Gigabyte AORUS CV27F Review - Immersive Full HD Experience

it's Adam here for PC monitors and in this video I'm going to be taking a look at the gigabyte horas CV 27f that's usual this video accompanies a written review and 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 the smart to use a 27-inch Samson SVA panel or more specifically a samson SP a cell with the custom backlight solution and this offers a full HD one 920 by 1080 resolution and it has 1500 R curve the resolution doesn't give you an amazing pixel density 27 inches Full HD sort of on the lower end of what you'd expect from a modern want to really you can see how large the desktop icons are there and it doesn't give you the kind of clarity and detail you get from much higher pixel density and it doesn't give you a great amount of useful workspace either but it's it's quite usable some users would find it quite usable and it does have its advantages namely that it doesn't take a lot of GPU horsepower to run good frame rates and this is a 165 Hertz monitor or this monitor supports of 165 Hertz refresh rate so it can be useful in that respect and it is a widely supported resolution for movies quite a lot of movie content it's just full HD at most and devices such as games consoles or some games consoles they'd be limited to the full HD resolution or for some titles you might want to run them at that resolution anyway for better frame rate or whatever much as you might as a PC user so it has the advantage as well the 1500 R curve this is something which is exaggerated in videos and pictures of the monitor I mean I can see even on my camera screen for example it looks like there's a kind of a pin cushion effect it looks like it's squeezed in there and it makes it look a bit weird to be honest but when you're actually sitting in front of the monitor that isn't something you observe and I just did very readily to the curve it isn't as noticeable as a curve on an ultra wide screen for example or much wider screen than this with a similar curvature because it's 27-inch screen it doesn't have the same kind of width and it is something which to be honest found perfectly natural it kind of just draws you into the experience a bit it's not something that most users should be afraid of of course some users will defer flat monitors especially if they're into design work and that kind of thing and geometric perfection is their preference there but for most people I really wouldn't be put off by the idea of the curve and it's something I'd actually embrace on this monitor the screen surface it's another thing I like to mention quite early on in the videos and something I like to sort of hammer in a bit later as well because it's something I'm very sensitive to and it's something which other reviewers don't really mention enough in my opinion or talk about enough because it does have a great effect on the image in general the screen surface on this one it's a light matte anti-glare screen surface it's one say it's typical for a VA panel because there's quite a lot of variation between the different screen surfaces used on VA panels but this one has a nice smooth screen surface as well as smooth surface texture and it helps lighter content have a nice smooth look there's no obvious graininess at all and in that respect I really have no complaints it also offers good glare handling as I'll talk about surely from the front the monitor has a slightly aggressive design I would call it quite a gay Marie look but not one in terms of having lots of bright colors or anything like that but just the sharp lines and it has a matte black plastic bottom bezel has a little shiny silver or ass logo with a little matte area around that and the stand is a powder coated metal the dark gray finish so that has a nice solid look and feel to it the top and side bezels are dual stage so they have a slender panel border as well as a thin mat out of plastic components to them and it's difficult to show you this but there's also if you look at just the right angle in the right light there's a slight blue line and on the inner edge of that panel border and that's perfectly normal that is a calibration mark used by the machine that puts everything together and I've seen this on various other curved Sam panels before so it's perfectly normal it's not a defect or anything like that a light Matt anti-glare screen surface is used which offers respectable glare handling whilst keeping the image free from strong graininess actually has a relatively smooth look to the image it maintains the clarity and vibrancy better than stronger matte surfaces and that the smooth finish as well I mentioned this elsewhere in the review I quite like it it also has a curve 1500 R curve to the screen and this is something that which is exaggerated in pictures and videos and again I mentioned that elsewhere in the review also at the front you'll notice that there's a power LED there and the joystick used for the OSD controls beneath the Auris logo and that's all explored in the separate video of the OSD video at the side you can again see the fairly angular design and you can see the stand from this angle in all its glory it offers decent economic flexibility you can adjust the height of the monitor you can tilt it backwards and you can tilt it forward slightly you can also swivel it left and right a bit at the rear the monitor is mainly matte black plastic that there's a little shiny silver or asphalt can logo in the center though these wings there which house the RGB fusion lighting feed to the RGB LED lighting feature which is controlled by fusion software and that is shown off in the OSD video stand the touches are centrally and you can remove it by pinching that quick release mechanism and I will reveal 100 by 100 millimeter vesser holes another subtle detail is the slogan they're team up fight on so that's one of the Auris slogans towards the bottom of the stand neck there's a little cable tidy loop so you can feed your cables through their ports themselves are down firing and I'll show you them shortly so you've got an AC power input which means the monitor as an internal power converter there is a case lot Kensington security lock slot as a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and a 3.5 millimeter microphone jack and the microphone jack has anc active noise cancellation technology on this monitor the two HDMI 2 ports which support adaptive sync including free sync on compatible GPUs and systems there's a DisplayPort 1.2 a input which supports adaptive sync including AMD freesync and Nvidia g-sync compatible mode and there are two USB 3 ports plus a USB 3 upstream port I'm now going to talk about the contrast performance of the monitor and to start off I like to talk about something called black crush this is a characteristic that affects all VA models to various degrees and what it means is the area of the screen that you're looking at directly which is in line with your eyes on this case the camera do you tell us a bit blended a bit more blended than they should be darker details basically the dark shades appear darker than they should the perceived gamma there is higher than it should be and that means that they blend into the black background more readily so I'm using the legume tests for black levels here what you see on the video as with other sections of the video it doesn't represent what the screen actually looks like firsthand but I can show you the relative effect so basically the blocks on the top row they look more blended than they should the first few with the monitor that correctly tracks the 2.2 gamma curve as this does according to my test settings and the measurements I took the first few may well blend in quite well they should blend in quite well but the last three blocks on the first row there they shouldn't be as blended as they are here they are faintly visible they probably aren't on the video but to my eye they are faintly visible so it's actually not too bad the black crush on this model but you will notice that if you go off angle the visibility improves significantly so in other words the perceived gamma changes the perceived gamma becomes a lot lower whereas from a direct frontal viewing position the the beta your directly cannot visibility has decreased and the same thing occurs if you move the blocks to different sections of the screen this is actually exaggerated a bit if you're close to the screen and it's probably not coming out on the video properly but I can now see that fifth block and the fourth block quite clearly against the background and it's still quite subtle so it's what we're not going to come out in the camera compared to that and the cameras probably adjusted itself so it's really difficult to show this on a camera I will show you some in-game examples but basically the black crush on this model it's about as slight as I've seen on a VA model so it's not something I'd worry about it's only really a minor point it's something that does affect all VA models to various degrees so it's just something to be aware of now on shadow of the Tomb Raider and I'm going to talk about contrast performance using some in-game examples before talking about the contrast specifically I'd like to point out that there's a bit of a flickering issue on this monitor it's something which I actually would expect gigabyte to address in an upcoming firmware update I mean I can't promise that they will but they have been very proactive about firmware updates and they've already updated the firmware once before and even got the monitor and wok-fried started testing it there was a firmware update available but for some scenes and games this one for example you can see that there is a significant fluctuation in the brightness levels of flickering if you prefer as you look at the wall from a slightly different position it only occurs in some scenes and to be honest I don't really notice it when I'm sitting in a brighter room which I do most of the time and because the fluctuation of brightness isn't massive so it's not a complete sort of change of the backlight from nearly zero luminance to fully minutes or anything like that but if you're sensitive to flickering it could certainly be something to be aware of it could be bothersome the only way you could get rid of it is to set the backlight brightness to five which is very low indeed extremely low and I mean you can look in the review I've got a passage talking about this I think that's probably below 40 can't last a meter squared or something around that maybe below fifty cars per meter squared so it's a very dim that level at which most users probably wouldn't want to use but hopefully gigabyte will fix it I have made them aware of the issue so it's something which they can hopefully look into and they are very proactive as I said with firmware updates and users can easily upgrade firmware themselves using the OSD sidekick software so moving on from that the contrast performance of the monitor is very good overall and it a VA panel that really the main strengths of the VA panel is contrast but even they're not all VA models are equal the static contrast I measured it's between 2000 and 3000 to underpin and what that means is darker scenes which are very common on games like this Tomb Raider has lots of dock cabins dimly lit interior locations such as where I am at the moment very common on this game and they have a much more atmospheric look than they do on non VA LCD panels without any sort of fancy local dimming on the battling or anything like that and brighter shades stand out very nicely against the darker surroundings as well so you can see there's sort of some patches of light reflection on the gold there light here streaming in from the top there they all stand up very nicely against the darker surroundings as a VA model there are a few slight imperfections with the contrast performers to be aware of there's the black crush which I mentioned before which masks a bit of detail so some of this detail actually there's quite a lot of quite subtle details which are visible which on some VA models wouldn't be visible so they mentioned the black pushers actually rather than though on this model but sort of around the plant pot bear the shaded area is a little bit more masks and it should be whereas if you view it a bit further away from the central position then there's more detail what I would mention is actually towards the bottom corners of the screen there's actually a little bit more detail and they show be so there's a little bit of extra detail there that more than they should be which sort of makes the comparison and between the central region and that region a bit more extreme but this is very common on VA models it's just to do with the perceived gamma changes and if you move your head or you're viewing a different part of the screen then it changes again but basically the central cone if you like where things are more blended that's your black crush then further out things are less blended they appear more or less as they should be for most of the screen but it doesn't really detract from the atmosphere in my opinion because the black crush and the sort of the changes in the detail level aren't extreme enough to really do that but you can certainly benefit from the strong contrast there's not anything like IPS glow to worry about a little bit of va glow but that is really quite low on this model and my camera as it as it doesn't allow proper flexibility when I'm recording videos unfortunately and it does actually exaggerate things so you can see it's sort of a big sort of bloom there on the video in reality that is a lot more subtle you can see it towards the bottom as well but there is a bit of va glow which lightens up those kind of areas a bit but again it's nothing like IPS glow it doesn't have the same kind of effect on the detail levels and it doesn't affect the atmosphere to the same degree and actually compared to some VA models the VA glow is quite low on this model the other aspect which I always like to talk about the screen surface I've already mentioned really there's no obvious graininess has a good smooth look to these lighter shades so that's very nice indeed I'm now going to talk about the color reproduction of the monitor and to start off I always like to use the logon tests for viewing angles that's the golden dot and L the website as I mentioned there's a black rush on this monitor due to some perceived gamma shifts and you observe them from a normal viewing position you can also observe perceived shifts in saturation due to the changes in gamma a different points of the screen so the central region of the screen things look more blended on the legume tests here this sort of highlights some weaknesses in the viewing angle dependency of the gamma curve that's what this test is designed to show so essentially things look more blended it's a bit more obvious when you're closer to the screen and so I was sitting a bit far back then sorry about that so you can see that or hopefully you can see that things are more blended the kind of slightly greenish look to the striking of the text towards the center of the screen whereas further out towards the corners in particular you can see a kind of orange and red striping and this all shifts as you move your head so the bit that you're looking at directly has the more blended appearance or where the cameras live not directly whereas other areas look less blended and more red it's difficult to show on the camera because the camera sort of just captures all sorts of strange things but if I move onto the solid blocks it's a bit clearer perhaps the purple block that appears a blueish purple throughout but there's more of a pink tint towards the bottom of the screen and the edges of the screen and as you move the camera or you move your head that pink hue shifts readily along with head movement the red block appears a good vibrant red throughout but it has more of a burnt appearance towards the bottom and the side of the screen more so towards the bottom on this model and it appears just less saturated in that region very saturated or highly saturated in comparison further up and again if you're close to the screen that kind of difference can be exaggerated somewhat the green block that appears a pretty nice consistent green throughout it's technically a saturated green chartreuse color that's the name of the color itself and it's shown quite well on this model as a slightly yellowish hue to it it doesn't look as green as it would on a model with a much wider color gamut but it actually doesn't have as much yellowing as it does with many monitors which would track the sRGB color space more closely and I'll come on to the color gamut of this model shortly and that it's sort of one of the key features of this as a slightly extended color gamut and towards the bottom of the screen there's a little bit more yellowing and this kind of shift with head movement but this block is actually quite consistent the blue block is very consistent really no complaints at all you might see on your unit or specific units you might see sometimes there's some shifts and brightness but they're not really related to the viewing angle performance they're just uniformity issues and they can affect any unit of a particular model now in battlefield 5 I'm going to talk about color reproduction using some in-game examples as I alluded to just before this monitor has a bit of an extension beyond srgb but it's color gamut it actually covers 90% of the DCI p3 color space that's actually specified by gigabyte Oris and measured by myself as well so what this does is for content like this so I'm running this game and SDR at the moment and it's designed as usual with the sRGB color space in mind and when you're looking at srgb content such as this game what a monster like this with a more generous color gummit you do get extra saturation extra vibrancy if you prefer so things just look like a more saturated version of the intended shade and many users do actually like this look it's something they've become accustomed to because smartphones even these days have quite a wide color gamut laptops various other devices as TVs as well having a bit of extra saturation vibrancy it's something that people quite like sometimes it's not an extreme amount of extra saturation so things don't look cartoonish or weird in my opinion it is look like a more saturated version than intended so there are some really nice autumnal Browns and nice vibrant oranges and reds for the fire some of the yellowish oranges look more orange than this showed more of a reddish orange and some of the orange shoes look more red than they should if that makes sense because of the color gamut and the monitor maintains a really nice variety so you don't get things crushed together and that's what you get if you just increase the digital vibrance control on the Nvidia control panel for example or if you adjust the saturation levels in your AMD graphics driver or if you use a similar setting on the monitor this monitor has it's digital saturation adjustment setting as well I command what it's called off the top of my head it's and that color vibrance I'm not really sure but anyway what that does is it pulls shades closer to the edge of the color garment without expanding the color gamut itself so it basically compresses everything together and it makes things look very unnatural with this you get a wider color gamut things maintain good space come the color gamut so you get appropriate range of shades and actually for the panel type the color consistency is very good on this one as of the a model there are some inconsistencies I'd already mentioned with the gum earlier there are some shifts in saturation at different points of the screen and these shifts have actually more pronounced if you're sitting closer to the screen so my preferred viewing distance is around 70 centimeters from the screen and from that distance you do see a little bit of a loss of saturation for some shades it affects some more than others I gave lots of examples of this in the written review and so I recommend referencing that just cuz it's actually quite difficult to show in the video because quite a subtle effect there's only a few compared to some VA models where they really look kind of quite washed out at the very edges this model doesn't have that effect and compared to TN models where they look quite washed out towards the bottom or certainly a lot less saturated towards the bottom than the top and that's because the perceived cameras way lower lower down and way higher higher up it doesn't have that kind of inconsistency but things aren't up to IPS type levels so be aware of this if you've got to do any color critical work or absolutely khalaq who sees your thing and this is always something you have to be aware of for non IPS type panels I've just bought the camera a little bit closer so I can show you this effect on the video you can see the wood there has quite a rich slightly reddish look to it the reddish hue - it's actually slightly from the the color gamut being extended beyond srgb so it's a little bit redder than that should be but it's not extreme it is however quite a difference in saturation if you compare the viewing this log centrally - if you view it closer to the edge of the monitor you can see it looks kind of a bit more faded but from a normal viewing position the effect isn't as pronounced and if you're not going to use the monitor for color critical work photography that kind of thing I wouldn't worry too much about the issues and that's not to say that you can't use ass monitor for color critical work a sort of hobbyist level in particular some people certainly do use v8 models for such things but if it's something you take very seriously I would consider IPS type panels the better option just because of their excellent color consistency I've now got in the game and indeed the monitor in HDR and you'll notice when you go into the menu if you're willing HDR the first thing to note the picture menu greyed out that's because HDR requires automatic adjustments in a close communication between the GPU and the monitor and the game basically the things are all controlled automatically and that's good to see actually because the Auris 82 7qd gave the user far too much control in the menu system and it basically ends up messing things up if you change some of these things what I would mention though something I might have quite like to see when you're running under HDR I mean you'll notice straight away things look very different or hopefully you'll notice that things look very different this is the same scene I was just showing you before in the color reproduction section one of the reasons it looks a bit different it's not necessarily obvious on the video but there's actually a sharpness filter applied so things are over sharpened a bit and it's sort of moderate sharpness filter not everyone likes this kind of thing and you can't control it you can't disable it there isn't any kind of sharpness control in the OSD when you're running under HDR so I think it would have been nice to have some flexibility to disable that or reduce it that that's not certainly may have given you however it's not what I'd consider an obnoxious sharpness felt if I kind of get used to it but individual sensitivities that kind of thing very so it would be nice to have a bit of control over that the other aspect is things naturally look a lot brighter certainly compares to brightness setting I was using and that's a part of HDR as well and I'll come on to that using tomb Raider's an example but really I want to focus more on the color reproduction aspects at the moment and things related to that so under HDR the game and the AGR pipeline xgr 10 which just wanted to users it supports 10-bit color this monitor is vested of HDR 400 certified and that's the lowest level of certification for HDR that festival certified for so by no means to give an amazing HDR performance but there are certainly some boxes that it does tick it doesn't actually support 10-bit color itself and this is something I've been through on various reviews that I've done before on monitors that don't support 10-bit color for HDR but the monitor is using 8-bit color and the GPU is using an extra dithering the stage to make up the extra two bits whilst the game is displayed essentially in 10-bit color this actually works very effectively I've compared 8-bit to 10 bit on the monitor side versus the GPU handing the dithering many times included on models where at some refresh rates they do one and other refresh rates they do the other and honestly it's it's not really certainly I want a boy to death with but it isn't as bad as you might think having the GPU handling the dithering and actually the end result is very similar so you can notice that gradients are handled much more finely so weather effects and light effects that kind of thing they have a really nice smooth look to the gradients and the rays of light the light around the clouds that kind of thing there's a sort of nice variety of light shades there and a nice smooth progression with the gradient this isn't something I can show you on the video as with pretty much everything else but it's certainly something you can notice by eye another aspect is at the low end for the darker shades hgr gives you a nice nuanced shade variety so shaded areas such as this around the wheel there and under there also under this vehicle there it's just a nicer variety of shades a nice and nuanced a variety lots of very closely matching dark shades which already brought out in a nice way and HDR this is very different to what you would have if you simply reduce the gamma on a normal monitor and SDR that just makes things look flooded on this there are plenty very dark looking shades but a nice variety and actually to some extent overcomes some of the black crush which I mentioned before just with the finer control and this is all something which you can notice in the HDR even on this monitor it doesn't have fancy local dimming or anything like that mats and he'll come on too with Tomb Raider when I talk about contrast we're just sticking to color for now colors are more muted under HDR a bit more muted in general and that is completely intentional it's because as I mentioned before 90% DCI p3 coverage on this monitor and the HDR pipeline actually uses the DCI p3 color spaces its target or targets a good coverage of the DCP three color space rather than just relying on srgb that means that the shades are actually more appropriately mapped to the extended gamut and they look more as a developers intend so that means that some of these shades are more muted but they actually still have good saturation and where it's required to have a good vibrant look to the shades for example the flames here the fire the sparks they have a really nice intensity this way beyond what you see on an sRGB monitor or within the confines of the sRGB color space so certainly when they're vibrant elements required and the dark green paint there as well another example they certainly have that look whereas the elements which are a little bit overblown before for example I mentioned the wood there had a slightly too much for red hue and some of these autumnal colors were a bit more red than they should be essentially toned down the fire as well you don't get the sort of oranges verging on red where they shouldn't things look more appropriate another thing I'm happy to report is HDR is similar on this monitor whether you're using an NVIDIA GPU as I'm using right now or you're using an AMD GPU that's very different to the gigabyte or as a d2 7qd which I reviewed earlier this looks pretty much washed out and quite wrong on the NVIDIA GPU but looked a bit better on the AMD system so having a decent hgr performance on both of these is good are now on a shadow of the Tomb Raider and I know continue to talk about HDR and I am running this game in hgr the monitors in HDR and I'm gonna focus more on contrast performance now now the good aspects of hg on this monitor again shine through on a tomb raider so the colors are more appropriately displayed a little bit less saturation and for the oversaturated shades but things look nice and vibrant there are lots of nice lush greens Lara's skin as well looks more appropriate it looks a little bit too tanned and a STR sorry so that's all nice again the nuance Jade variety that kind of applies as well but one issue a big issue under HDR when you're looking at a display like this which is only VESA disparity are four hundred certified it doesn't support any sort of local dimming on the backlight and this means that the backlight is just controlled as one unit and the monitor just uses a glorified dynamic contrast setting to adjust the backlight brightness as one unit according to the overall light and dark on the scene at the same time so what you don't get in a scene like this would show it very nicely on a monitor which with a higher HDR capability and fancy local dimming etc you'd get a lovely bright look to the light there whereas the darker shades there would look really deep in comparison and that would to help these nice bright shades stand out very nicely you'd get this glint off the water there which would be not quite blinding to look at but on a monitor with a much more powerful backlight and local dimming it really does stand out in a lovely way which you don't get here the glint on the waxy leaf surface as well it's really just completely lost on this monitor and any vessel disparage r400 monitor for that matter so in other words high dynamic range isn't really so dynamic so that's really one key aspect of HDR very the key aspect for many users which you just don't get at all on this monitor so yes there are advantages as I've gone through but when it comes to the contrast performance has no advantage whatsoever to HDR on this monitor the static contrast remains unchanged because VA panel it's reasonable but you don't get an advantage from any local dimming because there isn't any so let's talk a bit more about this on a monitor with a really good HDR performance I'm talking vesser dissipates gr 600 or 1000 or potentially higher these days asbestos base gel 1400 but haven't actually tested any displays of that sort yet they really provide much better variety of brighter shades I had mentioned that the gradients are more smoothly handled and that is true things just look like a huge ball of light on the video but actually there's a nice variety of of shades there but really the the upper end there the really bright shades aren't as bright as they should be and the demo shades there are not as dim as they should be even though the 10-bit color reproduction does help with that nuance chafe variety so there is just sort of a lack of depth when there's bright scenes sorry bright elements at the same time and I'm going to go a little bit deeper into the the level here to show you some more examples of this and more specific examples I'm now a little bit deeper into the level and this scene here on a monitor with a really good HDR specification so a very nice implementation of vesser's beige our 600 at the very least you'd get a very natural look to the daylight things would look very bright but not universally bright on this model because it doesn't have local dimming the brightness is it is fairly bright but it doesn't really have this sort of natural look to it the brightness from the daylight isn't it as intense as it should be whereas the darker areas don't look as deep as they should so there's a good mixture of light and dark here on this scene on this monitor it really doesn't show it them in all its glory at all but because of the strong native contrast of the panel as a VA panel you do at least get reasonable depth most of the time so in this scene here for example the darker shades don't look completely flooded as they might on some models and again the camera does exaggerate this you can see too much va glow etc on the video but in reality things look quite decent and certainly if you're not sitting in a dark room as I am right now and or dimly lit room as I am right now then things look quite decent for these kind of scenes but I would say that the backlight control even there is just one single unit and controlling the backlight sometimes it doesn't seem to go as dim as it should so here for example there isn't really much in the way of lighter shades being displayed it's really predominantly darker shades being displayed but the backlight doesn't go as dim as it I feel it could get away with and but you know I don't know how easy I'm not gonna engineer or anything I don't know how easy would be to implement that but I've certainly seen on some vessel dispatch they are 400 models and they would go dimmer on this kind of scene even if they just have the backlight control as one unit so basically the HDR performance on this monitor as far as vessels straight to your 400 level displays go it's not bad at all there is some advantage to running under HDR the color cameras put to better use you can get 10-bit color processing on you games that kind of thing but in terms of contrast there's no advantage at all so really it's far from a true HDR experience but it is something which some users will select to use and although I'm using PC games here and I've just shown you battlefield 5 and shadow of the Tomb Raider the reason for that is I've used them on wide variety of HDR monitors and I know that they're good 8 gr implementations if the mantra itself has a good HDR implementation at least then the gamers will look very nice under HDR but this kind of experience that I'm talking about here it would apply to movies and HDR as well if you're going to HDR compatible games console and you've got HDMI to everything on the monitor as well very similar things you'd experience yourself and on other PC titles as well I'm on battlefield 5 again and I'm going to talk about the responsiveness of the monitor this monitor offers a 165 Hertz refresh rate and I've got it running at that at the moment I've also got game running at a decent solid 165 frames a second there might be some occasional dips just a little bit below that but it's pretty solid hundred and sixty-five frames a second so well that means I'm getting the most out of the monitor in terms of its responsiveness and what this 165 Hertz refresh rate does for you it's giving you over two and a half times as much visual information every second as a 60 Hertz monitor and what this does is it improves what I call a connected feel and that describes how it feels to actually interact with the game world and your character in the game world the fluidity the precision it's something which can't be replicated on monitors with much lower refresh rate even if they have very low input lag the input lag on this monitor and input lag certainly does help connect it feel if that's nice and low but it's sort of a separate issue to the refresh rate itself however the input lag on this model is a little bit above 4 milliseconds and that's nice and low so even users who are quite sensitive to that shouldn't find the signal delay on this one bothersome or the overall latency bothersome so it has a nice connected feel the other aspect of the high refresh rate at high frame rate is that you have a low level of perceived blur this is a concept we just explored in some detail in an article on our website all about monitor responsiveness and it's also summarized in the written review of this model most of that received blur you see on a monitor doesn't actually come from the pixel responses although they are important as well but it actually comes from the movement of your own eyes as you track motion on the screen and I feel refresh rate is increased the amount of time your eyes spend moving decreases and you get a decrease in perceived blur due to this eye movement so that means that at these high refresh rates and frame rates you get a significant reduction the see of blur Authority for example a 60 Hertz monitor this monitor running at 60 Hertz or at 60 frames a second having said this the difference between 144 Hertz and hundred and sixty-five Hertz is marginal I actually prefer 144 Hertz on this monitor over 165 the main reason for that is that there's this issue with overshoot that has these weird artifacts at 165 Hertz and I'm not sure if this will come out on the camera but I can see it quite clearly to my eye around this flag post for example there's overshoot and there is overshoot at lower refresh rates as well but it has a strange interlaced pattern I don't know if you can see the flag post itself that looks kind of aliased jagged the overshoots sort of breaks the object up into this weird kind of pixelated mess for want of a better term and it's this is just one example I actually see some even more obvious examples sometimes there's something captured them here but I don't like that and it's something I find quite distracting it doesn't occurred 144 Hertz interestingly it does occur if you actually have the monitor at 144 frames a second but keep it at 165 Hertz as your static refresh rate and you've got adaptive sync active so the monitor is technically reducing its refresh rate so the overdrive impulse and the behavior the voltage control is actually a bit different if you've got the monitor set 265 Hertz 144 and it's gonna set at 244 Hertz now to show you the difference so it's now set 244 Hertz and you don't get that strange kind of jagged appearance to the the overshoot which I quite dislike but you do still get the overshoot actually this is quite a fast VA model VA models always have some weaknesses especially on transitions that are common on scenes like this whether a darker shades involved in the transition these so called high contrast transitions or potentially between closely matching darken and medium to dark shades they're much slower on VA models in general so you do get some weaknesses but this model has very effective pixel overdrive using my preferred speed setting I'll come on to the weaker setting shortly and which you can set if you prefer but the speed setting it works very well it does get rid of a lot of what you might call smeary trailing or extended powdery training whatever you want to call it but there is quite a bit of overshoot and you can see that around the flag post here you can also see some examples of dirty trailing as I call it another form of overshoot around the lamp there there are some clear examples of this elsewhere and actually I didn't find the overshoot I wouldn't say distracting but I do certainly find it noticeable on this model however the powdery trailing the smeary trailing the obvious weaknesses they're certainly not as extensive and as obvious as they are on some VA models but they are still layer to an extent so around this flag post for example there is a bit of very sort of smearing look to it the boats down there as well they have a little bit of a sort of powdery trail that's a bit of a smearing look to it as well but sometimes the weaknesses here are actually more obvious so I'm sure on the video you actually be able to see there's a sort of weird effect as I circle the mouse like that and that's because of these slower than optimal pixel transitions there's also a bit of what I call breakup trailing and that's where by some of the shades contained within the boat or leave the background it can be they kind of leech out as if you're wetting a page with water soluble ink on it and it kind of flows out of it it has that kind of effect a little bit of a colorful effect to the trailing but on some VA models this would be way more extensive and have a kind of smoke like appearance so on this model it's not as bad as on some it's actually quite a fast VA model overall and you get this as well in other places so you can see sort of a powdery trail quite a heavy powdery trailing and a bit of breakup trailing so the dark hatched area they're sort of makeshift roof on the shelter there and if I go inside there's some further examples you can see it around the book there and where it says e to pick up a letter it's a bit of it there the pops here have a bit of what I call light powdery trailing so that adds a little bit to percieve blur but it doesn't really distinct smear or stinked heavy powdery trailing that makes sense so really I like to sort of show these weaknesses and show that they do exist but actually I've been playing this game a lot on other games and as far as v8 models go I actually find that I can play quite competitively on this model and it doesn't really bug me in the way that some others do however the overshoot is something I noticed quite a lot and if you are sensitive to that you can reduce that and you do that by changing the overdrive settings so I'll just do that now so it's there in the gaming settings it says it's speed which is my current setting like the third setting can set up to balance or picture quality I'll show you balance first what this does is it does get rid of that overshoot but it replaces it with quite a lot of powdery trailing and it has quite smeary appearance in places and just overall levels of perceived blur they're increased considerably and for that reason I really don't like this setting it's just the pixel transitions are way slower than they should be especially for these high refresh rates but even at lower refresh rates they're actually quite slow and now I'll come on to that shortly but I don't like this setting but if you super sensitive to overshoot in a bit less sensitive to these sort of weaknesses in terms of the powdery trailing then perhaps consider this setting I will show you the picture quality setting for comparison it's very slow indeed this one there's now extensive smeary trailing all over the place there's a huge level of perceived blur it doesn't really look like a hundred and forty four Hertz performance at all it's really quite messy and it's I like I liken it to being drunk when you're playing a game as a sort of dizzying effect it's really uncomfortable so I don't really think this setting is going to be preferred by any user really you might also notice in the video there seems to be some sort of hatch markings on the monitor and see that in the video they might come and go that's just more away from the camera it's not something on the monitor itself because of the pixel density of this monitor it's very difficult to actually capture the motion or the in a way that doesn't show that without putting the camera miles away from the monitor which is bad for other reasons so there isn't something from the monitor it's just from the camera so don't worry about that particular aspect I also would mention that 165 Hertz if you're using that and you're getting 165 frames a second at least above 144 frames a second so you're actually getting some benefit from 165 Hertz you still get this sort of smeary trailing or the weaknesses in terms of the slower than optimal pixel transitions and actually the the trailing is a little bit more pronounced in some places because the pixel response requirements are increased as your refresh rate increases and your frame rate increases but the monitor doesn't speed up its pixel response as it can't speed these up without extreme overshoot so it doesn't really help in that respect it actually hinders it and if you set the monitor to a much lower refresh rate then these sort of weaknesses they do reduce a bit but they are still there to quite an extent so I'm going to talk about adaptive sync and I'm going to show you the monitor running it lower frame rates and refresh rates and I'll talk a little bit about this I'm now on a different scene on battlefield 5 most of the pixel transitions here are between lighter and medium shades the kind that the monitor performs very quickly and the overall level of perceived blur is a lot lower here than where the darker transitions are dominant there are some dark transitions so you can see sort of the dog's shades there for example so there's a little bit of the powdery Tralee around there some more of that here there are also some other examples of overshoot here because the lighter transitions do show a bit of halo trailing and places isn't just for the dark transitions that you get this the halo trailing you can see behind the object here to the left of the object I hope you can see on the video sort of a bright overshoot trailing halo trailing it's brighter than the object and it's brighter than the background which is why it stands out a bit so I'm just showing you these so you get an idea of how it looks at high refresh rates and high frame rates you don't really see it behind the walls buildings or anything like that that's not really widespread on seems like this it's still there though this monitor to support adaptive sync though so I'm just going to increase my graphic settings and talk about this now increase my graphic settings and you'll see that the frame rate counter which is towards the top right of the screen it does sometimes dipped below 144 frames a second gets close to 140 sometimes dips a little bit below that now without adaptive sync you would get obvious tearing if you had vsync disabled or you got obvious stuttering if you had vsync enabled with adaptive sync however the refresh rate of the monitor is dynamically adjusting to keep pace with the frame rate so as the frame rate reduces the refresh rate of the display reduces that keeps everything in sync and you don't get that tearing and stuttering so that's very nice this monitor supports AMD freesync on compatible GPUs and systems and also supports an Nvidia g-sync compatible mode that's actual amusing at the moment and videos decent compatible mode on an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti the technology works in much the same way adaptive sync as an AMD user or an Nvidia user I've used it on both of my graphics cards and as an Nvidia user the only difference is that the floor of operation which will come on to shortly is a bit higher so with AMD you will get between 48 and 165 Hertz with the monitor dynamically adjusting and the ceiling of operation that depends on what static refresh rate you've selected so for example I've got one hundred and forty-four Hertz selected so that means that will be my ceiling on the NVIDIA GPU like I'm using at the moment the floor of operation is 65 Hertz it doesn't make a big difference though because the monitor also supports LFC low framerate compensation or as an Nvidia user and LFC like technology and what that means is the monitor sticks to a multiple of the frame rate with its refresh rates to keep tearing and stuttering at bay so at the moment I've only got a few dips below 144 frames a second but I'd still get to me obvious tear and stuttering sensitivity to tear and structure and does vary not everyone will find this technology is sort of magical as other people but I really do appreciate it even with these slight dips I've increased the graphics settings further now so I'm around a hundred frames a second bit of fluctuation either side of that and one thing I notice straight away the perceived blur overall is increased because I have a decrease in framerate and there's also a decrease in connected field for that reason so it isn't the same as 144 frames a second 244 Hertz or 165 but it's still quite decent you know you're still getting triple-digit frame rates so there's still decent connected feel and the level of perceived glare is quite good overall one thing to note freesync adaptive sync it doesn't employ variable overdrive like Nvidia g-sync monitors with the module do so what they do is they tune the pixel overdrive to various different refresh rates so as your framerate dips the overdrive is retuned and that's a good thing because with adaptive sync models like this things that basically tuned to your highest refresh rates and as the refresh rate reduces because your frame rates reducing you have excessive amounts of voltage for the lower refresh rates and things aren't as tuned well in terms of the pixel overdrive and that basically gives you more noticeable overshoot so if you do notice overshoot on an adaptive sync monitor at its maximum refresh rate and that is quite strong on this model moderately strong it will then become increasingly strong as your framerate dips and your refresh rate dips if you've got adaptive sing active so you can see that halo trailing it's even brighter now a bit more colourful you can also see some examples of overshoot behind the building walls now some halo trailing fairly colorful what I would say though I think most users at this kind of frame rate around 100 frames a second hundred Hertz Martha you probably will prefer to use a speed setting still it does depend on your sensitivity to overshoot versus other issues but I will show you the balance setting just for a comparison here I've not got the balance setting active and there is certainly a decrease in overshoot but instead it's replaced by some of this heavy powdery training with a bit of a smear looking places so these significantly slower than optimal pixel transitions and that does have the effect even for these transitions which the March has a bit more comfortable with with the lighter shades and the medium shades it does increase the overall perceived blur and that is noticeable to me so I don't like this setting and even at 100 frames second 100 Hertz but if you're really sensitive to overshoot then it is something to consider I've increased the graphics settings further I'm still using the balanced setting just so I can show you so it's around 60 to 70 frames a second 60 to 70 Hertz therefore on the monitor at the moment and with this balance setting even though the weaknesses in the pixel responses the sort of powder trailing the smeary trailing they aren't as obvious as at higher frame rates and high refresh rates but they're definitely still there and and there are some standout examples and this isn't even you know showing lots of the high contrast transitions this has mainly their lighter shades and the medium shades but even then they're definitely some standout weaknesses so really it depends on your sensitivity to overshoot and versus these sort of weaknesses and pixel responsiveness which setting you might want to use however if you do use the speed setting which I'm going to just switch on now yeah you guessed it you get some pretty strong overshoot so you can now see behind the walls there up there for example quite strong overshoot obvious halo trailing quite colourful quite I captured actually very eye-catching and the other shoe here the halo trailing increased further but really the examples up here actually more obvious and it's really quite widespread now you also get some dirty trailing in places around the leaves there so that's darker than the background or the foreground cut then that's darker than the background or the object color might not come across so obviously on the video but I can certainly see it to my eye but the overall perceived blur is reduced compared to the mid setting rebalance setting however adaptive sync is still doing its thing that's getting rid of teryan stuttering if the frame rate dropped further and then LFC kicked in or NFC like technology as I described earlier you'd still have an experience free from that tear and stuttering from frame rate and refresh rate mismatches so I really do appreciate the technology but what I would say is I think having a setting somewhere between speed and balance would have been preferable on this model and I would just say that in general actually because I think for some users even at the higher frame rates and high refresh rates I'll just tone down my graphic settings then so I can I can show you them again much nicer so now I've got my connected field back that perceived their levels are much lower overall much more comfortable in terms of the responsiveness and the overshoot levels are much lower however I would say that as I was alluding to just before I do think that the speed setting is a little bit overdone for some users the overshoot levels are fairly strong and even here although they're not as strong in these scenes for these transitions and aren't as strong as lower frame rates and refresh rates if you're sensitive to overshoot you might still notice this whereas the balance setting is way slower it's far too slow really especially at these kind of high refresh rates and I just think that a setting between the balance and speed would have been preferable this was sort of my main criticism of the Auris 82 7qd which I reviewed earlier as well I feel that there's too much of a jump between the overdrive settings I think that tuning some way between the two would have been preferable and I haven't really mentioned comparisons with other models although I did say that this is quite fast for VA model which I would stick to if you're using the speed setting it certainly is there are weaknesses which I've shown you but those weaknesses aren't really as widespread or extreme as our and many high refresh rate VA models however I wouldn't say this is the fastest or the best the cleanest performance I've seen from a VA model I'd give that accolade to the LG 3 to GK 850 G provided you've got G sync active which some of us didn't have when they were given you pixel response time measurements unfortunately so if you've got G sync active and using the faster setting I believe it is the fastest overdrive setting that's a bit faster than this overall it doesn't have as many weaknesses and I think the over shoots a bit lower as well the aoc c24 g1 with its strong setting i think was probably the model i'd say was most similar to this in terms of its overall responsiveness at 144 frame is second hundred and forty-four Hertz although the AOC again had slightly tighter pixel responses some of the weaknesses are a little bit more pronounced on this model and compared to the AOC and in terms of overshoot it sort of occurs in different places and manifests a slightly different way but I feel it's a little bit more obvious on this model but maybe I'm just miss remembering the AOC overall this is a fast VA model just be aware that there are some weaknesses just before wrapping up the review the responsiveness section that was cut slightly short and that's because I had recorded a sectional thought I'd recorded a section but my camera had overheated and it wasn't actually recording so we mentioned there is something called a limb stabilizer on this monitor as well which is a strobe backlight setting and what that does is it causes the screen to flicker at a frequency matching the refresh rate you can set it to various different refresh rates including 165 Hertz I do talk about this feature in the written review and that's actually a better medium for this kind of feature to be discussed the reason for that is that all you really see in the video is the screen flickering and changes and brightness and stuff but it's not something which you can actually see the benefit of in a video however I would say that the strobe backlight setting on this model is not particularly great the aim stabilizer setting some users may see some utility in it but personally I think you would prefer to just use adaptive sync and you can't have that active at the same time as the aim stabilizer so refer to the written review for further information about that so to wrap up then the contrast performance of the monitor is the main strength really and it did put in a good showing and that respect had a good strong static contrast it didn't have a great amount of va glow just a bit of va glow and that's certainly nothing compared to I P s glow or anything of that nature and a little bit of black crush as well but nothing extreme so it takes a lot of boxes in terms of contrast provided a good atmosphere to dark scenes and games and that kind of thing should also mention I suppose the design of the monitor I often sort of get a bit carried away with the image characteristics don't really mention the design so much but I find it fairly inoffensive really it doesn't look extremely gamer esque it doesn't have any sort of bright colourful features I find the fairly solid powder coated metal stand solid feeling and solid look to it quite nice the RGB fusion lighting feature it isn't the brightest and that I've seen in terms of illuminating the ball behind the monitor but you can at least see it in in dimmer room lighting whereas it with some features you have to actually be behind the monitor to see that there's even a light on at all so it's better than some and the flexibility you get with the software and how easy it is to sort of change the different colors and stuff it's quite a nice little touch as well speaking of software suppose it's worth a bit of a mention and honourable mention the OSD sidekick software I quite like that my main reason I like it and it's very easy to use but also that it makes it very easy to upgrade the firmware and gigabyte Oris have been really very proactive at least with their ad 2 7qd if that's anything to go by with releasing lots of firmware updates and I know users do like to be able to upgrade stuff like that themselves they give you that utility so onto the image characteristics that and the color reproduction really very good overall for the panel type there aren't any major inconsistencies it isn't as consistent as an IPS type panel but from a reasonable viewing position and sitting quite centrally there are chips and saturation and gamma and that kind of thing but they're not extreme for the panel type and for general purpose use I think this will be absolutely fine and for color critical work perhaps be aware of these issues the color gamut is quite generous as well that extends a fair bit beyond srgb so you get a good dose of extra vibrancy things look more saturated and they should but it's quite a balanced extra saturation and it's not extreme so I think most people will find that quite pleasing the responsiveness of the monitor the main weakness of VA panels and this has really no exception but it does have a nice high refresh rate although I don't actually like the 165 Hertz for fresh feet because there is this strange artifact you look to the overshoot which I found particularly unpleasant to look at so even if you've got it set to 144 Hertz you're not really losing much but you do lose that annoying effect to the overshoot but there is quite a lot of overshoot still it's fairly widespread if you're using the optimal speed overdrive setting there are some weaknesses as well in terms of slower than optimal pixel responses but overall this is one of the faster VA models I've used and I feel that I can game quite well competitively on it even if it doesn't give me the cleanest performance out there I would have liked to have seen an overdrive setting between the speed setting and the balance setting because a balance setting is far too slow the monitor also supports HDR high dynamic range and it does quite well at least for VESA HDR 400 level display you don't get any local dimming or anything like that so it's far from a true HDR performance and some people say it's absolutely pointless having HD on a monitor but doesn't have local dimming and I do sympathise with that and I do understand why people would say that but I wouldn't say it's pointless because it does bring some benefit still the color gamut is put to good use the 90% DCI p3 color space of this monitor it's put to good use appropriate you so saturation levels are appropriate for HDR content overall there's also good tone mapping you get ten bits per channel for the pipeline that improves you nuanced shade variety for shadow detailing and at the higher end as well so it gives you smoother gradients it's a nice thing a nice addition so overall the the look under HDR some users will quite like it but it isn't the full Flatley to our experience by any means so there haven't really mentioned just to wrap up and the conclusion at least the screen surface is nice and light as well doesn't have an obvious graininess to it and the screen itself is curved and in videos like this there's a strange pin cushion effect and inin photos as well that you see of the monitor but when you're actually sitting in front of it using it it's really not something you notice and it's something which most users will adapt to quite readily the curve in general so I don't think it's something you should fear think it's something you should really embrace unless you are a designer or you know you don't like curved monitors to experience for most users I really wouldn't worry about it then the resolution the pixel density obviously it's not going to win any awards in that respect it sits on the lower end of what you'd get from a modern monitor 27 inch full HD but that is an appropriate resolution for some users and it certainly makes it quite easy to get a relatively high frame rate which is sort of what this monitor is all about really and it also is more appropriate for movie content which tends to be full HD at most you know there is some UHD content out there I appreciate that but a lot of content is still Full HD or lower resolution so that's really all there is to the gigabyte horas CV 27f 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: 13,355

Keywords: Review, Gigabyte, AORUS, CV27F

Id: WI3FXkHzu-s

Length: 63min 46sec (3826 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019