Gigabyte M27Q Review - 1440p Jack of All Trades

it's adam here for pc monitors and in this video i'm going to be taking a look at the gigabyte m27q as usual for a video review what you see depends on my camera depends on the processing done by my video editing software depends on the processing done by youtube and ultimately it depends on the screen that you're viewing the video on so no way does it accurately represent what the monitor would look like first hand as usual there's a written review which accompanies this 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 this one also uses a 27-inch ips type panel it's an ips type panel from sharp it's a little bit different to most others on the market and it has two 560x1440 wqhd resolution supports a 170hz refresh rate the combination of screen size and resolution gives you a good pixel density so there's a good useful workspace good clarity potential as well so it's good for multitasking that kind of thing texts pretty crisp decent size something i will mention early on is this monitor has a bgr blue green red rather than rgb red green blue sub pixel layout and it does have some fringing issues and that's to say that sometimes you can see a slight border of cyan on one side and magenta on the other side of objects particularly white objects and this can happen around text as well a lot of this at least with the text is cut down if you set up clear type correctly most windows users will be using clear type so if you type clear type into the box there in windows 10 for example you can then go on this clear type text tuner and what you want to do is make sure that the first sample set here is set to the second one there and that sets windows to expect the bgr subpixel layout you should say on this model that the first one looks finer and it has a bit of fringing to it so that sort of cyan it can be green it can be kind of magenta depends on your perspective on things but to me it's a sort of cyan and magenta fringe but the second set there should look bolder and better the rest of them you can actually just set them according to your preferences it doesn't really matter what you do there once you've done that most text is cleared up but there are some examples of fringing which will remain and it's not just text which this will affect and i go through that in the vision review so refer to that this isn't an issue which most users are going to notice it really is just a small minority of users who are going to notice this or find it bothersome so don't worry about it and don't dismiss this monitor for that reason but if you look at the start of the calibration section of the written review this is all covered in quite some detail and i'm going to talk about the external features of the monitor so as you can see it has a pretty basic homely design as i like to call it has lots of dark matte plastics the stand base is a low profile design with a step it actually has a little band of glossy plastic between the two steps just on the forward facing bits there but it's mainly matte black plastic and you don't really see that glossy band to be honest or i don't notice it so it's a pretty basic stand design really kind of hollowed out not particularly high quality look or feel to it in my opinion certainly if you compare to the gigabyte oris models with their powder coated metal it's a bit more basic than that but it does the job the module itself is pretty firm on the stand it doesn't wobble about excessively or anything like that there's also a cable tidy loop in the middle of the stand neck and you can also see some more glossy plastic there depending on the height you've got the monitor at the bottom bezel is just matte black plastic single stage pretty much covers the panel border at the top and sides you can see the panel border because it uses a dual stage design so that means that there is some panel border but it's flush with the rest of the screen and when the monitor switched off as it is now it's quite difficult to see it you will be able to see it if i've got the camera at this angle when the monitor switched on you can certainly see that panel border and then there's a hard plastic outer component as well very slender just around the screen the screen surface is what i would classify as very light matte anti-glare so this room is not particularly bright and because it's very light matte anti-glare it does mean you can get some slightly sharper reflections and you'd get or some slightly sharper patches of glare i should say then you'd get on some matte screen surfaces so the glare handling isn't quite as strong as on some but on the plus side it doesn't give you a clear layered appearance to the image and it's better for preserving clarity and vibrancy so i actually quite like this kind of screen surface myself i'm a fan of glossy monitors some of you might be aware which are very few and far between on the market at the side the mod is quite slim at the thinnest point books out a little bit centrally where the stand attaches you'll also see the mechanism that attaches the stand in the screen that offers some reasonable ergonomic flexibility you can adjust the height of the screen i wouldn't say the height adjustment is the smoothest operation so i'm sorry about those uh noises for those of a nervous disposition as you can hear it's not like a smooth silent glide or anything like that it's a little bit noisy but it does the trick you can also tilt the screen so that's fully tilted backwards and fully tilted forwards at the rear of the monitor you can see that there is glossy fingerprint and dust magnet as i like to call it black plastic but just at the top and it's at the back so i don't really mind too much about that i never really see that so it's facing my wall the rest of it is matte black plastic and there's an m27q logo in sort of a medium gray towards the top left there and also some little engraved patterns up there just a little design feature the stand attaches essentially with 100 by 100 millimeter vessel holes and you can unscrew that and attach an alternative 100 by 100 millimeter vessel compatible solution if you prefer the osd controls are found towards the bottom left here so there's the joystick there's also the dedicated kvm button and this is all explored in the osd video that accompanies this review and i didn't mention before but the in terms of the depth of the monitor it's quite good it's a fairly compact design it doesn't take up a lot of depth on the desk i give exact measurements in the visual review and the features in the aesthetics section if you're interested in that kind of thing and you'll also see that there's a little bit of a section missing from the stand has sloped angled design which means you can have your keyboard at an angle in the middle of the stand or you can have other things sitting there if you want the ports face downwards so you can see nice little port labels there quite clear actually so you've got a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack you've got two hdmi 2.0 ports which support up to 144 hertz at the native to 560 by 1 440 resolution also hdr compatible and will support amd freesync on compatible gpus you've got a displayport 1.2 a plus input which means it has hdr support and it supports up to 170 hertz at the native to 560 by 1 440 resolution also supports adaptive sync including amd freesync and also nvidia's g-sync compatible mode on compatible gpus there's usb type-c port which only offers 15 watt power delivery i believe it is you can check that in the written review in case i misspoke there so that's not a massive amount of power delivery mf8 that's quite typical on these gaming monitors to have a fairly low power delivery unfortunately that's just how it is at the moment but it does give you a bit of power delivery it gives you data transfer and it also has displayport alt mode then a usb 3 upstream port and two usb 3 downstream ports and a dc power input which means this monitor has an external power brick rather than an internal power converter i'm now on shadow of the tomb raider and i'm going to talk about contrast using some in-game examples i wasn't actually expecting to load this particular scene i don't usually show this one gives you a bit of variety so i'll run with it anyway as a monitor with an ips type panel contrast really isn't the main strength i did measure around 1 200 to 1 for my static contrast and that's after the adjustments made to my test settings that's actually pretty strong for an ips type panel certainly quite a bit stronger than competing models with lg nano ips panels for example we also have to take into account ips glow that's a big feature on ips type models like this or certainly a feature at least and because i got the camera mounted fairly centrally you can actually see that in all four corners of the screen it is exaggerated a bit on the camera and it isn't something which you will notice in a brighter room and i'll brighten up the room a little bit later so i can show you this but it does eat away at the atmosphere and also my unit has a bit of backlight bleed towards the bottom at least particularly the bottom right corner which brings out the ips glow a bit more strongly so some units will be a bit better than my one but you can see this kind of hazing it looks quite warm in some regions kind of greenish gold in other regions that's how i'd describe it and actually my unit also has a bit of backlight bleed towards the top left as well but i've got to say i don't usually game in a dark room like this and it isn't something which i find as obnoxious as it will appear here on the camera and in this dark room but if you do like to sit in a dark room and game or dimmer lighting then ips type models like this they just don't give you a deep atmospheric performance that's really not what they're all about a real strength of the ips type panel though when it comes to contrast it's not strictly related to contrast but i like to start it in here anyway is the gamma consistency excellent so that means the overall detail level and actually the scenes turned out to be quite a good one for testing contrast i might use it in the future but when i'm talking about detail so it's sort of the finer details like the vegetation here on tn models what you'll find is further up the screen that'll be masked and too much of that detail is ebbed away at and lower down there's actually far too much detail and that can give things a banded or blocky appearance on va models it tends to be that or it is always actually that the center of the screen has black crush it can vary between panels but there's always some black crush and that means that dark shades are darker than they should be things are too blended together whereas peripherally so towards the side edges and bottom edges from a normal viewing position you can see too much detail on some va models or certainly either way you're going to see a lot more detail than you do centrally so ips type models like this they're much more consistent with the gamma in that respect for brighter shades i quite like the screen surface on this model so this model has a very light matte anti-glare screen surface as i mentioned when i was talking about the external features of the monitor the aesthetics so that prevents a layered appearance in front of the image it doesn't have an obvious layered appearance the lighter mission is more direct in that respect than many matte screen surfaces and it also means that brighter content such as the light in the background there which i have to say looks a bit more like that to the eye just the exposure of the camera sort of caused it all to get crushed together it looks a bit more like that and some of the smoothness is there it doesn't have the kind of graininess that some matte screen surfaces offer i'm quite sensitive to this graininess and i find this screen surface quite agreeable so that's a good thing in my book most users are going to be absolutely fine with this screen surface going to find it quite nice i've brightened the room up it's moderately bright now and you can see or what's the point you can't see that ips glow as strongly at all so these are the kind of conditions which i'd say really work much better for panels like this ips type panels and actually just lcds in general if you're going to be sitting in a dark room i would recommend having some kind of lighting behind the monitor bias lighting and philips hue lighting you can sort of customize that it's quite nice they have various different solutions there which can be used so i would definitely recommend that otherwise you are going to have issues you're going to notice issues with dark uniformity because you're not going to have nice depth because that's just not what monitors like this deliver and speaking of that ips glow i said it can be brought out a bit more notably on some models if you've got issues with dark uniformity and my unit isn't awful in that respect but does have some issues which does bring that ips glow out a bit more and of course you can notice the issues themselves as well another thing which would cause extra ips glow is if you have the brightness increased if you're using a higher brightness level and also if you are sitting closer to the screen it's brought out more noticeably so i tend to sit around 70 to 80 centimetres from the screen that's my normal viewing position it varies a little bit depending on my posture how i'm sitting that kind of thing but that's roughly how i like to sit and really from from this distance this is much in line with other 27-inch ips type models i've used when it comes to ips glow i'm going to focus on colour reproduction now and to start off i like to use legom that's legum.nl the website and the test for viewing angles so the legume text here it looks a nice blended gray throughout it looks a little bit more red for the striping to the text towards the bottom of the screen a bit more greenish towards the top but it doesn't have obvious flashes of orange or saturated reds and greens as you'd get with models with weaker viewing angles so this indicates a low viewing angle dependency to the gamma curve of the monitor pretty typical for an ips type model this block always looks a bit weird on the camera so i'm not going to spend too long going through this but it basically looks a pinkish purple to my eye throughout it's pretty consistent the red block very nice good consistent rich red throughout the screen and the green block that appears a good saturated green chartreuse throughout again it doesn't have any issues where some regions of the screen are clearly more yellow than others as tn models in particular would show and va models show this to a good degree as well so it's nice and consistent in that respect blue block good rich royal blue throughout the screen although that's not really saying much this block often looks very consistent but brightness uniformity issues can also affect it but on my unit at least the shade looks really nice and consistent i'm on battlefield 5 now and i'm going to talk about color reproduction using some in-game examples this monitor's color gamut is quite generous it extends quite a bit beyond srgb actually measures 95 of the dci p3 color space and actually it covers a lot of adobe rgb there's a bit of under coverage of adobe rgb in some regions and some over coverage and others just like there's some over coverage of dci p3 in some regions of the gamut but i would recommend looking at the color reproduction section of the wriston review so you can see the exact gamut i measured and the percentages compared to various color spaces but what this means if you're looking at most content such as the game i'm playing here but this would extend more broadly lots of content you just look at when you're browsing the internet that kind of thing this is really mainly designed with the srgb color space in mind certainly typical for games under sdr like this and when you're watching movies and that kind of thing and what this means is that with the generous color gamut here extending quite a bit beyond srgb things look more saturated than they should they look more vibrant this is a look that some users really like other people don't like it so much but the way that it's achieved here is very different to if you increase the digital saturations so if you increase the saturation slider or this monitor has a feature called color vibrance if you increase that things look really cartoonish things are crushed together you lose your shade variety and that's because shades are taken closer to the edge of the gamut without the gamut itself being expanded so the most saturated shades remain the same but shades that should be less saturated appear a lot more saturated than they should with this back in the neutral position and that's just the gamut with the extra saturation the shade variety is all there there's good spacing on the gamut between shades so you get a nice variety of shades and if you like you can actually reduce that a bit to take a bit of the edge off the saturation but i find the balance is very difficult to get right and i talk about that a bit more in the osd video when i talk about this particular feature and various other features of the monitor but with the consistency as well the consistency of the panel which i talked about with reference to legon earlier the strong color consistency it means that the saturation levels the richness is maintained throughout the screen so these fires here there are shades there which are way beyond the srgb color space thanks to the generous gamut and because of the strong color consistency it maintains that rich look that vibrant look throughout the screen and again some people are really going to like this look and if you look beyond gaming it's actually quite useful having this kind of color gamut or all the potential is there to use that if you've got work within the adobe rgb color space or the dci p3 color space so the vibrant shades definitely there it does mean that some shades appear a bit unnatural so some of the green shades for example they appear just too saturated some of the yellowish greens the yellow components are brought out a bit too strongly as well and you get the same with browns so the woods of these rifles for example they look a bit too orange the red shades the orange shades brought out too strongly they don't look as much of a neutral brown as they should the monitor also offers an srgb emulation setting so we change picture mode to srgb that clamps things to the srgb gamut so the coverage extends just to that and no further and that tones down this extra saturation things look more as the developers intend things to be aware of though for example the rifle there certainly looks more realistic so the push towards the reds and oranges has gone and again some of the green shades look more muted more appropriate so if you do like this kind of look then you can do that just be aware that you can't change the color channels as usual for an srgb emulation setting you can't change the gamma either but you can at least adjust the brightness which is better flexibility than some srgb settings give you sometimes the brightness is locked so at least it's more usable in that respect as i show in the written review the color gamut isn't perfectly aligned with srgb it's not too bad in that respect but either way it gets rid of that extra saturation there's really no right or wrong answer as to which mode you should use it's just according to your own preferences you might find that on some game titles you like using this mode others you actually prefer the native gamut and that's absolutely fine you know it's all about personal preferences because the srgb color space is very restrictive there are lots of shades in the real world which you will not see with the srgb color space in mind they're just way beyond that so it's really personal preferences whether you want things to look as the developers intend even if they're little restrictive gamut or if you prefer extra saturation and vibrancy i'm back on shadow of the tube made and i'm running the game in hdr high dynamic range so it uses hdr 10 like most movies and game titles you'll use on the pc and indeed on the console and this is the most widely supported hdr standard vesa also has their own certification system for different levels of hdr if you like this one is vesa display hdr 400 certified so that's the lowest level it's only a basic hdr experience so i'm gonna just quickly run through what that brings you so one thing is that you have 10-bit color reproduction used rather than just 8-bit in the pipeline this monitor is actually using an 8-bit panel but it uses dithering on the gpu to fill in the gap so to speak and that works very well i've talked about this on previous videos and i've reviewed some models where it will do this with some refresh rates to save bandwidth whereas other refresh rates it'll actually have the dithering handled on the monitor and the difference between the two is really very slight so don't worry about it just take my word for it it's only a slight difference and what this does is it enhances the nuanced shade variety so there's a better selection of closely matching dark shades for example so that gives a natural uplift to shadow detail and it's very different to the look you get if you enhance the gamma use a gamma enhancement under sdr which doesn't improve your shade variety it just kind of gives an artificial uplift it's a nice little benefit of hdr things definitely look different and it's not just the dark shades it also affects the brighter shades i'll come on to that shortly but just sticking with these dark shades again festive spatula 400 is very limited in this respect there's no local dimming used here so the monitor just has its backlight brightness at one particular setting and that's used all the time it doesn't employ any dynamic contrast which i would say it's a bit disappointing actually i'm not a massive fan of dynamic contrast in general but if it's used properly under hdr it can be enhanced with hdr metadata which enhances the precision it means the adjustments made are actually more appropriate and less annoying than they can be under sdr or just generally so that can work quite well the viewsonic xg270 qc that's the va model is one example of a model which uses very effective dynamic contrast under hdr that works quite well of course not as good as local dimming but better than nothing on this model instead you actually set the brightness manually so i've got it set to 100 which is full brightness and that's really the only setting i would recommend using under hdr just because otherwise things have a very unhdr like look the bright elements are far too subdued and actually some of the colors get subdued it's a little bit odd under hdr the color reproduction is kind of tied to the luminance more closely than it would be under sdr so really hdr is supposed to be experienced with local dimming or illumination which varies throughout the screen and varies for different shades different shade depths that kind of thing so if you don't have that then it doesn't really have a proper hdr look but that applies regardless of what you've got the brightness set to it's just that if you set it any lower and you see under hdr it says that hdr on at the top and a lot of this is grayed out it doesn't matter which preset you use either for example there's no srgb setting and i'll come on to the color gamut used under hdr shortly some of the settings apply an extra sharpness filter if you like that kind of look then fair enough you can use one of the settings which applies that more strongly i think the reader mode does that to some extent and the movie mode is quite a strong one but the main thing you adjust here is brightness which as i said got it set to 100 if you reduce that if you don't like the high brightness then by all means that's fine do that but to me things just look far too muted there again some colors just have lost depth the overall scene just doesn't look as it should under hdr at all so i'm gonna stick to 100 brightness for the rest of this oh and if you like quite a strong sharpness filter incidentally if you go into gaming you can actually change the super resolution so if you increase this applies a fairly strong sharpness filter and as you can see there you can adjust the overdrive you can also use adaptive sync when you're using hdr and that works with amd and nvidia gpus i'm actually using an rtx 3090 at the moment and i've got adaptive sync active as it happens doesn't change the performance under hdr at all and speaking of changing performance or not changing performance i'm using displayport but i tested under hdmi very similar experience i tested with my amd gpu again very similar experience so of course if you're using an hdr compatible games console you're going to be using hdmi and usually the chipsets amd the graphics chipset so really the experience that i'm talking about here applies more broadly to games consoles under hdr as well and if you're looking at hdr film content which is another thing i did but for me scenes like this really separate very good hdr performers some not so good ones and this one it's kind of middling it's not the worst i've seen but i have to say that it doesn't have a particularly high brightness so the luminance is i mean 400 kilometers per meter squared is the requirement for vessel display hdr400 it slightly exceeded that but only very slightly actually i think it was very close to 400 so it doesn't give great pop to these bright elements and because it isn't local dimming the surrounding dimmer shades aren't any dimmer the high brightness is used throughout the screen so not a wonderful look at all not an hdr like look in this respect and really the depth of some of these shaded areas should be much better than they are i've tried to adjust the camera a bit so it shows the nuanced shade variety at the high end but of course it isn't an hdr video you may well not be using an hdr monitor anyway running in hdr etc so you're not going to be able to see what things actually look like first hand but the nuance shade variety for these brighter shades it helps weather effects it helps sort of the mist here and the light effects look more natural with more natural progressions smoother progressions nice smooth gradients so it certainly does have a nice effect in that respect so on a bit of a different scene now still running the game under hdr and the other aspect of hdr which i'd like to talk about is color reproduction so now the developers are targeting the dci p3 color space as their near-term target they've also got rec 2020 in mind so ideally your hdr monitor would fully cover rec 2020 that gives you sort of the full vibrancy but developers are still aware that most displays are closer to dci p3 if anything if they even get there under hdr so they have to make sure the content actually looks decent there as well this monitor as i mentioned 95 dci p3 color space coverage it actually extends a bit beyond that for some green shades i actually quite like how it shows green shades this monitor in terms of its color reproduction the hdr so you don't have that extra yellowing i observed under sdr things look very vibrant still there are some really nice lush green shades and a good variety of brighter green shades but they look a lot more appropriate than they do under sdr and really the very generous color gamut helps in that respect again because it isn't local dimming as i mentioned earlier on it does mean that things don't look as vibrant or as lush or as deep as they could regardless of the color gamut and how things are set up but the color garment still helps these flowers as well they're quite eye-catching nice and blue and there are these shades which are well beyond the srgb color space being shown here so really things look more natural but the vibrant elements are still there and actually some of them are there arguably to a greater extent than under sdr but in general if you're running the game under sdr then you switch to hdr your initial thoughts on the color might be that things somehow look washed out i've heard people describe it as they probably wouldn't describe this model as washed out but just in general that's actually just because you've been used to these greatly over saturated shades things are now appearing more as they should more natural but still with the vibrant elements if you actually look at sort of the finer details the elements that should be vibrant they are another example would be the fire here for example has a nice vibrant look to it under sdr though some of the oranges are brought out too strongly and look kind of a reddish orange here it's a more natural look again local dimming would definitely help here or better luminance control can help with the the shade depth there and some of the the blues for these dresses for example they don't look as lush as i've seen on some models and actually the the fire i showed you before just then and these dresses they could have done with a bit of extra richness and it's not just the local dimming the color gamut extending a bit more could help a little bit in that respect as well but it certainly is far from the weakest hdr performance i've seen but really hdr on this monitor it's a bonus it's something which i think some people are going to quite enjoy um if you if you haven't seen better hdr performance then you might quite like it i have seen better hdr performances so it doesn't wow me in any way but it's kind of it's still quite usable and it can be nice it makes things look quite different so it can be nice for a bit of variety i'm on battlefield 5 now and i'm going to talk about the responsiveness of the monitor this monitor has a 170 hertz refresh rate and i've got this game running at pretty solid 170 frames a second and see the frame rate towards the top right with the green text there this gives you two main advantages this high frame rate high refresh rate combination one is it improves the connected feel and that describes how things feel when you interact with the game world it's fluidity and the precision this is also aided by low input lag with this model i measured around four milliseconds of input lag so it's not super low but it is low and it's certainly low enough that most users are going to find it absolutely fine in that respect and it certainly isn't indicative of a low signal delay which is the main element of input lag that you feel the advantage to having this high frame rate high refresh rate combination is that it greatly reduces the perceived blur and this is talked about in the written review and an article all about responsiveness on the website i'm not going to waste my time going through that here but it is something which is closely linked to refresh rate most of the perceived blur you see is due to your eye movement rather than the pixel responses of the monitor so this increase in frame rate and refresh rate it gives you a good edge in perceived blow a good reduction in perceived blur due to eye movement pixel responses are still important though and this monitor does very well in that respect i'm pleased to say it's not perfect there are some weaknesses but i would stress they are minor weaknesses so i often talk about powdery trailing and this is really it's just kind of a spectrum of what i'd classify as powdery trailing sometimes there's light powdery trailing which doesn't really affect perceived blur very much it's the kind of thing that most users aren't going to notice sometimes there's heavy powdery trailing which has a tendency to be potentially more noticeable especially the sensitive users but it's not smeary training or anything like that this monitor generally gives you light powdery trailing and a little bit of sort of moderate or moderate to heavy powdery trailing but it's mainly light especially for these transitions here they're mainly between medium and lighter shades and here this monitor performs very well indeed it does a lot of justice to that 170 hertz refresh rate there are some slight weaknesses as i mentioned so for these brighter shades and for very dark shades sometimes the powdery trailing appears a bit more noticeable so the text here for example shows a bit more of it but it's not extreme it's not smooth it's not like what you'd see on a va model it isn't quite as good overall in terms of the perceived blur and just considering this powdery trailing in general it isn't quite as good as lg's nano ips models for example but it's quite a bit better than models with the inner lux panel that i've tested so the gigabyte aorus fi 27qp for example and also the benq ex2780q they have more noticeable perceived blur they have more significant issues so really i think this model is one that many users are going to be very happy with in terms of its pixel responsiveness it does have adjustable overdrive settings but another nice thing about this model you can just use the lower setting which is called picture quality and by the way there is an auto setting here as well i don't know what that's supposed to do all it seems to do is set this to balance and if you set it to balance it just gives you quite noticeable overshoot so you can now see inverse ghosting you can see some colorful elements introduced around the walls there which weren't there before it does technically speed up pixel responses and technically i suppose you don't get that sort of powdery training i was mentioning before but it's actually just replaced by shadowy trailing dark overshoot it doesn't look very nice at all and you can see this more clearly in the written review with the pursuit photographs that are included in the responsiveness section there but there's actually overdrive artifacts as well so it's not just sort of plain overshoot it actually has a hatched appearance as well which i find really quite distracting and quite annoying so this setting it could appeal to some users but to me it really doesn't deliver anything and that's attractive the picture quality setting i just stick with that oh and the speed setting just for completeness really strong overshoot now bright colorful trailing all over the place and just to show you the auto setting just in case you didn't believe what i said just the same as balanced so back to my preferred picture quality setting now and on to a different scene i'm now on a different scene on battlefield v this one is dominated more by dark transitions it has plenty of dark shades i should say and these can be very unforgiving if some of you have seen my other videos particularly with va models you might break out into a bit of a cold sweat when i start talking about this scene you might have some horrible memories of this smeary trailing and that kind of thing really can be shown very clearly here and strange flickering that can occur due to slow pixel responses as well for some of these objects but here that isn't a problem that isn't the smeary trailing nothing like that there is again some powdery trailing and it does add a bit to perceived blur but it's really quite minor and overall it still makes good use of the 170 hertz refresh rate there aren't really any standout weaknesses as i describe them so again it's me retraining none of that heavy powdery trading not really a little bit um sort of moderate powder trading i guess i might call it so sort of the transitions up there for example it did show a bit of this powdery training a bit more noticeable than some of the other transitions but nothing that i'd really lose sleep over and another nice thing there just isn't any noticeable overshoot i've increased the graphics settings a lot and my frame rate is now substantially below 170 frames a second it's closer to 90 to 100 frames a second just at the moment this monitor supports adaptive sync and that works with nvidia's decent compatible mode on a compatible nvidia gpu such as the rtx 3090 i'm using right now i've also tested amd freesync using an amd rx 580 and freesync worked in a very similar way there are some very minor differences which i'll come on to shortly but it was very similar the main thing the technology does whether it's freesync or nvidia's decent compatible mode works in very much the same way it ensures that refresh rate of the display matches the frame rate where possible that gets rid of tearing and stuttering so usually if you had vsync enabled you would get clear stuttering whereas if you had vsync disabled you'd get clear tearing with adaptive sync you don't get either issue that would be down to frame rate and refresh rate mismatches you kind of stuttering for other reasons but um they're not because of frame rate from fresh rate mismatches because of this if this technology is doing its thing which it certainly does here another thing is the reduction in frame rate yes it is notable to me the connected feel isn't as good there's more perceived blur but the lack of tone and stuttering is very nice and you'll see actually sometimes the frame rate dips closer to 60 or 70 frames a second that really decreases the connected feel and increases the perceived blur even more but again lack of tearing and stuttering easy to appreciate if you're sensitive to those things as i am this monitor doesn't have a lot of overshoot though again i'm using that picture quality setting and that works well throughout the variable refresh rate range so there is a little bit of overshoot now um around the tree there for example but it's not substantial at all not eye-catching i think it's really very impressive actually how well the picture quality setting works across the entire variable refresh rate range i have to say and speaking of variable refresh rate range with this one it will go down to 48 hertz if you are using amd freesync and actually measured 55 hertz with nvidia's json compatible mode it was a little bit lower than that if i decreased the refresh rate so instead of 170 or 165 hertz i decreased that 244 i believe it was 53 hertz the floor of operation and with the refresh rate set to 120 hertz that would go down to 50 hertz you can see the exact figures in the written review where i write this all down it doesn't really make any substantial difference in practice and when the monitor goes below 48 frames a second as an amd user or below 55 frames a second with implementation i'm using at the moment g-sync compatible mode 170 hertz selected as my refresh rate then it employs lfc or frame to refresh multiplication technology that works very effectively to keep tearing and stuttering at bay the only thing i'd say is that and i'd say this with any monitor that uses adaptive sync there is a bit of stuttering when it activates or deactivates so it isn't a very smooth crossover between the technology being used and not used for most users that isn't a problem you'd only occasionally be passing the boundary so it's not an issue but if you happen to be running at a frame rate which is sort of frequently a little bit below a little bit above or you're just frequently passing that boundary that could potentially be annoying but it's really just an issue more generally with adaptive sync monitors not specific to this one and some monitors have issues with flickering that are sensitive to voltage control that kind of thing i didn't observe anything like that on this one with my nvidia or amd gpu so that was really nice to see or not see should i say and i should actually just make a small correction here when i said that the floor of operation is 48 hertz with amd sometimes it seemed to be slightly above that i'm not quite sure why sometimes it seemed to activate lfc a little bit above that maybe 50 to 52 hertz but again i wouldn't lose sleep over this difference it really makes very little difference in practice and again lfc does its thing anyway below that but for me it's really nice having adaptive sync and i do like how it's implemented here because there aren't issues with flickering there aren't issues with overshoot to worry about that kind of thing so in terms of adaptive sync with my nvidia or amd gpu a really nice implementation here and actually the overall responsiveness experience really quite praiseworthy on this model i will also briefly just tagging at the end here this monitor has what's called aim stabilizer which is a strobe backlight setting i'm not going to cover that here in the video review because all you see is obnoxious flickering you can't see any of the benefits but i talked about this in the written review quite extensively i don't love the implementation here i haven't actually ever liked gigabytes aim stabilizer setting if i'm honest it always seems to have some issues strobe crosstalk issues in this case strong overshoot issues with the technology active and you have to have your frame rate matching the refresh rate exactly so it's not ideal and you can't use adaptive sync at the same time and there's also locked brightness so i think for most users this isn't a setting that's going to be of much utility but i do like to mention that it is a setting you can use if you want to just refer to the written review which is a better medium for exploring that kind of setting to wrap up then i think there's a lot to like about this monitor it does take a lot of boxes gives you decent ergonomics at least gives you height adjustment and tilt adjustment which are the main ones people use if you want better economic flexibility you can use an alternative 100 by 100 millimeter vesa compatible solution instead it gives it quite a basic stand in terms of the design you know nothing flashy no powder coated metals nothing luxurious like that does the job another thing that does the job is the resolution in screen size it's decent two five sixty by one four forty twenty seven inches gives you decent amounts of desktop real estate decent clarity to suitably high resolution content that kind of thing there are some issues with fringing which i mentioned more in the written review but really i don't want to go through these in too much detail here because they're only going to affect a minority of users and it isn't something that i think most users should really concern themselves with the contrast performance was very much in line with my expectations for the panel type but actually still quite a bit stronger than some competing models particularly those with lg's nano ips panels which tend to have static contrast which is probably around 400 to one on average lower than this one so there's a bit of a difference there the usual ips glow applied here the screen surface i found quite agreeable it didn't have a clear grainy look to it actually it looked quite smooth and it didn't have a clear layering in front of the image either so i found it quite nice the color reproduction generous color gamut which extends well beyond srgb actually good dci p3 and adobe rgb coverage as well not perfect coverage of either of those color spaces a little bit of extra coverage in some regions some under coverage and others but it does give you the potential to use this monitor for color critical work but for that i would always recommend using a colorimeter or a similar device calibrating and recalibrating your own unit with your own calibration hardware but for general use and games it gives a vibrant look to the image extra saturation not to everyone's taste but this monitor does have an srgb emulation mode which at least has adjustable brightness so it's better than some if you want to tone down colors it also has saturation sliders if you want to just play with that kind of thing and adjust the saturation according to your own taste the color consistency was very strong good ips type performance there so it kept shades looking vibrant and saturated throughout the screen so without clear perceived gamma shifts as you get with tn and va models the gamut was certainly put to good use under hdr and i think the color aspects of hdr probably the most praiseworthy in terms of contrast very basic experience vested sphere hdr400 no dynamic contrast with hdr metadata used no dynamic contrast at all under hdr in fact manual brightness control which is a bit of an odd one to have and hdr to be honest and no local dimming either so really just a very basic experience peak end luminance around 400 count loss per meter squared so not a true hdr experience but not the worst i've seen either in terms of responsiveness ticks on the boxes there as well low input lag good overall pixel responses only minor weaknesses really and the nice thing is you can use the picture quality setting regardless of your refresh rate and it doesn't inject obnoxious overshoot as your refresh rate decreases as it would if you're using adaptive sync and your frame rate decreases so you can just use the lowest setting there picture quality throughout the variable refresh rate range and it works nicely and that was with both nvidia's decent compatible mode and with amd freesync when you put all of this together and you consider that this is a budget offering i think it's really a very attractive offering i know some of you will be watching this and thinking you know how does this monitor work with games consoles i have to say i don't use games consoles myself i don't own games consoles so i don't test in that way but i do look at user feedback and i'm aware that this monitor it would seem at least at the moment and how things are it doesn't actually work with the xbox series x at two five six c by one four forty currently the playstation five doesn't even support that resolution it does have a 4k uhd down sampling mode so you can run it in sort of a pseudo 4k mode and it can accept a 4k signal at up to 60hz so you can use it like that but in terms of its high refresh rate capability at the native resolution it doesn't really work there so really for modern games consoles i tend to recommend something like the benq ex2780q who have lots of positive feedback from console users there and in terms of how it compares to this one just just a quick comparison i don't want to get into too much detail here largely similar not quite as responsive as this one though has integrated speakers and intuited subwoofer has an osd remote so it had some little features which could appeal in fact to to console users as well and it's it tends to be a fairly affordable model as well the price is usually a little bit higher than this gigabyte monitor but not substantially so so to me i mean both of these monitors certainly have their place so that's really all there is to this review of the gigabyte m27q be sure to check out the full review on pc monitors pcmonitors.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: 25,805

Keywords:

Id: _3k-OSm_1FI

Length: 44min 3sec (2643 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Sungate123]

I love seeing people review my monitor :)

[u/santopeace]

https://pcmonitors.info/reviews/gigabyte-m27q/ <- Written review link.
https://forum.pcmonitors.info/main/display-discussion/ <- PC Monitors discussion forum.

[u/[deleted]]

I've been using this monitor for about ~3days now and it's honestly perfect when you consider how cheap it is, I thought the BGR layout would be annoying but I haven't even noticed a difference from RGB layouts.

[u/rodimuscon]

Damn I got the G27Q because so many people in this sub complained about the BGR thing and now it turns out it barely changes anything 😂

[u/Blood13]

I have this monitor.

BGR layout is really issue for me. ClearType set to BGR, yet still i have chromatic aberrations-like artefacts in applications or web pages, which have fonts not supporting ClearType. It's annoying and i can't deal with it. No matter how hard i tried to calibrate monitor, it's hardware peculiarity and you can't totally mitigate it.

I decided to buy LG 27gl850 and ASUS tuf vg27aq1a. Will take best of 3, other 2 will be returned.

​

For potential buyers: don't think that you're special or something. Check black text on white background precisely before buying!

[u/Gingerblakeman94]

Does anyone have any idea how to make this monitor run 1440p x 120fps on Xbox

[u/robi101012981]

Hello, G27qc or M27q? can t decide between those 2, I need 1440p 120hz and VRR via HDMI for my Series S. Thanks!