Published: January 29, 2021 | Source: Gigabyte | Author: Tom Logan

Aorus FI27Q-X 240hz IPS 1ms Gaming Monitor Review

Conclusion

If you’re a regular reader of these pages you’ll know that we reviewed the regular Gigabyte monitors and found them good for gaming, but strictly gaming focused. The Aorus FI27Q-X is a significantly more well rounded offering and a tremendous choice if you’re the type of person who utilises every facet of the tools available on a PC.

The looks, comfortably the least important part of any panel, are nonetheless very good. The bezels are extremely thin, although the panel itself doesn’t fully fit corner to corner. So be careful if you’re the type who moves your monitor about a lot. The lighting on the back is very nice with a full RGB suite of colours available, and it’s enough to light up a wall behind your desk, but not so bright that if you have your monitor facing somewhere else you’re going to annoy everyone in the vicinity.

Speaking of moving it around a lot, the stand is both solidly built and very manoeuvrable. There is a good amount of tilt and pan giving you flexibility about where you fit it on your desk and helping to ensure you’re comfortable, whilst the ability to rotate into portrait mode is perfect for image editing or playing SHMUPs/Pinball.

The SS-IPS panel is a complete joy. We know it technically supports HDR400, but that’s very much the baseline level of HDR and doesn’t make a significant impact in the visual quality. This is partly the paucity of games that fully support it, and partly Windows terrible implementation. However, if you ignore that and just run the FI27Q-X ‘as is’, the blacks are incredibly deep and inky with good shadow detail and none of the ‘slightly grey’ effect you can get on some panels. Additionally the colours are bold and vibrant. They don’t lean into the blowing out of the histogram side of things where clipping occurs, and they are natural enough that viewing images we know extremely well and are used to looking at on our work displays look similar on the Aorus. Another feather in it’s all-rounder cap.

For many of you the star attraction is that ludicrous 240Hz refresh rate. We know most of you already understand this, but for those who don’t we have to remind you that just because a monitor can hit 240 FPS doesn’t mean your graphics card or game can. We can’t think of any combination of GPU and game from our benchmark suite that hits 240 FPS at the native 1440 QHD resolution. But if you play those ‘games designed for a toaster’ like MOBAs or multi-platform low detail shooters then with sufficient graphical horsepower you could manage to maximise your frame rate, thus response time and, hopefully, win rate.

The Gigabyte Aorus FI27Q-X is pitched perfectly. At 27 inches it’s neither tiny nor requires a massive desk. It isn’t curved so you don’t get that pincushion effect. 2560×1440 is a great combination of high PPI for game detail but not requiring seriously high end GPU power that a 4K screen would. The blistering refresh rate can help in many situations, whilst the IPS panel produces fantastic colours, deep blacks, no ghosting and looks the absolute business whether you’re using it for gaming or productivity. An excellent all-rounder that costs more than a base level monitor, and perhaps borders on a bit pricey given it only supports HDR400, but wins our OC3D Gamers Choice.