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Gigabyte GS27Q Review

VaselineAugust 27, 2024

28 7 minutes read

With all the hype surrounding luxury OLED gaming monitors This year it can be easy to forget how much the affordable gaming monitor The market is also expansive. Gigabyte is one of the major players in both sectors, with its premium Aorus monitors at the higher end of the price and feature spectrum, and its self-branded monitors with lower prices and competitive features. The Gigabyte GS27Q falls into the latter camp, but while it may offer a good picture and gaming experience, its terrible stand, poor out-of-the-box image quality, and similarity to other, better Gigabyte monitors make us wonder why it exists at all.

Gigabyte GS27Q – Design and Features

The GS27Q retails for $249.99 and offers a large 27-inch IPS display with SuperSpeed technology for a speedy 1ms response time. It benefits from gaming features trickling down from the Aorus line, like Aim Stabilizer, which strobes the backlight to reduce motion blur. It has a resolution of 2560×1440 (1440p) and a speedy 165Hz refresh rate that can be overclocked to 170Hz via the OSD or the OSD Sidekick Windows app. It also supports variable refresh rate with support for AMD FreeSync Premium and compatibility with Nvidia G-Sync.

Like most of Gigabyte’s non-Aorus monitors, it’s simply designed. There’s very little to suggest it’s a gaming monitor not at all, except for the word “gaming” stamped on the base of the stand and on the rear cable management bracket. It’s thin and looks modern that way, but ultimately it’s a basic design that doesn’t really draw any attention, for better or worse.

The bezels are slim, which usually maximises screen space. Here, there’s a hefty black border around the actual screen that undermines that. Such an outline isn’t unusual, but it certainly stands out and feels more pronounced here, perhaps as if it’s been cut into a little more than on other IPS gaming monitors. It could also just be a domino effect of the poor impression given by the stand.

The stand is honestly one of the worst I’ve ever used. It offers a little adjustability with -5 to +20 degrees of tilt adjustment, but that’s it. A lack of height adjustment is not uncommon at this price point, but few sit as low as the GS27Q. It’s like you took a better stand and pushed it all the way down and locked it there. It does support standard VESA mounting if you choose to replace it with something better, which I’d recommend.

Connectivity is also limited to the basics. It offers two HDMI 2.0 ports and a single DisplayPort 1.4 connector for video inputs. There’s also a headphone jack, as the monitor doesn’t have any kind of speakers. There’s no USB hub or KVM like you’ll find on Gigabyte’s cheaper M27Q , the upgraded version of which is one of our picks for the best 240hz gaming monitor of the year so far.

It’s clear that Gigabyte has stripped this monitor down to the bare essentials to keep the price down, but the core features are undeniably appealing. At 27 inches, it’s a good 1440p ratio, balancing a large screen with a bright image. It has a pixel density of 109 pixels per inch, so in-game visuals and graphics are all crisp. Oddly enough, I found text to be a little blurry out of the box, but I was able to clear it up with Windows ClearType.

IPS panels are often recommended for their increased color vibrancy, and the GS27Q is no exception. Gigabyte rates the monitor as covering 100% of the SRGB color space, which it did in my tests. It also covered 82% of the DCI-P3 color space and is reasonably bright at 306 nits (measured), slightly higher than the rated 300 nits.

The monitor is controlled by a joystick placed under the center of the screen. It works well enough, certainly better than the old-fashioned buttons on office monitors. You can avoid using it entirely via Gigabyte’s OSD Sidekick software which lets you configure all the settings with your mouse.

Gigabyte GS27Q – OSD and gaming features

The OSD for the monitor is split into the usual categories of Gaming, Picture, Display, System, and so on. To its credit, Gigabyte offers a plethora of options for tuning the image, including brightness, contrast, color vibrance, temperature, gamma, and sharpness settings, as well as add-ons like dynamic contrast and a low blue light mode. There are also the usual presets for different genres and content types. The default settings aren’t great, which I’ll discuss further in the performance section. But, suffice it to say, you’ll need to be able to adjust the image if you want it to come close to what this monitor can do.

Gaming features are more limited than I expected. There are essentially three options specifically for gaming: Aim Stabilizer, Black Equalizer, and Super Resolution, excluding basic options like Overdrive and VRR. Aim Stabilizer strobes the backlight to reduce motion blur, but does so at the cost of brightness. Black Equalizer boosts shadows, making it easier to spot enemies in the dark. And Super Resolution helps upscale lower-resolution content so it looks better on the GS27Q’s larger screen.

All of these options are also available via Gigabyte’s OSD Sidekick application, which is more convenient to use than the OSD itself. For some reason, the hotkeys have been removed, which is a bit of a shame as it makes features like Black Equalizer harder to use during competitive matches. It’s not a feature you’ll want to leave on all the time, so it’s disappointing to see that features DELETED from within the software instead of added.

Gigabyte GS27Q – Performance

When I first turned it on, the GS27Q surprised me – and not in a good way. The image was extremely washed out, worse than any IPS monitor I’ve ever used. I’ve tested many Gigabyte monitors and have never experienced such poor image quality. It was so bad that I considered contacting my contact at the company to see if it was defective.

But it wasn’t the panel that was at fault, it was the settings. When I dug through the menus to find a reason for the dull picture, it was Black Equalizer. It’s set to ten by default, the midpoint, but that’s far too high for a decent picture. This setting is designed to boost shadows in games and brighten darker tones. Outside of that purpose, it’s image-destroying, turning everything on the screen into a dull wash. It took me three whole steps to lower this setting to get the black levels right. I also had to crank up the actual contrast control, because even at full brightness the screen remained dull at the default settings. It is possible to make the screen look good, but it takes effort.

Given all this, I wasn’t surprised that the out-of-box calibration wasn’t accurate either. A calibration run with my SpyderX Elite colorimeter fixed it, but even that’s a problem. If you were to run a calibration cycle with the Black Equalizer on its default setting, the colorimeter would have to work extra hard and the resulting image would still be disappointing. To calibrate it properly, you’ll first need to lower this gaming setting and Than work on the colors.

Click to enlarge. The differences are harder to show in photos, but are very visible in real life.

How bad it looked when it left the factory is shocking. If I had bought this monitor and not thought to lower this setting (which is technically a gaming feature and not even a picture setting), I would have been looking for something that actually looked like a $250 IPS. Based on the user reviews, I’m not sure if it was just my unit that was configured this way or if people just don’t comment on it, but it’s something any potential customer should be prepared for.

If that was fixed, the image could actually look really good and provide a good gaming experience. However, the short stand was constantly distracting and forced me to put a box under it to get it to a usable height. On its own, it leaves the screen uncomfortably low. I raised my sit-stand desk to the correct height, but then my keyboard and mouse were too high. The stand needs to go back to the drawing board, because it’s just plain bad. The monitor required a riser or a third party arm, in my opinion.

When properly configured and raised to the correct height, its strengths finally begin to show. The SuperSpeed panel eliminated visible ghosting in every game I played. There was still some visible ghosting in the BlurBusters Ghosting Testwhat you would expect from any IPS gaming monitor, but which I could not perceive with the naked eye in actual games.

Color reproduction is also very good. I prefer saturated colors, so adjusting the color vibrancy also improved the experience. I tried using the sharpness function, but one step up brought artifacts and one step down brought text blur, so that was not recommended. By focusing only on the core graphics settings, the panel actually turned out to be quite nice for gaming.

Set up properly, this becomes a very competent gaming monitor. I experienced no artifacts or strangeness when running the monitor in overclocked 170Hz mode. The lower native contrast of the IPS (rated at 1000:1) made blacks in the interiors of Battlefield 2042 and the sewers of Baldur’s Gate appear grayer, but my unit did not suffer from any abnormal backlight bleed from its edge-lit display.

The monitor is generally fine, nothing special and nothing so terrible that you can’t work around it, but it’s in an odd place. It exists alongside Gigabyte’s other 27-inch SuperSpeed IPS gaming monitor, the M27QOn paper, these monitors seem very similar, except the M27Q is brighter, has an even faster 0.5ms response time, includes a USB hub and built-in KVM, has a height-adjustable stand, and has been on the market long enough that it’s guaranteed to deliver a good image right out of the box, all for $229. For the extra $20, the GS27Q gets you a smaller base to save a few inches of desk space and a lot more work to make it look good.

Even if the prices were reversed, the M27Q would still be the better buy. Given the similarities in their panels, their feature sets, and their gaming prowess, it’s just not clear why the GS27Q exists at all.

VaselineAugust 27, 2024

28 7 minutes read