It's no secret that I'm a man who loves a good monitor. So when ASUS reached out and offered to sponsor this video,
so I could unbox not one, but two new gaming OLED monitors,
I couldn't say no. We've got not only the XG27AQDMGR,
a 27-inch, 1440p, 240 Hertz, OLED gaming monitor,
but we've also got the XG27AQDMES.
I had to look at the box because I couldn't memorize two of these in a single video,
but this guy is a little less expensive and it's cutie OLED,
but there's a reason we're gonna be opening this one. This guy doesn't get as bright as you might expect.
So we're gonna look at it later, but not right now.
With W or white OLED, one of the biggest advantages
is just how bright these things can get. With ASUS claiming this guy gets up to 1300 nits peak,
now that is only gonna be peak brightness.
So just little spots or whatever on your display. It's not gonna be full field white.
Sustained is probably a lot less than that, but the nice thing is this means that
with OLEDs per pixel level dimming zones, because they just turn on and off when you need them,
you're gonna get an amazing HDR experience, regardless of whether you pick this monitor
or the cutie OLED that we're gonna look at closer to the end of the video.
Let's see, what do we got here? We got a stand that is actually really small.
I think ASUS has made this a little smaller than before, which is fantastic,
because now you get just a much tinier footprint on your desk.
I also like how robust their rubber feet system is.
It's a minor thing, but like most of the time, these are just little strips, like they're not tall at all,
but these are like thick, and there's a bunch of them too, and it's a little elevated.
I'm a big fan. The rest of our stand says ROG on the back
with the ASUS ROG logo, cable management.
Actually, it's labeled cable management. That's kind of nice. And it's actually a really nice and big hole.
Sometimes these are a little annoying because they're tiny or they go like down and then out,
and it's really hard to fish like big C13 power connectors through.
And a nice thing about ASUS is a lot of their more premium monitors have a place to mount your camera or webcam
or whatever else you have that's gonna fit in there, maybe a little ring light or something.
The terrible thing about technology these days is most of it's getting more and more expensive.
But on the other hand, the nice thing about monitors is that they're either coming down in price
or we're getting more features at the same price.
And so with these guys, I won't talk about the price yet,
but it's really not that bad and you're not losing any premium features.
As per usual, we've got ASUS's bag of tricks.
One thing that I actually really like about buying monitors from them is they tend to have
this little carry bag for all of your cables, which is great because I mean,
most of you are probably just gonna throw all this packaging away. You can keep this.
It's got everything you might want. Throw your warranty card in there. You know, cables, whatever.
HDMI, ultra high speed. HDMI 2.1 cable.
DisplayPort, but what are you? Probably DP 1.4.
We've also got a USB-B cable as well as a very typical C13 power cable.
One thing I'm not seeing is a power brick. So that means that we are going to have
an internal power supply and it's just gonna plug straight from our monitor
into our wall. What else we have? Ooh.
I believe this is an adapter plate.
Not every single monitor I've ever bought comes with an adapter plate. If you want to put it on the wall or something,
that's what this looks like it is. And thank you ASUS for including it
because it really sucks having to 3D print something
to mount your monitor to an ARM, which I've definitely had to do on premium monitors.
And at last, what is this last ASUS warranty card?
This guy and his companion both come with three year warranties, which is great
because while image retention on OLEDs,
it's gotten a lot better to the point where like, I haven't seen any on either of my displays
that I've owned for years now. Little piece of mind certainly doesn't hurt.
But now the part that I've been waiting for, as per usual, we're just gonna do the old click, clack,
pull it out of the box, took the box with it. You ready? Are you ready?
Wow, it's cleaning steps.
I think this is the first time I've actually seen cleaning steps on here.
What you need, microfiber cloth, turn it off, dry the screen, wet cloth cleaning, pure water,
spray bottle, they know what they're talking about. For stickier messes, you can use a little bit of a solvent.
You just really don't want to use too much. Maybe the smallest amount of isopropyl alcohol
mixed with water, very small amount
because it is very easy to ruin your screen. Very easy. Ask me how I know. I've ruined them.
We got one more peel on the back here with what I'm guessing is a big RGB matrix.
So that's also, you know, always really cool to see. I'm not crazy about RGB being on the back
because you don't see it that much. But hey, you know what? Especially like an internet cafe
where you've got like tables like that and you can see the backs of each other's monitors.
You know, it's pretty cool. What have we got? The old height adjustment.
Very nice. Swivel, no problem. Actually quite a bit of swivel.
And then can we, oh, we can, we can pivot.
But the real question is this is where, you know,
oh, we can go both ways. And while that doesn't matter to a lot of you,
you know, it's a 240 Hertz gaming monitor.
The chances of you putting it in portrait as your secondary display, at least right now is low.
But in like five years, when it's still going strong,
you know, you want to make sure that this bezel down here is not going to line up like in between.
You want to put it on the side. Actually, how bad is the top versus the bottom? Yeah, it's not too bad, but I don't want to see the ASUS logo.
I want to like hide it all. Whatever you want to do, whatever your setup is,
you can arrange it in that way. Also as per usual, with an OLED, you know,
the panel itself is like laser thin.
And then you've got this giant control box on the back. And so it's not super bulky.
I'm personally of the opinion that, you know, to make the whole thing feel a little more durable,
I'm not against like just extending this out to the full thing of the control box.
And you got a thick mon... Like I'm okay with that. But what I can see is a bunch of cooling vents.
This thing probably has a custom heat sink in it. Okay, this is great.
This is actually something I don't think I've noticed on a lot of monitors before.
We've got a bunch of text on the back here. And at first I thought it was like labeling for the IO,
which I'll get to in a sec. But it's actually like, for those who dare,
game on, hashtag, ROG, oh, that one does say power.
Okay, power, navigation, Navi. And then that one is key.
I don't know why it's key, but sure. And then what's this 25 point,
that's just like longitude latitude? Are they telling us where their office is?
I've always wondered what the 206 on the top here is. That's when ROG launched, February of 2006.
Our IO is also nicely labeled. We've got a couple of HDMI ports here.
DisplayPort, headphone jack, Kensington locks.
Even got the little K Kensington lock symbol, our USB-B, and then a couple of USB-A ports as well.
Oh, I almost forgot about our power connector over here. And if you don't want to use their display widget center,
which we'll check out later, they also have physical navigation controls.
Thank you so much. Please monitor manufacturers, never take those away from me.
I will die inside. So it looks pretty on the outside, but what does it look like on the inside?
To do that, we'd have to take it apart. So instead we're just going to turn it on
and take a look at our panel. All right, it's all set up on the desk here.
Looks great. Just makes some minor adjustments,
which is easy enough because the stand is so good. And then I'm going to look at the OSD.
We should be at 240 Hertz. Hey, I love that the OSD actually tells me that.
So I don't even have to go into Windows settings. It's got some G-Sync support.
It'll support FreeSync as well. And then, oh yeah, FreeSync premium pro turned on.
And it's also got ELMB, ASUS's extreme low motion blur,
basically BFI or black frame insertion. We'll probably get some lower brightness,
but it should be even clearer MPRT, which is wild
because OLED is already lightening fast,
how these pixels change. Oh, they've got OLED anti-flicker, brightness,
HDR settings, gaming HDR set to on. They've also got a HDR 400 true black mode
that we don't want to use. We just want to stick to gaming HDR, adjustable HDR.
One problem about a lot of HDR displays is to keep that PQ EOTF curve like the way they said it.
You'll notice that a lot of display options
are locked or grayed out. And with now, with this custom mode,
we can do whatever we want. Is it going to be as color accurate? Probably not, but we can make those changes as we see fit.
I'm going to keep adjustable HDR off because I want to keep everything
as color accurate as possible. It actually tested pretty well out of the box.
We'll get to results in a bit here. What else do we have?
OLED care, there's a bunch of screensaver stuff, pixel cleaning, pixel refresher.
I don't want to do that. One problem is the navigation is a little sensitive
and I've definitely misclicked the wrong thing a few times.
So just be careful with that. Basically everything, logo brightness,
everything that most brands come with these days. But the nice thing about ASUS is
they've got this neoproximity sensor and this thing's actually great.
My biggest concern with my monitors at home
is if I forget to turn them off or forget to lock my screen so they auto turn off
or just whatever. Cause I've definitely left it up and come back like a day later
and it's still the exact same screen. And hey, I haven't seen any image retention yet,
but of course I'm still worried. This really helps alleviate that.
You can set it to a bunch of different distances and I think you can even change the timer
if you turn it to tailored mode.
The sensor will start detecting your location. Oh, this is to detect my location after,
okay, yeah, let's do it, confirm. Five, I'm 70, this is so cool.
Whoa. Okay, I don't want to be that far away. Okay, I probably screwed that up by moving.
That's sick. I've never seen like a little measurement thing
on the screen while we do that. That's awesome.
It's the little things, you know? And then on top of that, you can set it between five, 10, 15 minutes.
So, you know, if it doesn't detect anything for five minutes, it just turns black.
That's great. You're not going to burn in with a black screen, that's for sure.
And then it's even got a time on counter. That's fantastic.
OLED track, OLED time track, 11 hours, pixel clean times, 11.
That's fantastic. If you're ever buying a monitor secondhand,
you can check that out and see how much they've actually abused it before you decide if you want to purchase it.
So, love to see that sort of thing. Aside from that, you know, pretty typical input selection, lighting effect.
Oh, how's our RGB?
It's off right now. Let me turn it on. There it is.
I can confirm it works. But we'll show you too, just in case.
And if you don't want to use the physical buttons, they do have their display widget center.
So, we've got it up here. I'm going to change this to cinema mode.
It's not HDR anymore. That's pretty obvious. Now I can change like brightness and stuff right here
on the fly. So, I'm not going to mess with contrast or saturation or anything, but you can also turn on some of the other settings
that I didn't really go into, like the crosshair if you want to turn that on
or a timer, whatever you feel like. My only complaint, ASUS,
please make it look almost the exact same as this OSD.
So, I don't have to learn two different sets of menus.
It's a minor thing. This looks fancier.
I don't know which one I like more, but make them the same. Please, I don't think I will ever get tired
of looking at the footage that we shot for the RE video.
I think, I don't know if this is 4K. Yeah, this is 720p, but the HDR looks good.
In testing, we slightly exceeded their claims of peak brightness with about 1,321 nits.
So, it's going to get super bright for you.
We tested the color gamut coverage. We got a little less than their claim of 99% of DCI P3.
I think we hit closer to 98. That's still great. And then on top of that, it is very color accurate.
I think we measured a Delta E of less than two average
in SDR, and then for HDR, when we're measuring with Delta EITP,
we get a very respectable just under 17 Delta E average.
Pretty solid and pretty in line with similar monitors
that we've tested around this price range. But, this is a video.
What about gaming? I want to use that actual 240 Hertz,
and I want to see the lightning fast 0.03 millisecond
response times in these pixels. So, let's do it. God, the fire, the HDR in Doom, 2016 Dark Ages,
and Eternal has all been pretty top notch, even if Doom Eternal was a bit of a let down in other ways.
But yeah, the way it handles dark and bright parts of the scene, absolutely phenomenal.
240 Hertz, I mean, obviously, you know, we're using like a 5090, if you really want to get that.
Actually, you know what? I just realized it's 1440P and not 4K.
So, to get 240 Hertz, you probably don't even need a 5090,
which is fantastic. But hold on a second. I've got a whole other monitor I've got to check out.
Okay, we've got the XG27AQDMES setup now.
ASUS, please start removing letters from your product names
because they're getting a little long. This one's the QD OLED.
It is very similar in spec to this guy in that it's 27 inches, 1440P, 240 Hertz.
It's a little cheaper, but there is a kind of
major downside that I can't ignore despite this being a sponsored video.
You're only going to get about 400 nits
of peak brightness on this guy over here. And that's kind of been the problem with OLED
for quite a while, is the lack of brightness. But I will say, despite that you are getting
a much wider coverage of color gamut,
thanks to quantum dots, and the viewing angle should be a little better.
For me, I personally lean towards this guy.
Most people just prefer brightness. That's kind of the human experience.
Even if colors look a little different or off, brighter object or display just tends to be
what people gravitate towards. There's a reason why most TVs and Best Buy
is set up in vivid mode. Another kind of big difference you might notice
is that this guy's only got the semi-glossy coating. And so it doesn't get quite as perfectly black
as I'd like, but most people aren't really going to be able to tell if it's by itself.
Right next to this guy with the fully super true black
glossy coating, it's a little obvious. There are two other spots where you kind of miss out on.
If you go for the less expensive model, there's no RGB on the back, which, hey, that's fine with me.
However, you do lose the USB hub feature.
That's on the W OLED. At time of filming, the W OLED is currently on sale
for about $550, which is a pretty reasonable price.
And the QD OLED is currently $599,
which is $50 more than this guy, although regular price is $650.
So buy whichever one you think makes the most sense
if you're looking for a monitor. Listen up, Chump. You got to enter the Worth the Upgrade Challenge
brought to you by ROG, where you can win one of eight ROG OLED monitors.
You can do that even if you already own an OLED monitor from ROG, and you can do it if you don't,
because you're like me, all right? Yeah, okay, stop looking. Go to the description.
That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going right now. We're going to have both of them
linked in the video description below, so you can take a look for yourself
and make your own decision. Thanks again, ASUS, for sponsoring this video.
I'm Plouffe. These are two displays. So now I own two displays, I guess?
Although I don't know these. One for each hand. They're the companies.
They're not mine. Mine are at home.