Gigabyte Aorus F127Q-P HBR3 HDR 165Hz Gaming Monitor Review

Conclusion

The rate of improvement in gaming performance in recent years is something that can be barely believed if, like us, you’ve been around since the days when you had to hope your Dad didn’t want to watch the news and you could take over the one television in the house with your RF cable and computer or console in hand. We rapidly moved to pukka CRT monitors – 17 inches if you were rich – and then flat panels. Sure the space saving of modern flat panels is taken for granted, but in the early days the problems of ghosting, colour saturation and in particular rather grey blacks meant that many of us held on to our hefty cathode ray devices for a long time. There was a squidgy period when the size and resolution of our displays was advancing at about the same rate as the power behind them, and the tech struggled to keep up. Now with the standard resolution of 1080P well established, and GPUs also capable of giving you 1440P and even 4K performance the issues that plagued early ones are gone. 4K might look good on a box or when gaming, but for desktop use it’s a bit severe. 1440P is the performance and eye-strain sweet spot we think. Certainly for monitors below 30 inches.

The Gigabyte Aorus F127Q-P is a 27 inch 1440P monitor so it is big enough without being overwhelming, high resolution enough without forcing you to reach into the settings to stop your GPU giving you a slideshow, and that also sports all the latest image quality technologies. High refresh rates are vastly under-rated. The console wars rage on but with people arguing that 30FPS is perfectly acceptable. It isn’t, as anyone used to 60 FPS will tell you. In fast twitch games though, there is no replacement for high refresh rates, benefitting your accuracy, kill rate, performance and everything. The Aorus has you covered with a blistering refresh rate at the top end. Equally if you want to take advantage of high display rates without causing the screen-tearing that is the bane of anyone who has endured it, the panel is incredibly stable even in poor scenarios but also has the vital Freesync technology which gives you the smooth stable imagery of VSYNC but at any frame rate.

When you add to this the broad colour palette that is available from the combination of a 10bit panel with HDR 400 certification you get richly saturated colours alongside the deep blacks that everyone loves. Nothing makes your colours look washed out quite like grey blacks, and at the risk of sounding like an advertisement for laundry detergent the Aorus F127Q-P keeps your blacks looking black no matter what the circumstances. The combination of HDR and the Gigabyte Black Equalizer 2.0 also stops you having to ramp your colours around until the blacks clip, letting you see the detail in shadows and perhaps your enemy hiding within. After all, on their display they are probably invisible but here you can see them clearly. The fools. +1 kill.

Away from the main event of the panel itself we need to give Gigabyte special applause for bringing the Aorus F127Q-P to market with a stand which is rock solid whilst also providing all the adjustment required to ensure maximum ergonomic comfort. Anyone else spent time propping up their monitors on books because of bad stands with low maximum heights? Not here. The lighting around the back might fall into the category of case lighting, nice but not important in things other than social media posts, but the Aorus lighting system has always been one of the best around and the transition to the monitor hasn’t lessened its impact. 

With a fantastic panel that is at the cutting edge of current technologies, wrapped up in a near frameless design with a great stand and a whole host of helpful, user-focussed features the Gigabyte Aorus F127Q-P Monitor is thoroughly deserving of our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

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