need to cower in the shadows at sundown. He's a very versatile bloodsucker.

It's great fun to slay Brencis' men. Coen's swordplay is similar to Kingdom Come's directional approach: I have to pay attention to how my foe is swinging all the better to block in that direction, and then exploit any weakness this opens up. This can be gruelling in the realism-focused Kingdom Come, but it's much more approachable here, thanks to an icon signalling every incoming move that's visible no matter how close or far the enemy is (this can be toggled off at higher difficulties).

It's also more approachable because I can trigger hectic waves of spectral crows in between strikes, or warp behind my enemies to suck their blood and replenish my health. I can boil the Brencis' blood, temporarily extract their souls, scream at them until they're immobile, or possess them, all the better to turn them to my side.

Like The Witcher 3 before it, The Blood of Dawnwalker borrows a lot from the quietly radical combat approach taken by Rocksteady's Batman games. Like Geralt of Rivia, Coen "sticks" to and circle-strafes his primary target, but unlike Geralt of Rivia, Coen's swordplay is precision-oriented and gratifying, albeit maybe a little too easy for hardened players. The lock on system can be imprecise—it's always a pain on rare occasions when I want to choose an enemy rather than let the targeting choose for me—but I actually went out of my way to fight people and monsters, rather than avoid conflict like I thought I would (and which I mostly can't, anyway). It helps that Coen's skill trees are riddled with some truly overpowered delights.

Days gone

But it takes time to hone these skills, not to mention all the other minor and major perks and buffs in each of Dawnwalker's three skill trees. And time is framed as a crucial currency in The Blood of Dawnwalker. Coen's days are separated into 16 units of time, and nearly everything I do—from completing major quests through to levelling up my bloodsucking prowess—spends one or more units.

And my quest is urgent: Brencis' coronation occurs in 30 days, and that's my deadline for saving my family. After that they're done for. Little wonder I don't want to fetch slivovitz for one of my dad's old war mates.

This pressure feels overwhelming at first. Should I prioritise assassinating Brencis' three vassals, all the better to weaken the regime for a (presumed) final showdown? Is it really a good idea to spend my time doing the bidding of local witch and love interest Anca? As Dawnwalker's early hours wore on, a handful of other urgencies emerged to complicate how Coen should spend his precious time, not least the fact that some tasks can only be completed by day or night.

The concept is similar to Persona and Majora's Mask, but the way it's implemented is the glue holding Dawnwalker's jumble of familiar components neatly together. It encourages a more tactical approach to questing than I'm used to in action RPGs: I often found myself browsing my journal and plotting out how I'd make the next couple of days matter. This didn't always involve heroics. For example, by day I'd buy up manuals from nine-to-five vendors, all the better to learn new skills, because spending skill points passes time. By night, with my vampiric shadowstep ability, I could access rooftops or cliff shelves inaccessible to mortals. Sometimes my plans would be waylaid by the sudden emergence of a time sensitive problem.

The calendar system sure does apply urgency to Coen's task, at least at first. Urgency is almost always baked into the narrative of blockbuster RPGs, but it's problematic to reflect that urgency in actual gameplay systems. Sure I want to save the world, and sure I want for my actions to matter. But I'd also like to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much. There’s a reason the Pathologic games remain a niche concern.

Rebel Wolves tries to sidestep this problem in a couple of ways. First, the player is always amply warned before embarking on a time-spending activity: I can waste as many IRL hours as I like harvesting St John's-wort and the position of the sun or moon won't change. It takes me knowingly triggering the passage of time for my precious hours to be spent.

Second, the pressure is largely illusory. By day 20 my Coen felt virtually unbeatable, and I had a small handful of promising ways to take the fight to Brencis. Maybe I could have fetched that old bastard his slivovitz after all.

But illusory or not—and it'll likely depend on how much you drag your feet—the calendar system does give Dawnwalker a greater sense of choice and consequence than most of its big budget action contemporaries. It's largely up to me how I'm going to save my family, when I'll do it, in which order I'll take measures to make it easier, or if I'll bother at all. But I can't deny it was deflating to discover that all my careful clock strategising was ultimately for nothing: pretty much everything of any importance can be tied up well before the 30 day deadline, with lots of frivolous traipsing around to boot.

Despite this, it feels like Rebel Wolves learned the right lessons from Breath of the Wild or, before it, Gothic: Dawnwalker provides an explicit goal and then gestures vaguely at its world. Completing quests can either teach or strengthen Coen, but he has to find them first, and this is where players' experiences may vary. I was on day 21, and pretty much ready to stick it to Brencis, when a colleague let slip that there was a major companion whose presence and attendant quest had eluded me for 30 hours.

Quests vary in size and interest. Some are long and winding; others amount to "kill these guys" or "follow these glowing yellow hints to an encounter". I definitely got sick of searching for yellow hints, just as I did rotating an object for points of revelatory interest. But I never got sick of fighting, nor did I ever lose interest in the Vale of Sangora itself.

All in vein

Maybe I'm just a sucker for European miserablism, but The Blood of Dawnwalker's valley of bloodletting is one of my favourite open worlds since The Witcher 3. Its take on 1300s Romania is subtly daubed with fantasy, but like CD Projekt, Rebel Wolves has a knack for gorgeously downcast panoramas. Though Coen can move at lightning speed by dint of his vampire powers (by night he can even transform into a galloping wolf), I often found myself slow-walking the fir forest backroads and alpine highlands of Sangora, taking in sights reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's landscape paintings or the covers of Tolkien-themed black metal albums. Though it’s not immune to open world busywork, Dawnwalker at least knows its open world needs to feel like a world and not a sandbox of mini-games. It’s a place I inhabited, rather than a map I traversed towards quests and rewards.

And like The Witcher 3, Rebel Wolves keeps a tighter leash on its fantastical leanings than most fantasy studios. Supernatural themes regularly puncture the bleak and rugged realism—this is, of course, a vampire game—but the fantasy elements only serve to emphasise the humdrum nastiness of the Sangora peasants' lot: this is a world of hand-to-mouth poverty, tyrannous cruelty and materialised superstition. The latter almost feels like a delirious symptom of the former. I highly doubt Dawnwalker is an authentic rendering of 1300s peasant life in Romania or elsewhere, but it is determined to capture the phantasmagoric mystery of pre-enlightenment, and the horror and indignity of an oppressed people, without resorting to folksiness or misplaced nostalgia.

Boy, is this an unremittingly pessimistic experience. Choices are almost invariably between two evils. Quests move inexorably towards bad or worse endings. Rarely did I ever select a dialogue option with complete confidence that it was the right or magnanimous thing to say. In fact, by the end, I had my Coen acting very much at odds with how I envisioned him in the early hours. My allegiances—or rather, my notion of who was the worst of various competing evils—were in constant flux. I experienced three endings (there are more) and not one of them offered any hope.

And this is what I admire most about The Blood of Dawnwalker. In the opening hours it clocks as an almost on-the-nose allegory for 20th century European history—Brencis equals incoming communism, Skender equals outgoing monarchy—but by the end it registers as a more universally human story about the vile extremes of power, the powerlessness of its subjects, and the latter's susceptibility to persuasion when nothing feels real except tragedy and toil. It's also—and I find myself sometimes forgetting this aspect entirely—a vampire story. None of its narrative components are especially original, but they cohere into something viscerally affecting. There is no morally righteous way to solve the problems of this world.

It's a very well optimised game too. On my unimpressive system I was generally able to stick to 60 fps on low at 1080p, and even at these settings I found Dawnwalker gorgeous.

Life drain

It's understandable to feel exhausted after playing Dawnwalker, despite its relatively modest 40 hour runtime. It can be so doggedly miserable that you just have to laugh at it, and I did laugh occasionally, but not for the rare and minor sparks of light. When these occur, it feels like being shaken from a disturbing dream. I mostly laughed for shock at its audacity. There are no heroes here. Everything, always, sucks. I learned nothing, but I felt a lot.

Blood of Dawnwalker is an effective piece of worldbuilding and storytelling then, but it doesn't make good on its promise as an innovative piece of RPG design. Maybe Rebel Wolves worried that too many players would fall afoul of the passage of time and thus loosened its severity. Certainly, the prologue implies a greater role for this system than what eventuates. In the end, Dawnwalker doesn't have the courage to allow this system to show its fangs. I feel like if it did, we’d have a modern classic on our hands.

It also suffers some commonplace open world trappings. There are lots of icons denoting almost identical tasks. There are Ubisoft-style towers to scale. The freedom of fast travel tends to diminish the scale of the world with time (why doesn't fast travel incur a time cost?).

But I mention these shortcomings out of a sense of almost begrudging responsibility: despite its obvious indebtedness to The Witcher, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a distinctly dismal horror RPG whose unyielding darkness and sense of benighted adventure will leave more of an impression than any of its flaws. I hope this series gets the chance to return with a fiercer appetite for my blood.

This is, of course, ridiculous: In truth Musashi first parried dozens of Ganryu's strikes, softened him up with a flourish of reflex combos, and then ran him through with the Flashing Void, a spear harnessed from the power of lightning in an ancient demonic hellforge. He was perhaps a bit too modest to recount the more baroque details of the battle in his memoirs, but blessedly Capcom is less bashful.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword whips ass.

I've been told that two words don't qualify as a review, though, so let's talk caveats. I'd put the action in this long, long-awaited reboot up against the best Capcom's ever made, though it's spread out across a 10K that should be a sprint. It begins with a foundation of weighty swordplay that made me feel the muscle and bone behind each strike, and eventually challenged me to parry increasingly ostentatious bosses with a patience and precision I haven't exercised since Sekiro. The reward each and every time was the exhilaration of locking in and nailing the timing, graduating from a quick game over to a calm, clean execution.

Well, not that calm—other than the adrenaline a few of Onimusha's harder fights left pulsing in my hypothalamus, this game sets itself apart from FromSoftware's taciturn tone with a swagger reminiscent of early 2000s Capcom. One of its great strengths is the use of legendary actor Toshiro Mifune's likeness as Musashi, an act of digital necromancy that could've easily left a rotten stink if it wasn't handled precisely this deftly. But it doesn't just work, it makes the game.

I loved Onimusha's lavishly animated cutscenes just as much as the combat: Musashi is brash, fiery, and incredibly expressive, tilting his head with a cocky boast, cartoonishly gawping at monsters, contorting his whole face into a snarl when he gets his blood up. A throwaway moment where he scratches the back of his head exactly like the real Mifune does so much to make Way of the Sword feel like an homage to bloody '70s samurai flicks down to its bones.

Onimusha needed to nail that authenticity, because the dozen samurai roles I've seen Mifune in add up to significantly less screen time than the 35-odd hours I spent finishing the story and a healthy chunk of sidequests. Too long? Yep! Unfortunately the Capcom that made Resident Evil 9 and Pragmata lean, briskly paced adventures wasn't talking to the Capcom that thought Onimusha needed a dull hub world, grindy crafting materials and bosses that show up for an encore to an encore to an encore well after I stopped applauding.

Kyoto drift

There's a distinct whiff of modern videogame bloat to Way of the Sword compared to the tight 3 ½ and 8 ½ hours of the now-vintage Onimusha 1&2. It spends its first third steadily introducing new combat mechanics and devoting quite a bit of time to how a young, not-yet-famous Musashi finds himself wearing a magic gauntlet that absorbs the souls of the demonic Genma trying to move into east Kyoto. The initial pacing means it's slow to really show its teeth, though I found that a nice change from the soulslikes that are now legion.

Onimusha wants you to feel cool from the start: Duels with the basic Genma tend to feel more empowering than challenging, which narratively dovetails nicely with Musashi's gauntlet steroids but means only boss fights really allow the swordplay to shine until the midgame.

In between major plot beats that whisk Musashi off to new environments like a bamboo grove and a sunset-drenched mountain fortress, there's busywork to do in feudal Kyoto. And it sure is bogged down by dreary, muddy streets that immediately blur together. There are engaging moments here and there when a trinket on the other side of a wall enticed me to find a ladder that led to a hidden crawlspace to a gate I could unlock from the inside, but these detours never really rose above the bar of not outright boring.

Kyoto mostly exists as a vessel for upgrade materials, scattered in plain sight and squirreled away in corners that are occasionally more fun to track down. These items and the gangs of Genma roving the streets respawn periodically, which ended up reinforcing how insignificant most of my time spent in Kyoto felt. Same with the trifling basic sidequests, delivered by nameless NPCs that give you an icon on the map; there's not even an attempt to offer hints for you to puzzle out a location yourself.

Oni-curious

You can sense the nervousness behind this whole side of the game: that players needed something to keep them playing longer, so how about collecting dozens and dozens of pieces of leather and iron to upgrade the stats on their gear 2% at a time? What about an exciting boss that gets some new moves the second time, and then really drags down the pacing each time you fight it again? Even Capcom seemed to know it didn't nail the balance here, considering how many times the writers have Musashi grumble about having to fight someone he's already whooped.

Strip out 90% of the upgrade economy and corresponding time spent in Kyoto and Onimusha: Way of the Sword would be a much leaner game. And a better one, with just a brisk hour or so of scraps in between showstopper bosses.

What saves Kyoto from being a total waste are the Curious Cases, a fancier set of sidequests delivered to Musashi by poet Lady Murasaki, a pioneering 11th century author.

These vignettes are a touch more involved, calling on a recurring cast of Kyoto's citizens to deliver morbidly funny Japanese fables. Each concludes with Murasaki commenting on the story as she writes them into legend. I rarely go digging into a menu to read up on extra lore, but I devoured every bit of it in Onimusha—the care put into the mythology does so much to make this feel like a jidaigeki historical drama as much as an action game. There are only a handful of Curious Cases in the whole game, yet they each left more of an impression on me than any sidequest I encountered in 25 hours with last year's Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Sword is life

Onimusha's crafting-driven bloat would've annoyed me more if every boss that awaited wasn't such a thrill to take down. The heavy clank of steel-on-steel and the way the camera pivots around Musashi as he redirects the enemy's blade in a shower of sparks was still triggering something primal within me 30 hours in. (Should I buy a sword? Surely a katana would fix me.)

The elegance of the combat is that each duel demands the same thing—precisely parrying a few times to build up a "burning" meter for your blade to deal more damage, then using the deflect technique, an extra button press with slightly more generous timing, to sap the enemy's stamina and deliver a critical hit—but executing that plan is never so simple. When I fumbled my parry timing and blocked instead, bosses punished me by smashing my own stamina meter, turning the fight into an oh shit oh hell panic.

Take one of the minibosses that Onimusha reheats three too many times: Byakue, a demon carrying a giant axe whose entire body is covered in ofuda talismans. When Byakue broke my guard, its axe split in half to reveal a jagged maw that sucked down souls and sent it into a primal rage. I learned to start watching for new moves in that state: a grab where it used its flowing paper-flesh mane to bludgeon me, and an explosive slam that caused the earth to erupt with poisonous Malice.

Where other action games like Nioh ask you to nail multiple complex button inputs in the heat of the moment to parry, recover stamina, and swap sword stances, Onimusha's happy to keep swordplay simpler mechanically but more cinematically rewarding. Crossing blades will either prompt you to mash the attack quickly to overpower your enemy or to lock into a brief minigame of alternating light and heavy attacks until you outmaneuver them and deliver a vicious blow; both moves are easy but look and feel badass thanks to the detailed physics and animations that send enemies staggering or leave them bisected anime-style, crown to jewels.

What this Onimusha does differently from every other game of its kind is embrace the physicality of the brawl. The way Musashi braces for an impact; the way he shifts to an overhead strike for a heavy attack that's easy for enemies to sidestep if you don't lead with a lighter horizontal swipe; the way walls and boards you can pry off the ground are an opportunity to deal quick and ruthless stagger damage. Way of the Sword toys with the idea of making these physics interactions its specialty, but it never really commits to them, with boss fights mostly falling back on more straightforward 'git gud' tests of patience and timing. It leaves a lot on the table for a sequel to build on, but even with their full potential unrealized the physics still make Musashi feel like he has a body. Literally built different, etc.

Strategic complexity comes mostly from the secondary weapons, Musashi's Oni Armaments; most of them play a key role, from peeling health or power souls off an enemy to smashing half their stamina meter in a single hit. It's so tempting to wait to use these until the perfect moment, but holding onto that meter just a little too long risks a boss getting in a clean hit and stealing the souls for themselves. It's a dance of patience and aggression that was still tripping me up when I had a boss down to the last 10% of their health, then suddenly lost my rhythm and was dead seconds later.

There's a fantastic clarity to all of the action: you could teach a Videogames 101 course using the boss attack patterns (tricky, but always learnable) in Way of the Sword, and the instant post-meter burn regret of popping too early. This is the kind of stuff Capcom's designers have excelled at for decades, just with a bit more emphasis on patience and timing than usual.

The panache and silliness of old Onimusha still comes through in much of the character design, too—just wait for the boss who's basically a demigod rockstar riffing on the Japanese high school delinquent trope, exaggerated pompadour and all.

Samurai spirit

I was pleased by how beautifully this action ran on my 9070 XT, often hitting 120 fps with all the settings turned up and AMD FSR4 set to quality. Other than brief hitches when loading or transitioning between cutscenes, performance is fantastic. And I think this is the best-looking RE Engine game Capcom's made when it comes to the facial animations, art direction and cutscenes—which makes it an extra shame that so much of the game takes place in a perpetually overcast, muddy Kyoto. Truly a baffling choice.

A shorter, more linear Onimusha with less time spent picking up boring junk would've truly been all killer no filler—but even with the filler, it's going to be a strong contender for the best combat of the year. But that's a box I really expected Capcom to check from the moment it brought Onimusha back to life.

More impressive is the lengths to which it goes to live up to Toshiro Mifune's resurrection. This series started with the fun but shallow premise of digitizing a famous actor as a samurai. Way of the Sword asks how to imbue that idea with purpose: What if the emotional core of the story revolved around Musashi's fabled journey from arrogant vagabond to a noble warrior? What if one of the other figures it plucked from history was the inventor of Kabuki, at this point a ferocious young girl who cares more about the people of Kyoto than Musashi does? What if the big bad, another famous Japanese warrior, was an absolute motherfucker? This is the most fun I've had with a game's alternate history since Command & Conquer Red Alert's campy FMVs, and pushes the game up a tier from period action game to proper period piece. Bring on Way of the Two Swords with haste.

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.