THE ULTIMATE 1440P GAMING MONITOR – Gigabyte FI27Q-P Review
It’s been a while since I checked out Gigabyte’s first gaming monitor, the AD27QD, and since then they’ve gone away and improved a fair bit about it, which gave us this, the FI27Q. If you want the ultimate 1440p gaming monitor, this might just be it. Let me show you why, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
This is an absolute monster – it’s 1440p, up to 165hz, IPS, sort of 10bit, and has freesync along with being fully gsync compatible too. It’s a stunning display to game, or watch content on, all thanks to the excellent panel. Now like I said, it’s an IPS panel from Innolux, and it’s remarkably fast. Black to white response time – with overdrive set to normal – was only 3-4ms, although as always the white to black time was significantly longer at up to 16ms. Strangely when I set overdrive to the “strong” setting, it was actually slower so I’d recommend keeping it at normal.
In terms of input lag, it’s insane. Testing with my time sleuth over HDMI, it reported just 1.5ms at the top of the display, or 8.5ms at the centre, which considering it was running at 60hz makes sense. That’s incredibly fast, so massive thumbs up there.
As for one of the more popular features Gigabyte offers, including through their OSD Sidekick software I covered in the AD27QD’s review, the “Aim stabiliser” mode. This is just their way of saying motion blur reduction, or backlight strobing, except they seem to do it differently than I’ve seen before – warning for the epileptics out there here – you can see the display doesn’t actually turn off like I’ve seen before, instead it seems to dim a lot and dither between red, green or blue. The end result though is incredible. Seriously, look at how perfect the image is on the UFO. Yes, there’s a little trailing edge ghosting, but that’s nothing compared to without aim stabiliser on, so colour me impressed.
Speaking of colours, Gigabyte claim this is a 10 bit monitor, although later correct themselves to say 8bit + FRC, which is frustrating to see over and over, but the end result is possibly the most vibrant display I’ve seen in a while. It’s stunning to view. Colours really ‘pop’, and even in games, it just makes the experience that much nicer. Testing with my spyderx, it read a peak brightness of 435nits, which while not really enough for HDR, is about as bright as I’d ever want an SDR monitor. Colours wise, it recorded well over 100% of the sRGB spectrum, and 90% of AdobeRGB and a full 95% of the DCI P3 spectrum, which is insane for a gaming monitor.
So, that’s all the stats, but what’s it like to game on? Well, pretty great. When you mix the vibrant colours with the incredibly fast panel, and input lag, and either freesync or aim stabiliser – yes sadly those are mutually exclusive features – you get the smoothest, most responsive and enjoyable experience around. If you like fast paced games like CSGO, then use the aim stabiliser and hit the most insane shots around. If you prefer racing games, turn freesync/gsync on and enjoy the vibrance as you blast around a track.
That, coupled with their OSD Sidekick software which offers all the functionality you get in the on screen menu, plus extra bits like using the microphone built into the monitor to do active noise cancelling on your headset mic, really makes this a complete solution, and for the price it’s quite possibly unbeatable. Yes, the stand still wobbles a bit, they went for more RGB than stability I think, but overall this gets a massive thumbs up from me. In fact I’m going to crack out the awards for this, and give it a top tier award because man it deserves it.
