Gigabyte AORUS AD27QD Review - Strongly Accelerated 1440p

it's Adam here for PC monitors and in this video I'm going to be taking a look at the gigabyte horas ad to 7qd as usual this video accompanies a more detailed written review you can find a link to that in the description of the video alongside information about how you can support the work that we do as usual remember that this video does not represent exactly what the monitor will look like first hand what you see on the video depends on my camera it depends on the processing done by my video editing software by YouTube and ultimately the screen that you're actually viewing the video on this monitor uses a 27 inch IPS type panel one from inner looks and this has a two 560 by one 440 resolution and a 144 Hertz of fresh rate so the panel is a bit different to what most of the other competing models use and they use in AU Optronics a hva panel this resolution delivers a nice pixel density so images games suitably high resolution content looks quite nice and crisp when we start super-high by modern standards not UHD of this kind of size or anything like that but it certainly is a nice upgrade from full HD on a monitor of this kind of size or even a bit smaller it also gives you a useful amount of desktop real estate so lots of useful work area to play with or to work with if you prefer I always like to comment on the screen surface as well quite early on in my videos this is because it's something I see is very important it's certainly important to some users because a gray nice clean surface bothers some users and indeed having a nice light screen surface with a smooth texture can improve the perceived clarity and vibrancy of the image that's really very important and it's something that many reviewers just gloss over no pun intended this monitor uses a light matte anti-glare screen surface and this has quite a smooth finish to the screen so it doesn't have an overly grainy look when you're observing lighter shades actually looks quite smooth it's a sort of a little little bit of a graininess if you look carefully but this is really quite slight and it's not something that most users are going to notice so the overall clarity and vibrancy is preserved nicely I'm going to talk about the external features of the monitor so the master has quite an angular look to it it actually reminds me of some of the more recent ASA predator models has a sort of penguin foot design it's quite angular has lots of sharp angles and the central horas logo it's shiny silver I don't find it distracting I don't really notice it when I'm just using the monitor normally it's a little power led beneath that and there's a joystick at the bottom which controls the OSD so the power light and the OSD menu system are explored in the OSD video the bottom bezel is moderately thick and that's a matte black plastic but the bottom and side bezels have a dual stage vessel design so they have a very thin hard outer component or a slender hard out component when I say very thin I don't mean it's fragile or anything like that it's just a common design used by monitors now and with the so called three side borderless design so when the monitor switched off as it is now you can see the panel border blends in quite nicely there is a very thin panel border and when we want to switched on you can see that around the image and then there's a slender hard out component of plastic outside of that the screen surface is like matte anti-glare so that offers good glare handling whilst retaining a good level of clarity and vibrancy to the image you can't see some sort of soft reflections if you have a sharp angle and you in a bright room like I am now but it doesn't have that kind of mirror-like look that a glossy monitor has and in terms of reflection so it certainly offers better glare handling than that stand offers could ergonomic flexibility so you can just the height of the monitor you can swivel it left and right you can also tilt the screen backwards and forwards a little bit and you can rotate the monitor clockwise into portrait at the side the monitors reasonably slender at least the screen itself is at the thinnest point but lumps out centrally where the robust stand attaches so I so DV economic flexibility it's also a robust design as powder coated metal at the bottom so it's got a good weight base section of it and the neck itself is quite thick and the adjustments are nice and smooth I didn't have any issue adjusting the monitor which is why I was able to show you the adjustability just with one hand there isn't anything more really to note from the side except that there is a glossy black region here there's one on the other side as well and that actually has part of the RGB LED lighting feature and that's explored in the OSD video there's also further aspects of that lighting feature to note from the rear which I'll go through shortly at the rear of the martyr it's mainly matte black plastic but there are some glossy elements as glossy elements are again related to the RGB lighting feature you don't really see them on the monitors off and but when the feature is enabled as I show you in the OSD video and certainly when the room is darker you can see them there's also a dull central Oris Falken logo there which also lights up as part of the RGB lighting feature and that can be controlled using software if you've got the USB cable connected and you've got the appropriate software installed I think it's called RGB fusion 2.0 that's the current version anyway as a carrying handle at the top of the stand there and as a cable tidy loop towards the bottom the ports of the monitor are down firing so I've got the monitor in portrait orientation at the moment so I can show you them more clearly there's an AC power input which means the monitor has an int your power converter there is a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack 3.5 millimeter microphone jack 2 HDMI 2.0 ports and they support HDR capability and also 144 Hertz up to 144 Hertz I should say at the native 2560 by 1/4 40 wqhd resolution they also offer adaptive sync specifically support for AMD freesync on compatible GPUs and systems there's DisplayPort 1.2 a which supports adaptive sync and that includes AMD freesync support on compatible GPUs and systems and also support for Nvidia g-sync compatible mode on compatible systems there is a USB 3 upstream port and 2 USB 3 stream ports there's also a Kensington lock slot just there a security feature and something I didn't show you at the rear the monitor attaches using a proprietary bracket mechanism if you pinch those areas there you can take the included stand off and they were 100 by 100 millimeter vesser holes so you can use an alternative mount if you prefer I'm now gonna in shadow of the Tomb Raider and I'm going to talk about the contrast performance of the monitor this monitor as i've mentioned uses an IPS type panel so the static contrast is not amazing I mean it's not amazing compared to some VA models for example but it's not too bad on this model as far as the panel type goes at all the static contrast I recorded was around 1200 to 1 it was pretty similar to that even after the adjustments made to my test settings so as far as the power type goes really quite decent of course one thing that I PS type panels are known for IPS glow that does feature on this monitor there's a moderate amount of it I should mention that the camera does tend to exaggerate this quite a bit compared to what I say to my eye you can see it towards the corners particularly the bottom left corner on the video and a bit to the wall to the bottom right as well depending on the content it sort of blooms out a bit more on the video than I can notice to my eye in this particular environment my room lighting but either way it's definitely there there's a moderate amount of it and doesn't eat away at some detail in those regions sort of sucks wait the atmosphere this game title does have a lot of dark scenes such as this where strong contrast performance certainly enhances the experience and I wouldn't say this model delivers a particularly atmospheric sort of experience on scenes as such as this but still the Pointer elements there the fire there does stand out nicely compared to the darker background and a nice thing about IPS type panels like this is they have very good gamma consistency and the gamma tracking is very close to 2 point 2 essentially certainly was on my unit as I've got it set up at the moment so that means that subtle details such as the brickwork there it's pretty even throughout the screen a bit less at the regions covered by the IPS glow as I mentioned before but certainly for the central bulk of the screen it's good and it doesn't have this issue with TN models where if you observe higher up the screen you get obvious crushing of dark details that everything just looks crushed together too dark and because the perceived gamma it's far too high so you lose a lot of this detail whereas lower down things look really quite washed out and there's far too much detail and that couldn't even lead to what some people describe as banding or sort of little artifacts on the image things that should really be quite well masked by the screen sort of come out so this model doesn't have any of those issues but it does have the IPS glow as I mentioned the screen surface it's nice and smooth and light matte anti glare so it doesn't have any obnoxious graininess just a slight amount of graininess if you've got a keen eye for that kind of thing so most users would find this just fine I'm not going to talk about the color reproduction of the monitor and as usual I like to start the section off by looking at blue gone that's Lagoon NL the website because this has a really nice tests for showing weaknesses or strengths in color consistency being an IPS type panel the expectation is that performance in this area is good and indeed it is on this model so the text test looks a blended grey throughout there isn't really any obvious hints of green or red to the striking of the text and so on a TN model you'd get an obvious gradient shift between sort of green orange and red depending on whichever screen you're looking at and that's from a normal viewing position and if you move your head there'd be some of your shifts VA models as well they kind of have a central cone where it's more blended and then around that there might be more pronounced saturation so this model is far more consistent in terms of its gamma handling and in terms of its viewing angle performance so the purple block here that looks a blueish purple throughout that's a bit of a pink cube that's pretty consistent throughout the screen really there aren't any regions which have a much stronger pink hue than others the red block disappears a good solid red throughout again there aren't really any issues with some areas looking more saturated and some less saturated and some more sort of pinkish burnt red the kind of things you might observe on non-ips type panels or even some weaker IPS type panels so there aren't any issues there if you move your head slightly things remain nice and consistent there is a video looking at viewing angle performance from sharper viewing angles and even I guess type models still have some weaknesses there so if you sort of looking at extreme angles yes there are shifts certainly contrast shifts and perceived saturation shifts there but from sort of a normal range of viewing position with a bit of head movement no real issues there the green block it's a nice solid green throughout nice vibrant green it's actually less of a yellow-green than many monitors would display and that's because the color gamut is rather generous on this model and there aren't any regions that concern me in terms of being sort of extra yellow in their hue and again that's much stronger than what you'd see on non-ips type panels a blue block as usual pretty consistent blue you can get some sort of non-uniformity here based on backlight uniformity issues and that does vary between individual units so some units of this model may have that and on battlefield 5 so I can show you some in-game examples of color reproduction and talk about that I like this particular scene and also other scenes set in this location on the game because there's some really nice vibrant shades which highlight monitors with strong vibrancy potential very nicely and this model certainly does offer a vibrant and varied output for the colors and that's partly because the color gamut offers generous extension beyond srgb so that means that the content like this and any typical games anything really that's SDR content it's designed with the sRGB color space in mind typically and this is far more restrictive than the gamut that this model has and that means that when you're viewing this srgb style content if you like it's mapped onto a much larger gamut and essentially these saturation levels are higher and things look more vibrant as a result but because everything remains nicely spaced out on the gamut that isn't compressed together it's very different to the kind of look you'd get if you were to increase saturation digitally for example using Nvidia digital vibrance so all that does is that pull shades close to the edge of the garment without expanding the gamut itself so your most saturated shades are actually determined at the edge of the gamut and that's not expanded you're not technically getting any extra saturation for the most extremely saturated shades but what you're getting is shades that are less saturated or made more saturated it pulls close to the edge of the gamut and I kind of just crushes things together on this model the government's expanded so the most saturated shades are even more saturated and the less saturated shades maintain their distance from these most saturated shades so you maintain that variety it doesn't have the look either that traditional wide gamut displays have with Adobe RGB gamuts and they tend to have massive extension in the green region of the gamut but in the red and blue they correspond roughly to srgb or very closely to srgb if they're very strictly following Adobe RGB and this really does gives a skew of the image which this model fortunately doesn't have this model actually offers 95% dcpip three color gamut coverage and that comes into play for HDR which I'll discuss shortly the first your content like this really nice vibrant look there's a lot of nice rich reds but there's also lots of autumnal orangie hues and oven energy Browns and a nice pallet of mixed greens and golden browns and as I've mentioned that the shade varieties maintained it's not all crushed together so that's really nice some users really like this kind of look and it's a look that people have become accustomed to with smartphones even having quite a generous color gum at these days laptops or the devices like that as well so it's sort of a look that people kind of come to expect and it's looks very far from washed out but it doesn't look cartoonish in my opinion either the sky is well nicely saturated I mean if you're going to be critical and of course some users do prefer things to look sort of more natural in their saturation and more accurate more as the developers intended then yes there are some elements which are clearly more savvy than they should be so the sort of woody hues here they've got too much of a red hue and you get this with some patches of earth and other areas of this game and other games they tend to sort of have more of a red hue than they shouldn't rather than a more neutral brown color and some of the greens as well they look kind of a bit sort of bright and saturated they should look a bit more muted a bit duller but again some people like this look others don't personal preference really now within the game in HDR high dynamic range and I'm going to talk about the HDR performance of the monitor this monitor is VESA HDR 400 compliant and that's actually the lowest level of lesser certification that vests will certify for I have to say and I'm not going to spend too long going through this section I will give you some more examples and other games as well specifically shadow of the Tomb Raider but I'm not massively impressed with the HDR performance of this monitor I mean I didn't expect miracles besa HDR 400 is not really going to be true HDR experience by any stretch of the imagination but I do know from this model and what I've said already you should know that the Aconitum at 95% DCI p3 that actually extends far beyond the standard required for VESA HDR 400 so in that respect this monitor does take a big box however the way it's been implemented here I don't really like it it basically just looks quite dull and again this might not come out on the video certainly looks less saturated then without HDR and it should and certainly some elements should but there's really some obvious lack of vibrancy in places now one thing about the HDR on this model which is a little bit curious is he have full capability to change all of your settings like gamma and various other things gamma brightness as well so I've got my test setting brightness set to 23 far too dull for HDR really if you want anything approaching the kind of real HDR experience for the bright shades you're really looking at a brightness level of a hundred but when you do that things still just looks sort of dull now if you change the gamma setting the gamma for it sort of makes things look far too deep it does get rid of some of the dulling it sort of increases saturation in depth but it just goes too far and things just look quite wrong on the plus side some of the saturation I mentioned before some of the over done saturation for example the woody hues they're sort of earthy brown hues as well and the green of the bush there it kind of has more of a neutral hue doesn't have that kind of reddish hue actually has quite a nice rich earthy brown quality and the green there it has a good kind of slightly golden but quite deep and natural-looking green hue rather than looking at sort of overdone yellow so in that respect that's quite good but really the sort of most saturated shades should pop more than they do and this is under HDR the reason for that is that it's the DCI p3 color gamut that's targeted for HDR content like this so it's more appropriately in line with the actual gamut of this monitor and that can mean that so that means that the sort of extra saturation can be toned down where the developers want it but the developers when there producing HDR content like this they also want some vibrant elements and really the sort of lush red hues there aren't as vibrant as they should be at all and although there aren't any particular examples here flames on this game as well they just don't have that kind of vibrant quality they should and it just doesn't sort of stand out in the way it should so in many respects the color reproduction is sort of a bit of a bit of a miss really has good capability for HDR in terms of the color gamut but it just doesn't really put to very good use note that these observations are using an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti I'm now on another scene and this particular scene I've used when I've looked at various other HDR models even invested especially our 400 models and I like this because it really sort of highlight some of the more saturated shades I was talking about so the fire here for example the red hues aren't really quite as strong as they could be it does have some fairly saturated and vibrant looking oranges although they would have a bit sort of too much yellow to them so they really stand out as they should the sort of autumnal colors as well some of them just look too flat I think the Reds are really does also a bit too subdued and some of the rich oranges as well aren't really quite as saturated as they should be things just look a bit flat overall and part of that could be not just the color gamut but the contrast performance of this monitor and how its implemented and the HDR is not particularly great and I'm going to come on to that using shadow of the Tomb Raider as an example I should mention that I am actually using an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti as I'm recording this section of the video and I've also tested this on a Radeon rx 580 and I noticed some differences and I will go through them towards the end of this section of the video I'm now going to shadow of the Tomb Raider under HDR I'm going to talk about the contrast performance primarily and how that applies under HDR I'm also going to talk a little bit more about color and related elements so again I wouldn't say things look exactly washed out in terms of the color reproduction I mean there are some fairly saturated green shades here they look quite decent but they just again they just sort of lack something they look a little bit flat and they just lack a bit of intensity even though the brightness of the monitor is on maximum a lot of skin that looks nice and neutral and that's something which is a bit better under HDR certainly her skin tone looks to red I wouldn't really say sunburn but a bit too tan than the SDR on this monitor but under HDR that's sort of corrected so that looks more appropriately saturated another key aspect of HDR is 10-bit color reproduction so this brings extra precision to the tone mapping this monitor and indeed the HDR pipeline does support 10 bit and I will say that the light streaming out of there for example it has a nice smooth gradient it won't come across in the video and it looks like a big ball of light but there are some good new once's there but it doesn't really have the sort of intensity it should under HDR and there isn't that contrast that there should be between these bright elements and the darker surroundings part of this is because this monitor doesn't have any local dimming so your ideal HDR display would be able to show really intense bright shades there a much deeper darker shades on the screen at the same time so that would make this scene look a lot more dynamic and a lot higher in the contrast and as shown here this model things kind of just look quite they flooded really quite bright but not super bright and the elements there don't stand out really as they should another thing I've noticed is the shadow detailing that's something which HDR displays even VESA display HDR 400 displays could be really impressive at showing for example the AOC Ag 273 QC X which I reviewed recently also the ASA X B 273 K which I reviewed recently now the ASA does have very low level of local dimming but this doesn't really help with what I'm talking about here so if you look at the greenery here for example there should be a much deeper look to the shadow details and the the dark areas there then there is on this model things just got quite flat as I mentioned before and it's same here this things just kind of look flat they don't look too dynamic at all the light shining off the leaf there should be much brighter than it is and the dark shadowy details should be much darker and of course I have got it running at full brightness now and it doesn't prove a bit in terms of the the depth and naturally if I reduce the backlight brightness as you might expect but things now just look really dull and not dynamic at all still so that's kind of improved the shadow depth but there still is a lack of nuanced shade variety and that's because the tone mapping doesn't seem to be very good the HDR implementation of the sponsor is not really great in that respect and that's something which was much better on the models I mentioned before which again better HDR 400 compatible but this monitor just doesn't really tick the box of appropriate tone mapping in my view this doesn't matter what refresh rate or what color signal you're using either I've tested various I'm running at 144 Hertz at the moment but I've tested this in depth using 120 Hertz 60 Hertz various different color signals in the control panel as well and in the graphics driver and it doesn't really deliver anything approaching the proper HDR experience some users may still like the look under hgr on this monitor and that's fair enough really I would say the HDR capability on this monitor is severely lacking overall now on battlefield 5 again and as promised I am just going to show you quite briefly HDR running on my AMD GPU my AMD Radeon rx 580 immediately I notice that the the colors are quite different there's still lots of muted shades these earthy Browns here have the reddish hue toned down compared to running the game in STR so that's good and those shades are supposed to look more muted and indeed they do the green there as well looks fairly muted it looks quite rich but it doesn't have the kind of yellow cast it hasn't STR but there are some really nice vibrant reddish orange brown shades where they're intended so the leaves here for example these autumnal colors stand out a lot more pleasantly than they do on the NVIDIA GPU and HDR this paint there as well the green paint is really vibrant in sales the red paint and also explosions you don't see too many of them on this particular scene but explosions and fire in general on this game much more pleasant they stand out much more clearly so essentially it looks more muted where it should look more muted and it looks more vibrant where it should look more vibrant so this is really how things should look in the color Department under HDR I'm now on shadow of the Tomb Raider again and I'm running my AMD GPU the games running an HDR and focus primarily on contrast but again I do notice that the the colors are vibrant now these greens stand out in a nice way and it still looks natural in terms of the shades that should appear more muted looking more muted such as Lara's skin tone she has quite a nice neutral quality to that so that is an improvement compared to SDR in terms of the tone mapping it's fairly similar to what I saw on my NVIDIA GPU there are some slight improvements though in terms of the shadow detailing this particular scene doesn't really show the improvements particularly well the shadow detailing is a bit better but certainly the contrast and the backlight control and all of that it's actually very much the same as on my NVIDIA GPU and that was really my key disappointment aside from the colors which is improved on the AMD GPU under HDR it was really the contrast and or the lack thereof that was my main criticism and this remains here so the bright shades here they look nice and bright but I've got the monitor set to the brightness of 100 whereas the darker shades here look a bit kind of flooded really they just don't have the depth they should and for that reason it doesn't have the kind of contrast you should expect under HDR and again you can reduce the brightness manually but then all you get is these brighter shades of - muted and the deeper shades do look a bit deeper but really the tone mapping and contrast combined doesn't give the kind of distinct look to those dark areas that you should have under HDR and I'd say even on my AMD GPU where there's an improvement compared to my NVIDIA GPU and HDR things aren't really as good as I've seen even on some better display HDR 400 level displays so certainly could have been in some improvements there HDR on this monitor really I see it as a sort of perhaps a bonus feature it might be nice to have a bit of a play with and some users will like the kind of look it gives to games but in my view it really isn't a particularly good HDR implementation now in battlefield 5 again I'm going to talk about the responsiveness of the monitor there's an article on the website that looks at the key concepts related to monitor responsiveness definitely worth a read but if you're short on time the written review has a nice summary of these key concepts related to monitor responsiveness and one of the key concepts is perceived blur and this is actually caused primarily by eye movement as you track motion on the monitor and it's something that's closely linked the refresh rate so pixel responsiveness that's the other aspect of perceived blur that doesn't actually affect the perceived blur due to eye movement so you could have a really really fast pixel responses but you're always going to get this sort of mask of perceived blur related to the frame rate of the content and the refresh rate of the display so I'm running this content at the moment is 144 frames a second but I wanted to set 244 Hertz and that means I'm getting the most out of the monitor if my frame rate drops as I'll look out shortly this does increase the perceived blur due to eye movement it also changes what I call a connected feel so at this lovely high frame rate and this high refresh rate it has a really nice connected feel as I'm interacting with the game world it feels really fluid as a certain flow to it which is lacking at lower refresh rates and lower frame rates and this is something which you really have to feel to appreciate and it's separate to input lag although input lag does affect the connected feel and this monitor has a low level of input lag I measured somewhere around 3 milliseconds so that isn't going to bother you sensitive views as the input lag on this monitor and coupled with the high frame rate high refresh rate experience really nice connected feel so it certainly ticks that box in terms of pixel responses overall they're fast enough for really good 140 444 frames a second performance but there are some weaknesses so some of the pixel responses are a bit slower than optimal you can see that a bit on this dark area there against the quite light sort of medium to light shades in the background there's a little bit of what I call powdery trailing but it's only a light powdery trailing it's not the kind of smearing you'd get on some VA models and actually typically you'd get on VA models for these kind of high contrast transitions there is a clearer example yeah so they're actually the slowest transitions on this model occur where there are very light shades such as white here and for where it says e to pick up a letter against a significantly darker background it's not to be significantly darker but that sort of helps it stand out anyway the kind of contrast naturally makes it quite clear that there's a powdery trailing there and I describe it as a heavy powdery trailing some people might describe it as slightly smeary in its appearance this particular trailing but it's not really too bad and certainly as I said compared to VA models not bad at all and you get it a bit around these pots here as well there's just a kind of like powder trail behind the pot it sticks quite close to the object itself it doesn't extend out and that's why I wouldn't call it smeary in its appearance but it does add a bit to perceived blur but most of the transitions don't really show this there is however a fair degree of overshoot I'm using the fastest pixel response setting on this monitor they're called speed and that's my preferred setting at high refresh rates so there is a bit of overshoot inverse ghosting you can see that around the tree here or I can't my eye there's a little bit of a halo trailing that's kind of brighter than the background color and certainly brighter than the object color and has a slight sort of blue tint to it just around the flag post there and the tree might not come out on the video it's not a massive amount in this particular example I will show you some clear examples of shoot shortly and this scene isn't actually that good for showing overshoot there's also a little bit of dark trailing or dirty trailing whatever you want to call it again overshoot but that is darker than the foreground or background color so it sort of stands out for that reason but it's actually quite faint just around the light there that particular overshoot is not really particularly obvious I'm now on a scene which will show the overshoot more clearly and that's because there are some brighter shades and sort of medium shades rather than predominantly darker shades and this is where the overshoot tends to be more obvious so if you look at the building edge there for example there's a sort of bright halo trailing which stands out quite readily and that's probably some better examples a bit further in actually if you look at the buildings down there again you can see or I can certainly see a bright halo trailing and this is actually something I found a bit distracting on this model it doesn't distract everyone sensitivity to overshoot varies but certainly when I was playing this on multiplayer I did really find this quite I catch headed notice the overshoot and it was quite apparent on lots of different scenes and multiplayer as well you can actually see if you look there you can actually see some dark trailing some of that dirty trailing I was talking about as well as bright trailing depending on which direction you're moving and the mouse and which aspect you're looking at you see some bright flashes as well and this is actually quite strong overshoot these examples and I did notice them quite readily on this game in other games using the speed setting again they don't bother everyone just a bit high for my personal taste however the alternative to this would be to use the balanced overdrive setting which is considerably weaker and this actually gets rid of that overshoot and this won't be clear in the video you might be able to see that there's not overshoot there but there is actually quite a bit of power to be trailing and it actually has a bit of a smear equality the sort of dark transitions or dark - sort of medium transitions around here there's a definite smear that wasn't there before the same around the dark concrete areas there and this does add significantly to the perceived blur so for that reason I don't really like using this setting it doesn't make good use of the 144 Hertz refresh rate of the monitor and I would tolerate although I don't love it I would tolerate the overshoot in preference to this so I'm gonna set it back to my preferred speed setting you will notice there was another overdrive setting picture quality but that is really a very weak level of overdrive and it doesn't deliver a very nice experience at all even at much lower refresh rates than this hundred forty-four Hertz so there's the overshoot it's back and it's not wonderful if you are sensitive to this kind of thing I know some people really hate overshoot and I mean I consider myself moderately tolerant to it but I feel it's a bit too high even for my taste on this model and it's higher than on the del s2 7:19 DGF for example and it's even higher than on the del s2 716 deg which I use as one of my main gaming monitors and that's the sort of older revision of it it's not one of the most recent revisions so it's one of the ones that has quite strong overshoot but I found the overshoot on this more noticeable than that and it's not just these sort of extreme if you like examples of overshoots the sort of bright trailing there's actually kind of a frequent over sharpen in effect and you notice that just around the windowpanes here or I notice it to my eye and it kind of just makes the Texas look a bit artificial and overly sharpened when you move it's not a natural look to the image but again it doesn't bother everyone and I'm not trying to say this monitor is poor in terms of the responsiveness overall I think most users gonna find it just fine but I do like to nitpick I mean anyone who is listen to my reviews before read my reviews will know this so I just like to point these things out and now on a different scene on battlefield five and again you can see some examples of overshoot around the trees here I can see examples of bright trailing halo trailing but actually I'm not really going to talk about that too much but really the key purpose of me showing you this section is actually to talk about another capability of this monitor and that is adaptive sync and that means that it supports AMD freesync on compatible AMD GPUs and systems and it can also be used with Nvidia's g-sync compatible mode on compatible NVIDIA GPUs so that's GT x10 series in newer using Windows 10 as an operating system at the moment so what this means is the monitor adjusts its refresh rate to match the frame rate of the content so you might not be able to see it very clearly on the video but towards the top right there's a frame rate display actually a refresh rate display on the game and this corresponds to the refresh rate of the monitor as I'm running this with Nvidia g-sync compatible mode at the moment I've got a GTX 1080 TI over all the experience on the Nvidia and AMD GPU I tested very similar in the suspect there's some slight differences which I'll come on to shortly but overall it was very good um in terms of the ability to get rid of tearing and stuttering from frame rate and refresh rate mismatches and that's because it's matching them up and they don't go out of sync in the same way whereas if you have the technology disabled you'd see obvious stuttering if you had vsync enabled or you'd see obvious tearing if you had vsync disabled and also have this technology disabled so it's something which users like me who are sensitive to tear and such um it's really nice to have this removed it gives a much nicer flow to the experience a lot less distracting I'm sort of from a competitive point of view even it's something I rather like having and just to the I really in terms of the visual look to the game it just keeps things looking more natural I much prefer that not everyone is sensitive to this but it is something I noticed even with slight drops in framerate if I had the technology disabled but there are some frequent drops below 144 Hertz so it's nice to have this technology and scenes like this and on this game more broadly especially when you're playing multiplayer there are almost always going to be some little times when the framerate drops so it is nice to have this as a backup I've now increased the graphic settings considerably so I have a lower frame rate it's sort of around 100 frames a second it does fluctuate a bit around there and what I notice is again the tearing and stuttering from frame making refresh rate mismatches are completely absent so adaptive syncs doing its thing that's very nice but I also noticed that the connected feel isn't quite as good when I move the mouse I'm interact into the game world and the perceived blur due to eye movement is increased and that's just related to the frame rate that isn't something which adaptive sync whether it's AMD freesync or Nvidia's g-sync compatible mode can actually counteract another aspect is that the overshoot which I mentioned before is now considerably stronger there are some strong examples of overshoot and on this model even 144 Hertz or even with slight dips below that but a hundred Hertz it really does ramp things up a bit and this is related to the refresh rate rather than just a frame rate so if you disable the technology and your frame rate dips it just acts as if it's at 144 Hertz in terms of the pixel response behavior this is something which g-sync models and this is actual juicing models handle a lot better they have something called variable overdrive and that means it slackens off the pixel overdrive as the refresh rate dips as should happen because you don't need this kind of level of voltage surge for the overdrive and it just causes extreme overshoot at these lower frame rates and refresh rates so you might be able to see a particularly nice example of that around the tree there a nice bright trail I just I do hope this comes out on the video because it's sometimes difficult to capture this on a video but to my eye that's really bright and rather extreme overshoot increase the graphic settings further by bumping up the resolution scale so the rendering resolution has been increased considerably now and you'll see my frame rate I'm not sure if you can see that in the video but it's sort of around 60 frames a second which is when it's green but it does dip a little bit below that which is when it goes yellow or considerably below that at times when it goes red and again adaptive syncs doing its thing but one thing to note I didn't mention there's a difference between the Nvidia g-sync compatible mode and the AMD freesync implementation free sync will allow the monitor to go as low as 48 Hertz and so if you've got as low as 48 frames a second and it will match the frame rate with its refresh rate on NVIDIA systems the floor of operation is 60 Hertz that certainly was on my graphics card and the graphics driver I was using anyway and this doesn't really have a huge impact on the experience because whether you're using an AMD GPU or and video GPU with this technology it uses LFC low framerate compensation for AMD side or similar technology on the nvidia side and this means that it will use a multiple of the frame rate with its refresh rate to keep tearing and stuttering at bay so when you see that go red and it's well below 60 frames a second the the monitor can't go at that sort of refresh rate on my NVIDIA GPU just doesn't support that but it will keep to a multiple of that to make this a bit clearer I'll turn on the refresh rate display that's integrated into the monitor the displayed number there fluctuates a lot it reacts very quickly to changes in refresh rate so it's a bit difficult to read but you can see it's actually double what the frame rate is showing a lot of the time so that's the technology in action and again it works just fine to get rid of tearing and stuttering I don't actually notice any particular disadvantage to this and actually the overshoot levels are reduced if you recall I mentioned they're tied to the refresh rate rather than the frame rate so if you haven't it sort of 90 Hertz it's actually better than having your monitor set to 50 Hertz in terms of the overshoot levels just to reinforce this point I've dialed the graphic settings back just a little bit and now I'm getting sort of close to 70 frames a second and you can see that the monitor is running at around 70 Hertz there is fluctuation either side but this does give extreme overshoot I will use the word extreme in this case because the bright trailing really does stand out around those trees there very nicely indeed and I don't say nice he has a nice thing so I would say that if you are frequently dipping this low this overshoot really does get unsightly and some users will actually find it unbearable at this level so I would actually recommend that you dial back the overdrive setting set that to balance instead that will greatly reduce this overshoot and as I mentioned before there are some weaknesses in terms of slower than optimal pixel transitions but they're not actually as important at the reduced but at these reduced refresh rates and frame rates they're not so important and the requirements for pixel responses aren't as tight and the monitor actually does a decent job with its balance setting at these kind of frame rates and refresh rates the it's difficult to give an exact figure there are still some transitions whether a weakness is even at 60 Hertz or so with this setting but I think most people would find that they stand out less than the overshoot the problem is when you're playing games that are very dynamic in their nature and you have a huge range of refresh rates it'll be difficult to decide which setting you want to use so it's there's really no hard and fast rules in that respect and it would have been nicer if there was a better balance as you get on Nvidia g-sync displays with their variable overdrive so the monitors sorting itself out rather than you having to set the setting yourself based on the frame mate so to wrap up then this monitor goes head-to-head with a lot of models which use a slightly different panel an IPS type panel but rather than it being an inner luxe panel like this it's one of the Optronics hva panels and there were some slight differences in the performance mainly in terms of the color reproduction the color gamut of this model is more generous than the competing models and that gives a more vibrant look to the image but it's done in a way that retains shade variety rather than sort of like a digital saturation enhancement so this will appeal to some users some users will like this look this one might prefer the more muted tones of the alternative models or using the srgb emulation mode on this model the sRGB emulation mode isn't perfect on this model in terms of the fact that you've got a fixed frighteners you can't just the backlight brightness and also you can't adjust the color channels so they could have offered better flexibility in the OSD or needs in the srgb emulation mode but in terms of the color gamut restriction it does work quite well the overall output was also consistent and in that respect it was very much like an IPS type panel it delivered nice levels of saturation across the screen a nice vibrant look throughout the screen and also delivered a nice variety of shades and the consistency helps with that because a shade that you view in the center of the screen looks largely the same as that same shade displayed further out I'm Tien models of VA that sort of shade viewed further out even from a normal viewing position the weaknesses in terms of the viewing angle and perceived gamut changes would mean that that shade might just be displayed with much greater or much weaker saturation depending on where it's displayed on the screen I also found the screen surface very agreeable good light matte screen surface without an obvious grainy texture to it so that was nice the contrast performance was about as good as I've seen actually from an IPS type panel the static contrast around 1200 to one even after adjustments made to my test settings there was moderate amount of IPS glow and I suppose you could argue that some models are better in this respect because they have so-called low glow panels but actually the competing models to this certainly don't have low glow panels and they to have a moderate of ips glow backlight lead is something which varies between individuals units so there's not much point in me sort of going through that too much there's a little section on that in the written review if you're interested in that kind of thing but essentially that can accentuate IPS glow as well it can sort of bring it out more if you've got issues with clouding or backlight bleed it can sort of accentuate the IPS glow but on my model there were no extreme issues I mean in in either regard really so it actually gave a rather decent contrast performance the design of the monitors well worth worth mentioning that it has the kind of look that is found on many recent ASA Predator models it's quite angular certainly the stand base for example has quite an angular look to it and it has the usual sort of dual stage bezel design with three sided borderless I don't have any major complaints about the design I'm not the most fussy person in terms of monitor design though so perhaps I'm not the best person to really give an opinion of that but one thing that does bother me on some models is when they have a really deep stand base and you can't put the monitor particularly close to the wall this model does have a moderately deep stand base so I couldn't push it as close to the ball as I would have liked but it isn't as deep as some models it's not ridiculous like some Samsung models in particular they have that reticulated arm design which extends massively far back from the monitor itself that's a real pain this model also have an RGB lighting feature I didn't find that particularly useful because it doesn't actually do anything if he's sitting in front of the monitor even in a dark room it doesn't create a halo of light or bias light around the monitor it's only really there to admire if you can see the back of the monitor and in my room you can't the wall is looking at the back of the monitor so it really had very little utility for me but if you've got your monitor somewhere way you can admire the back of it or other people in your household could admire the back of it we've had a LAN party or something like that then sure it's a neat feature I suppose the HDR performance of the monitor is I'm not really going to spend too much time going through that because it wasn't really particularly impressive even by VESA display HDR 400 standards have certainly seen some better implementations in terms of the tone mapping capabilities it doesn't offer any local dimming on the backlight and that one issue but the tone mapping as well the way it's implemented the level of flexibility you get in the OSD these are all problematic and not really what you'd expect from a true HDR experience and the color gamut as I mentioned it's nice and wide it's actually 95 percent DCI p3 that corresponds very closely to the target for a good HDR experience but the way it was implemented meant that some of the more vibrant shades are sort of lacking a bit and it doesn't really have that sort of vivacity that you'd expect from HDR of course the other key aspect of performance the responsiveness of the monitor very important for the model like this nice headline feature being 144 Hertz support for adaptive sync which includes AMD freesync and overall it put in a good 144 Hertz performance snappy pixel responses low input lag there were some weaknesses slight issues with some slower than optimal pixel responses but really the bigger issue I had was with the overshoot if you using the optimal setting for the higher refresh rates or what I consider to be optimal the speed setting the overshoot levels are quite high and higher than you'd find on for example the Dell s2 719 DGF adaptive sync as I've mentioned works just fine on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs the technology worked to get rid of tearing and stuttering but as the frame rate decreased that overshoot I mentioned became really quite extreme so after door comparisons with the responsiveness the Dell s2 716 DG which I use is one of my main gaming monitors doesn't have as much overshoot as this but it is known to have quite a high level of overshoot so this was more obvious than the Dell in terms of overshoots and that's really not a very good sort of baseline to be working from there were some weaknesses in terms of slower than optimal pixel responses but they were sort of secondary to the overshoot in my opinion the overshoot as well it's much stronger than on the computing hva models and they don't really have any extra weaknesses in terms of pixel responses the actual speed of the pixel responses is very similar it's just that you get a high level of overshoot on this so I can't really sort of wholeheartedly recommend this but if you really are interested in vibrant color and color is really your main focus and you're less interested in excellent responsiveness or anything like that but still want decent responsiveness then I guess this model can deliver what you'd be after and I think at any rate this is certainly a decent first entry for gigabyte Oris into the monitor market it's the first ever monitor they've made and it's really not a bad product so that's really all of us to the gigabyte Oris ad to 7q d be sure to check out the full review on PC monitors dot info there's a link to that in the description of the video alongside information about how you can support the work that we do

Channel: PC Monitors

Views: 17,696

Keywords: Review, Gigabyte, AORUS, AD27QD

Id: LOXBlvN469M

Length: 52min 3sec (3123 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/EnigemCenia]

This would be a no-brainer to me if Gigabyte just fixed this monitor's overdrive. I can live with the sloppy blur reduction, but the overdrive come on.

[u/Maimakterion]

Well this does shoot down the hope that overdrive isn't as bad with Freesync enabled as some have stated here.

What's annoying is that unlike the LG ultrawide panel, this panel can actually do 5ms G2G pixel response at 144Hz with very little overshoot. It just doesn't have the scalar with variable overdrive capability to keep that kind of performance across its refresh rate.

[u/gypsygib]

RTNGS needs to change their monitor review algorithm, they don't seem to be in agreement with many users, TFTcentral, and PC Monitors and there's no mention of the overshoot problems. It takes away from their reliability.