Asus XG27AQWMG Review – NEW Tandem OLED PANEL!

This may look like every other OLED gaming monitor, but trust me when I say this is one of the most interesting developments in monitor tech in a while, so strap in as I explain exactly why. I’ve been reviewing monitors for over a decade now – I’ve designed and built my own tools to test them – and something special like this gets me incredibly excited. This is a Tandem OLED, and this is the Asus XG27AQWMG.

Obviously we have to start with the most interesting bit, the tandem OLED panel. If you’re somewhat immersed in the world of tech, you likely know what an OLED is – an organic light emitting display, basically each tiny pixel is an LED (or multiple, actually) that emits its own light rather than having liquid crystals selectively block light from a single backlight – but the “tandem” bit is new. In short, this panel is made up of four different layers of LEDs that are all stacked – working in tandem, hence the name. The previous WOLED panels were all three layer, two blue, one yellow, but by splitting the yellow back out to a red and green layer, that means more LEDs producing more light, with less power. Just to explain that a little more, here’s a hypothetical two layer example. To produce enough light, a single layer needs to pump a load of power into its LEDs to get a useful brightness out. But, the more power, the more heat, and the more you damage the LED. Compare that to the two layer OLED, if you’ve got two layers for the same brightness, you can use a lot less power on each, meaning less heat, and less damage. That’s huge.

It’s worth noting that “tandem OLED” is an LG technology (there are only like two OLED panel manufacturers because how you make an OLED panel is an utterly insane process that it’s a miracle we have ANY, let alone as many as we do…), which means it still uses LG’s WOLED pixel layout. Generally speaking, you have WOLED, or in QD-OLEDs, you have RGB Q-Stripe (that’s just red green and blue dots), where WOLED pixels are made up of red, green, blue AND white sub-pixels. That’s unusual, Windows does not know what to do with it, and so especially on text it can be uncomfortable to look at. I do think this is an improvement over the previous WOLEDs I’ve tested, but it still isn’t perfect. There’s a bit of colour fringing, which if you’re picky, you’ll notice. If not, then you’re good. 

One thing this XG27AQWMG claims in particular is 25 percent larger colour volume thanks to the tandem OLED design, meaning much richer colours, more vibrant, and in theory more granular too. They claim basically 100% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum, and my SpyderX2 pretty much confirms that. It does hit 82 percent of Rec2020, 1 percent lower than I’ve seen on most QD-OLED panels, but that’s hardly a big deal. As for accuracy, that’s great with an average DeltaE of under two, although unlike AOC and Philips you don’t get a colour calibration report in the box with this one. Still to the eye this looks great. It’s vibrant, sharp, and incredibly rich. That is in part thanks to the other major improvement this tandem OLED panel offers – and if we are being honest is how Asus got that “25 percent larger colour volume” figure – which is more brightness. Asus claims 15 percent more than a non-tandem OLED, and yeah, I saw highs of 530 nits with a ninth of the screen lit. The catch with WOLEDs is that to protect the panel – regardless of it being tandem or not – the manufacturers implement a feature I really don’t like called an adaptive brightness limiter, or ABL for short. The ABL basically ramps the screen up to that sort of 500 nits level, but then very quickly cuts it back down. It also depends how much of the screen is lighting up – because at one ninth it doesn’t cut back much if at all, but at 50 percent? You only get 350 nits. 150 nits, gone. Lost to the ABL. Just so you can see that change, here’s my response time tool’s light level data showing it peaking then cutting back down. You can actually disable the ABL on this thing by enabling the “uniform brightness” setting, although that caps the peak brightness at 320 nits or so regardless of screen content, which isn’t anywhere near as good as the 500+ nits without. If you do happen to use this in HDR mode by the way, this can supposedly hit a whopping 1500 nits on basically individual pixels at a time. That won’t be great for the lifespan, but it can!

Since we are looking at light level over time data, let’s peek at the response times. These were measured, as always, with my very own open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com by the way, link in the description below), and as expected they are functionally instant. OSRTT struggles to keep up, that’s how fast this thing is. There’s no weirdness with the two panels being out of sync or anything, it’s just spot on. Latency is excellent too, which means the gaming experience is top notch. It’s ridiculously fast, smooth and remarkably vibrant. Colours pop, while the infinite contrast means you get a brilliant range meaning tryhards in all black can’t hide from you. It’s a really good gaming experience. 

It’s worth also noting a couple of the other OLED specific features, namely OLED anti-flicker, which aims to eliminate a somewhat unique-to-OLEDs issue where especially with adaptive sync you can get a bit of flickering, especially in darker areas. Through the menu you can enable Asus’ anti-flicker on either medium or high, although it’s worth noting that this seems to mostly limit the available adaptive sync window from 280 hertz to 60 hertz, to more like 280-144. There is a weird cyclical pulsing that seems to happen over the multiple frames – here’s the raw light level data with anti-flicker off, and here is AF on. See that wave? That’s interesting – I don’t know exactly what it’s doing, but it is doing something. 

There is also the OLED care settings – this is the main thing you’ll use the on screen menu to adjust. The first one is actually new for this monitor, which is what Asus calls their “Neo Proximity Sensor”, AKA a laser distance module in the tiny little chinbar that detects if you are actually at the monitor or not and blanks the screen if not. You can customise distance and time, so a quick trip to the bog won’t kill the display, but leaving for dinner will. It does just blank the screen though, not actually turn the screen off, so your PC won’t freak out. Beyond that there’s the usual suspects, pixel orbiting, pixel refreshes, and lots of whole screen and selective element dimming. Most of it is on by default. This does come with a 3 year warranty, although I don’t know how well even tandem OLEDs will hold up – I have over two years of experience with a QD-OLED panel, but no long term data on this, although Asus claims “60 percent longer lifespan”, which sounds impressive.

I can’t quite believe we are this far into a monitor review and I still haven’t shown you the thing yet – let me fix that. From the front this looks like a pretty typical ROG gaming monitor. The illuminated logo in the little distance sensor chinbar, and otherwise pretty thin bezels all round. The stand is fully adjustable – height, tilt, swivel and rotation to portrait mode both ways. From the back you get a pretty nice, but very gamer, aesthetic, including an RGB ROG logo. IO is two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port with DSC, and a two port USB 3 hub. 

In short then, this is a really cool bit of kit. The tandem panel is undoubtedly better than the older standard WOLED panels, although I don’t know if I personally would opt for this over a QD-OLED. As it stands though, this is an amazing display, and it’s priced remarkably well at around £520 right now. That’s £130 LESS that LG’s own tandem OLED 280 hertz 1440p 27 inch gaming monitor, and seeing as that has the same panel as this? Well that sounds like great value – a sentence I didn’t know was possible when discussing Asus, but here we are. Just as a point of comparison though, AOC’s AG276QZD2 is just £380 right now – another £140 less than this – and that is a 240 hertz QD-OLED panel. It does offer less brightness – even with this using the uniform brightness mode – but in my experience should have better text clarity and I can confirm a distinct lack of burn in on my very similar QD-OLED panel. Food for thought, perhaps. Anyway, great job Asus, and if you really want the tandem panel, this seems like a great way to get your hands on it!