Pixio PX275C Prime Review – Budget Steam Deck Monitor?

This is the Pixio PX275C Prime, a 1440p, 100Hz IPS gaming monitor that in the words of Pixio’s marketing team, is great for Steam Deck users like them – and me. The reason for that is thanks to the rear facing I/O. You get one HDMI 1.4 port, one DisplayPort 1.2 port, and importantly here one USB C port which supports both display in, and 65W PD charging out. That means you can plug your Steam Deck in and not only get video out, but it handily charges the Deck while you’re at it. Also, can I just take a second to talk to all the other monitor manufacturers – see these really useful labels on the ports here? The ones where they list what port version it has and what the maximum refresh rate is for that port? EVERY MONITOR SHOULD HAVE THAT. Seriously. Let me know in the comments if you want to see that on more monitors too.

So, you’ve got your Deck plugged in, it’s charging and you are ready to game. What’s it like? Well, Pixio made it clear I should give you an honest review of this monitor, so truthfully… It’s pretty bad. When plugged in via USB C, the Deck refused to let me game at anything higher than 720p. It does detect that it’s a 1440p 100 Hz monitor and in the menu UI it looks fine, but the second you launch a game it’s back to 720p. That looks about as good as you think it does – as in it looks terrible. Even if you can get the Deck to output at 1440p, even on the lowest settings for everything, the Deck really can’t game well at that high of a resolution – and certainly not at 100 FPS. I’d imagine you are much better off getting a 1080p display instead which should work a little better – and will look better too. I’d also argue that the monitor could really do with some USB A ports for things like a mouse and keyboard as once you’ve plugged the only USB C port in to the monitor for video and charging, you are left with no way (other than bluetooth which is terrible for latency) to connect other devices. Luckily the monitor has you covered for sound, with two 3W rearward facing speakers that are… fine. You do have an “earphone” jack on the back should you want to use something better.

Ok, so if it’s not quite right for a Steam Deck, it should at least be a good gaming monitor for more conventional systems, right? Well… Sorry Pixio, you asked for this. The answer is no. It has a bit of a weird look to it – it doesn’t look like a 1440p monitor. It looks like it’s trying to render a 1440p frame on a 1080p panel or something – like it’s not, but it looks like it. I noticed horizontal lines across the panel – I thought it could be a large gap between the pixel rows but a close up photo of the pixel arrangement (and yes it’s an RGB layout) shows no noticeable gap. I’m not sure I can explain that one right now.

One thing I can explain is the contrast. Pixio quotes a 1000:1 contrast ratio which is pretty standard for an IPS panel. Sadly in my testing it could only manage around 890:1, and a hair shy of its 350 nits peak brightness figure at 324 nits. That’s not the worst I’ve seen on an IPS panel, but it does mean most of the darker shades end up compressed and hard to distinguish. Something that’s also a little strange is the brightness uniformity. This isn’t something I normally mention – although I do test for it on all displays just in case – but this panel is lop-sided. The left hand side is up to 60 nits darker than the centre – that’s a sizable drop. It isn’t something I picked up immediately, but after knowing to look for it I did spot it while using the monitor. It’s pretty normal for the centre to be the high spot, with the outer edges dropping even up to 10%, but almost 20%? That’s a bit much.

The colour gamut coverage is something Pixio specifies down to two decimal places – we should see 122.76% coverage of the sRGB spectrum and 90.5% of the DCI P3 colour space. In my testing I got a little less – 82% of the DCI P3 spectrum. That’s still not bad though, and neither is the colour accuracy. It averaged a DeltaE of just 1.77, with a maximum of 4.22. The maximum isn’t great – although it’s a dark grey so that’s to be expected with the lower contrast ratio, but overall that’s a good result.

Some more good news is the input latency. My open source response time tool reported an average of 5ms for on display latency – which is spot on considering the 10ms refresh rate window at 100Hz. The time sleuth reported 2ms which lines up well with the OSRTT data, and is a pretty good result. No complaints there. Sadly this is where the positives end because I’ve avoided possibly the worst test result so far – I can’t avoid it any more so I’ll just get it over with. Ready? Ok. So you know how they listed this as a “4ms GTG” response time.. Well.. erm… Oh just get on with it! IT AVERAGED 22.6ms! Ok?! It’s one of the slowest monitors I’ve tested. Even with the single overdrive mode set to on, the single best transition was 9.4ms. The slowest was 40! FORTY! I’d highly recommend someone at Pixio order an OSRTT Pro from me so you can test this yourselves and update your marketing materials. There’s no way to even cheat and measure this badly that would produce even a single 4ms response time result, let alone an average, and a 567% error seems like false advertising to me.

Just to show you what that means – even at 100 Hz where new frames are only drawn every 10ms, unlike at say 165Hz where it’s every 6ms – you get 4-5 frames of ghosting visible at any one time. That results in smeared motion – in games it’s pretty noticeable. It makes aiming a lot harder – any face paced game is going to suffer here. Games that don’t move so quickly aren’t as bad, but this sort of performance isn’t something I’d want to pay my own money for.

I also have some gripes with the physical build and quality, the stand’s foot is pretty small – which while great for not taking up too much desk space – means when you try and use the adjustment features like tilt, height adjust or especially the swivel it just spins the foot. The panel is also a little too heavy for the stand, which means it wobbles. A lot. The little joystick that lets you navigate the on screen menu is straight out the injection mould complete with burrs and sharp edges – and it also seems a little broken when trying to push it right. It does work, but you have to wrench on it to get it to register. The on screen menu is incredibly basic – it’s the same OEM style menu you can find on a bunch of budget monitors and you’ll find the Freesync and overdrive settings in the “MISC” menu. Overdrive consists of off, or, on. That’s it. It does improve the panel a tiny smidge, but it’s clear there is a lot of room for tuning the profile in future firmware versions.

Now, if I’m being honest, almost all of this is either addressable with a firmware revision – a much better overdrive mode could easily bring the response times down to a more manageable level – or are things that I could put up with for the right price. If this was stupidly cheap, like $120, maybe $150 – $180 at a push – I could forgive all of these ‘quirks’. So, how much is it? $280. Oh fuuuuuu