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Moderate ‘IPS glow’ ate away at detail and atmosphere, especially in dimmer room lighting. HDR performance very limited from contrast perspective The stand is very solid with firm movements. The vertical movement has subtle detents, which make it even more positive. You get a 5.2-inch height adjustment plus -5 and 20-degree tilts. There is no swivel or portrait mode. Thankfully, we didn’t encounter any play or wobble when moving the M27Q around. It is very well-built. Turning on HDR brightened the M27Q’s image considerably, but you can compensate with the brightness slider if it seems too harsh. We only used HDR for gaming and video, not for workday tasks. It offers no benefit when editing spreadsheets. Switchover is automatic and rapid when you select the HDR option in Windows’ Display Settings. On Battlefield V, with the frame rate keeping up with the refresh rate, the monitor provided a fluid 170Hz experience. The monitor is outputting up to 2.83 times as much visual information per second as a 60Hz monitor. This has two key benefits, one of which is to enhance the ‘connected feel’. Which describes the precision and fluidity as you interact with the game, something also enhanced by the low input lag of the monitor. The other key benefit is a significant reduction in perceived blur due to eye movement, as demonstrated earlier using Test UFO. The bump up from 144Hz to 170Hz with suitable frame rate isn’t as substantial or as readily noticeable as the initial boost from 60Hz to 144Hz (or even up to 120Hz for that matter). But it still provides an edge in terms of ‘connected feel’ and decreased perceived blur which was a nice bonus. However, VA technology has other disadvantages at this price range, such as slower response time, inferior VRR performance and not as wide viewing angles. As for the IPS glow, its intensity varies from panel to panel, but it’s manageable in most cases.
In the Standard picture mode, the M27Q is accurate enough to satisfy most. The native color space is DCI-P3, but you can use the sRGB mode for an accurate display of that gamut. Its only available adjustment is brightness. As usual, if you’re running the monitor at 2560 x 1440 and viewing 1920 x 1080 content (for example a video over the internet or a Blu-ray, using movie software) then it is the GPU and software that handles the upscaling. That’s got nothing to do with the monitor itself – there is a little bit of softening to the image compared to viewing such content on a native Full HD monitor, but it’s not extreme and shouldn’t bother most users. As factory defaults with cool tint removed, but a very slight green tint introduced. Good overall colour channel balance, however. The images below are pursuit photographs taken using the UFO Motion Test for ghosting, with the UFO moving across the screen from left to right at a frame rate matching the refresh rate of the display. The test is set to run at its default speed of 960 pixels per second, which is a practical speed for such photographs highlights weaknesses well. The monitor was tested at 60Hz (directly below), 120Hz, 144Hz and 170Hz using the main ‘Overdrive’ pixel response time settings; ‘Picture Quality’, ‘Balance’ and ‘Speed’. We have excluded the ‘Auto’ setting from this analysis as it was identical to ‘Balance’ in our testing. Results for 165Hz weren’t included, but performance there was very similar to 170Hz as you might expect. All rows of the UFO Motion Test were used, highlighting a range of pixel transitions between various shades. The final columns show some reference screens for comparison, using what we deem to be their optimal pixel response time settings. The first reference screen is the Gigabyte AORUS FI27Q-P using an Innolux AAS (IPS-type) panel and the second is the ViewSonic XG270QG using a responsive LG Display Nano IPS panel. Besides the standard image adjustments (brightness, contrast, color temperature, aspect ratio, etc.), the Gigabyte M27QP also offers some advanced tools, including gamma, sharpness, 6-axis hue/saturation and Color Vibrance settings.The high resolution 27” 2560 x 1440 monitor space is certainly crowded, with this hitting the sweet spot for many users in terms of screen size, pixel density and performance potential. The Gigabyte M27Q is an offering with this combination in mind, more budget-oriented than their AORUS models. But retaining a range of attractive features such as Adaptive-Sync support including AMD FreeSync Premium. With its IPS-type panel, there’s also a focus on strong colour performance. We put this model to the test with our usual suite, including desktop, movie and game testing. Vibrant and varied colour output with strong consistency and good coverage of both the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB colour spaces The greyscale gradient appeared quite smooth without obvious dithering or strong banding. There was minor banding for some darker shades but this was only slight and didn’t cause any clear issues in other testing. As above but gamma reduced further for some shades and raised elsewhere. Image balance a bit ‘off’ overall due to wonky gamma handling here. Slightly less of a cool tint. You can see a clear magenta fringe for some letters with ClearType enabled and BGR optimised, as shown in the first image. Particularly straight verticals, such as “l” on word “scaling”. With ClearType enabled but RGB optimised, as shown in the second image, this fringing isn’t noticed to the same extent. The cyan fringing seen in the image was not as clear by eye. With ClearType disabled this fringing disappears – there appears to be a slight cyan fringe in the image, but this wasn’t readily observed by eye. The font looks quite a bit rougher in appearance with ClearType disabled as well. We didn’t actually notice such clear fringing when browsing the internet or using other applications such as Microsoft Word, even when observing a broad range of font styles and sizes. So this could be an anomaly related to Nvidia Control Panel.
With HDR on we played a bit of Call of Duty: WWII. Comparing HDR to SDR in this game showed a brighter overall environment for HDR but better detail and color saturation in SDR mode. Your selection will come down to user preference. We preferred playing all games in SDR mode. Other titles, like Tomb Raider, looked fantastic with deeply detailed shadows, vivid color and defined textures in this mode.The monitor supports variable refresh rate (VRR) with AMD’s FreeSync Premium certification for tear-free gameplay up to 170FPS. As usual we tested a range of game titles using AMD FreeSync and found the experience similar in all cases. Any issues affecting one title but not another suggests a game or GPU driver issues rather than a monitor issue. We’ll therefore simply use Battlefield V as an example for this section. The in-game graphics options are flexible enough to allow the full VRR range to be assessed. Our Radeon RX 580 isn’t a very powerful GPU, so maintaining 170fps at the native WQHD resolution is difficult. Even with graphics settings set to ‘low’, it was common to see dips significantly below this and at many points the average frame rate closer to 100fps. Without a VRR technology like FreeSync, even the slightest dips below 170fps would cause obvious (to us) tearing if VSync was disabled or stuttering if VSync was enabled. Sensitivity to tearing and stuttering varies, but for those sensitive to it the technology is very nice to have. Decent static contrast for panel type, light to very light screen surface with fairly smooth surface texture keeps image free from a grainy or layered appearance Adobe Reader uses its own subpixel rendering system optimised for RGB, completely ignoring how ClearType is set up or if it’s even enabled in the first place. The top image below shows a PDF with fairly clear magenta fringing to the left and cyan to the right. It’s exaggerated somewhat in the image, but we still found it quite clear by eye. The bottom image was taken with the display running ‘Landscape (flipped)’ so that an RGB subpixel layout is used. No clear fringing was observed here. Thanks to its decent factory calibration and IPS panel, the M27Q-P is suitable for entry-level color-critical work.
The Off mode is too slow, while ‘Speed’ is too aggressive as it introduces high levels of overshoot (inverse ghosting). ‘Smart OD’ is supposed to function as variable overdrive, but it’s not very effective and should be avoided.This is equivalent to around 135% sRGB gamut size, meaning that regular content made with sRGB color space in mind will have over-saturated colors. Some users prefer this over-saturation, but you can also use the provided sRGB emulation mode in the OSD (On-Screen Display) menu to clamp the gamut down to ~100% sRGB. The Lagom text appeared largely a blended grey, without clear flashes of saturated red, green or orange. The striping had more of a dark red quality lower down to the screen and slightly greenish further up, but a well-blended appearance overall. This indicates low viewing angle dependency to the gamma curve of the monitor, as typical for an IPS-type panel. The photo below gives a rough indication of how this test appeared. Most users find a brightness level of 120 – 150 nits suitable for a dark room, so this won’t be an issue unless you’re used to quite dim displays (most monitors can get as dim as 30 – 50 nits). The M27Q is unassuming from the front with just a Gigabyte logo and a tiny white LED adorning the bottom trim strip. The remainder of the bezel is flush mounted with an 8 mm frame around the image. The anti-glare layer is the same 3H-hardness part found on almost all computer monitors. Here, it provides a sharp, bright image with no apparent grain or optical distortion.
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