The concept of OLED gaming monitors has always been an exciting one. Instant response time, gorgeous colors and contrast — what more could anyone want? How about faster and brighter?This the premise of the new ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM, the latest entry into Asus OLED gaming monitor family.
Retailing for $1,999, the ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM has broken past the limitations of previous generation OLED’s to give you an impressive 240Hz refresh rate that’s also 17% brighter than previous generation OLEDs. Paired with its 1440p resolution and 27-inch size, its perfect for fast, colourful shooters like Valorant or Overwatch.
While the PG27AQDM isn’t perfect, there’s very little besides budgetary concerns and a more competitively priced alternative that would stop me from recommending this monitor. It’s simply one of the best gaming monitors money can buy.
Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM Review
Let’s start with specs. The PG27AQDM is a 27-inch OLED gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh and 0.03ms(read instantaneous) response time. It has a rated peak brightness of 1000 nits but that’s limited to a 3% of the screen with HDR on, not the entire thing. But even in SDR, it’s one of the brightest OLED’s I’ve used with 450 nits of brightness which can be quite strenuous especially when viewing large white backgrounds in Office docs and webpages. Thankfully, it also has some Blue light filtering and flicker free tech to save you from sleepless nights.
And because it gets so bright, Asus had to chuck on a large, custom heatsink to the back of the monitor to keep those diodes cool and reduce the risk of the dreaded burn-in. The heatsink draws heat away from the panel and exhausts it through a vent on the top. Asus says this allows the PG27AQDM to operate at 5% lower average temps compared to other OLEDs. Also, it runs incredibly quietly and I never once heard exhaust fans.
That said, Asus isn’t taking chances with burn-in and includes a number of ancillary functions to support panel health. There’s a new intelligent voltage optimisation which adjusts the voltage applied to each individual pixel based on the monitors temperature. On top of that you have staples like Screen Move, Screen Clean and Auto Logo Brightness that’s especially useful when you have bright static elements like game HUDs that stay on screen for long.
I’ve only had the monitor for a few weeks so I can’t really speak to burn-in — that’s something that would take several months. However, having left the monitor on for hours at a time on some rather bright and static screens, I’m yet seen any evidence of burn-in. In short, I wouldn’t worry about burn-in in modern OLEDs.
In terms of the display qualities, the PG27AQDM like all OLEDs boasts an unbeatable contrast of 1,500,000:1 thanks to its self-emitting pixels that can individually turn completely off for perfect blacks. This also makes colours in general really pop and sizzle in a way that few other display types can manage. The PG27AQDM handles 10-bit colour with some excellent colour accuracy with a Delta E<2 and covers 99% of the DCI-P3 and 135% sRGB colour spectrums.
Each monitor is factory pre-calibrated which makes it perfect for colour accurate work and creative workflows. The monitor includes two presets for DCI-P3 and sRGB modes for professional work, which is nice to have. The panel is coated with an Anti-glare micro-texture that does a great job at cutting down distracting reflections and bright lights without dulling the colours like on some other OLEDs. I have my monitor facing some bright windows and I never had any issue with distracting reflections.
However, I don’t like everything about this panel. Asus used an LG source W-OLED panel, which essentially beams white light through colour filters. This is helps with brightness but has a rather obvious and distracting colour fringing effect when rendering text on screen. This gives text a odd, coloured border around text that makes it look less sharp. You can mitigate some of it with Windows ClearType but to some, this might be a potential deal breaker. I can personally live with it for all the other things the monitor does so well.
The PG27AQDM comes very well appointed with connectivity options too. You get your standard DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.0. Some might complain about the lack of HDMI 2.1 but realistically, that’s totally unnecessary given this is a 1440p monitor. Either way, it works perfectly fine with both Xbox and PlayStation consoles and it supports VRR as well as HDR10.
You also get two USB 3.2 Type-A and a USB Type-B upstream to turn the PG27AQDM into a hub for other peripherals. The monitor also allows the USB ports to work even when its off which is great for charging devices like wireless controllers or mice. Lastly is an earphone jack but sadly, the PG27AQDM doesn’t come with a built-in DAC to improve the audio quality.
Overall, the PG27AQDM is a very well put together monitor with a surprisingly understated design. Aside from the glowing RGB, dot-matrix ROG logo on the back and the downwards firing lighting from the stand, you wouldn’t know this is a gaming monitor. As an OLED, it’s incredibly skinny with just the bulge of the heatsink and ports bay sticking out of the back.
The Stand is typical ROG affair, three pronged metal feet with some desk illumination that you can customise with different stencils. The stand is solid with no desk wobble and offers you tilt, height, swivel and full 90-degree rotation for portrait mode use. The top of the stand includes a handy 1/4-inch screw thread for mounting your stream cam or microphone.
Gaming for sore eyes
I’ve already spoken about the excellent panel qualities, brightness, contrast and colours but how does it all come together when gaming? Simply put, perfection!
The PG27AQDM is first off, an easy monitor to drive given its sweet-spot resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. Throw in support for AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility, VRR and that 240Hz refresh rate and every game I played on here run incredibly smoothly.
My personal rig with an i5-13600K and RTX 3080 had absolutely no problems running games well above 120 fps at this resolution and if you have the new 40-series cards, hitting the 240 Hz will be even easier. There is nary a hint of tearing or ghosting on this panel with everything looking sharp and clean. If you’re coming from 4K monitor, the downgrade in sharpness will be quickly obvious but 1080p gamers will be impressed with the improvement.
And why not both? The PG27AQDM allows you to run a smaller 1080p, 24.5-inch window or even a 25-inch, 2368 x 1332 window. Additionally, the PG27AQDM has a ton of game centric features to enhance your play. The GamePlus OSD menu includes things like stopwatch, crosshair, timer and fps counter. GameVisual includes some colour and contrast presets for different game genre’s like FPS, RPG, or Racing.
Aside from games running so smoothly, I was more taken by how insanely good they look on the PG27AQDM. I was fortunate to have this monitor when Diablo IV launched and let me tell you, Sanctuary is utterly mesmerising on an OLED. The perfect contrast really comes into play in the dank, dark dungeons where you spend a lot of your time grinding for loot.
Dark corners perfectly mask hiding minions while flickering torches illuminate the darkness bright, warm orange tones that feel deceptively safe. I can safely say that the PG27AQDM had me truly immersed in the game, stopping every so often to admire the disgusting and fascinating design of the spaces I was in.
And even though games already look amazing in SDR, its when you shift to HDR that your eyes melt from the exceptional reproduction of highlights and shadows while still having excellent colours. Unlike the Mini-LED Acer Predator I reviewed a while ago that looses some punchiness in the colours and can’t match the perfect blacks of the PG27AQDM.
Now while Diablo IV is more of a twitch clicker than twitch shooter, I did play some Destiny 2. At 1440p with highest settings running around 160fps, the monitor performed excellently with no latency whatsoever. It still didn’t improve my KD but then again, that’s a me problem. Either way, I don’t anticipate players of Valorant or Warzone would complain about the smoothness and response of the PG27AQDM.
Verdict
I’ve really enjoyed my time with the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM. I’m already a huge proponent for OLED-everything and Asus has taken on the rally cry by pushing things to the next level. I absolutely loved the ginormous Asus ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ — the 42-inch do it all gaming monitor. But I recognise how that is too big for eSports purposes and the PG27AQDM seems like a perfect answer to that concern.
However, the $2000 asking price is a lot by any standards, even OLED standards. At this price you should be getting a 34-inch and bigger display like the exceptional Alienware AW3423DWF QD-OLED. Even then, there’s also the ultrawide Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 which is about $1600.
The biggest reason not to buy the PG27AQDM would have to be its closest competitor — the LG UltraGear 27GR95QE-B. Its exactly the same specification(seeing as Asus probably sourced the panel from LG) but it surprisingly costs $400 less. That’s a huge chunk of change and because you’re getting the same exact panel, you’re better off saving as much cash.
Either way, the ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM is a wonderful gaming and media consumption monitor that has been a veritable pleasure to game on. Now excuse me while I go back to immerse myself in Diablo IV.
Asus Australia kindly loaned the ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM to PowerUp! for the purpose of this review
