Thanks to its decent factory calibration and IPS panel, the M27Q-P is suitable for entry-level color-critical work. When it comes to pixel response time performance, the Gigabyte M27Q-P has five overdrive settings: Off, Smart OD, Picture Quality, Balance and Speed. 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 stand of the monitor is sturdy and offers height adjustment up to 130mm, tilt by -5°/20° and 100x100mm VESA mount compatibility, but it cannot swivel or pivot.

The original Gigabyte M27Q was one of the most popular budget 27″ 1440p high refresh rate IPS gaming monitors. Combining the above two settings gives a warmer and somewhat less green look compared to ‘Low Blue Light = 10’ alone. The blue light reduction is significant, a highly effective LBL setting – more so than either setting applied on its own. If you’re intending to use the monitor with the PS5 or Xbox Series X/S, be aware that a small settings tweak may be required to ensure 120Hz is selectable. Details can be found in this article. HDR is usable in Windows with very little change in color and contrast from SDR. If you need to leave HDR on for video or gaming, it’s perfectly fine for productivity apps. Some monitors wash out the Windows desktop image in HDR, but the M27Q X does not. bit can be selected in the graphics driver at up to 120Hz when using DP and running at the native resolution. 10-bit and 12-bit can be selected at up to 60Hz when using HDMI. The panel used is only an 8-bit panel, but the monitor’s scaler can add a dithering stage to facilitate work with higher bit depth content.Non-gaming viewing was great, with no glare detected no matter the viewing angle. And of course, the games looked great, too; I detected no noticeable ghosting when playing Halo Infinite or Guardians of the Galaxy. If you have multiple displays connected you can just fine-tune the Gigabyte. This is illustrated below, with a different model used in this example (taken from our AORUS FI27Q-X review). Unfortunately the main optimisation you’re interested in (for BGR or RGB) is largely determined by what is selected in ClearType for the primary display. Only applications built using WPF can have ‘per display’ optimisations and most will just pay attention to what is selected in ClearType for the primary display. This limits the appeal of multi-display setups in Windows with mixed RGB and BGR layouts. A fairly effective Low Blue Light (LBL) setting. The blue colour channel is weakened a fair bit, producing a warmer image and reducing blue light output. The green channel remains quite strong, imparting a green tint. Your eyes adjust to some extent over time. This is an sRGB emulation setting. The colour gamut is restricted significantly, curtailing saturation. The default brightness is reduced but can be adjusted. Gamma remains a touch too high and the image has a cool-tint, neither of which can be adjusted in the OSD using this setting. As factory defaults with cool tint removed, but a very slight green tint introduced. Good overall colour channel balance, however.

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. 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. Further, the screen has a light matte anti-glare coating that prevents reflections without making the image too grainy.The Gigabyte M27Q-P is based on a Nano IPS panel by LG with a wide 98% DCI-P3 gamut coverage for rich and saturated colors. 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. Size-wise, the monitor measures in at 21 by 24.2 by 7.6 inches (HWD), about the same size as most other 27-inch monitors we’ve reviewed, like the MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD. It’s also only 11.6 pounds, much lighter than the ViewSonic Elite XG270QG or Sony Inzone M9. That’s with the stand, of course. If you choose to ditch the base and fasten your monitor to a VESA mount or arm, the panel alone is a mere 7.7 pounds. 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.

Further up the screen the screen strobe crosstalk appears in front of the object. This becomes fainter and eventually disappears a bit further down. For the more central regions of the screen the strobe crosstalk becomes displaced behind the object, becoming increasingly bold further down the screen until it eventually melds into the main object. Making the object appear doubled. Whilst the strobe crosstalk isn’t too strong centrally, and this is the main area of the screen you observe when immersed in something like a competitive FPS game, it is still visible in some central regions and very strong lower down. There’s also that pesky overshoot throughout the screen and some additional issues to consider, as we explore a little later when we provide subjective analysis of this setting.The monitor also has a few different Low Blue Light (LBL) settings which are easy to activate and deactivate given the flexible and customisable preset arrangement of the monitor. ‘Low Blue Light’ is the main setting and that can be adjusted between ‘0’ (off) and ‘10’ (strongest effect). This setting created a warmer look to the image and significantly reduced blue light output, but maintained a relatively strong green channel and therefore imparted a slight green tint. The alternative is to set the ‘Color Temperature’ to ‘Warm’, which was about as effective as a high ‘Low Blue Light’ setting but didn’t impart the green tint. We didn’t find either setting in isolation quite as effective as we’d like at cutting out blue light output – although they still did a decent job in that respect. So we used a combination of the two, the maximum ‘Low Blue Light’ setting combined with ‘Warm’. This was a very effective LBL setting which we used for our own viewing comfort in the evenings, although not for any specific testing beyond that involving the setting itself. It’s particularly important to reduce blue light exposure in the hours leading up to sleep as blue light is stimulating to the body and affects sleep hormones. Increasing alertness and making it more difficult to ‘shut off’ the mind and body. The side view is angular and slim. The M27Q X is a bit thinner than typical 27-inch flat panels. Compared to most I’ve reviewed, it’s about one inch shallower. Unfortunately, there are no USB ports on either side. Whilst mild fringing could be seen in places for similar reasons in games and movies, nothing jumped out at us in such situations. And we certainly don’t feel the BGR subpixel layout, specifically, had a significant impact there. Remember that games and video content are not optimised for any particular subpixel layout and BGR is not uncommon on TVs. The overall conclusion here is that most people won’t notice these fringing issues or find them bothersome if they do. They aren’t all that widespread nor are they extreme. Compared to some of the subpixel-related issues we’ve come across we really feel these issues are minor. Text and fine edge clarity issues related to split subpixel arrangements on some VA models ( example) or fringing due to chroma subsampling usage ( example) are far more significant. Nonetheless, some users will still be bothered by the fringing issues observed here. We’d again stress that most users won’t find them bothersome or noticeable and shouldn’t be put off by their existence. A small utility called SMTT 2.0 was used alongside a sensitive camera to analyse the latency of the M27Q, with over 30 repeat readings taken to help maximise accuracy. Using this method, we calculated 3.71ms (~2/3rds of a frame at 170Hz) of input lag. We measured similar latency at 60Hz. The input lag measured here is influenced by both the element you ‘see’ (pixel responsiveness) and the main element you ‘feel’ (signal delay). It indicates a low signal delay which most users should find acceptable. Note that we don’t have the means to accurately measure input lag with Adaptive-Sync active in a variable refresh rate environment or with HDR active in an HDR environment. The monitor provided a varied and generously saturated palette on Battlefield V. Most content under SDR, including this game, is designed around the sRGB colour space. If the colour gamut of a screen extends beyond sRGB, as it does here, it imparts extra saturation – providing a vibrant look that some users enjoy, but not providing a faithful or accurate look to things. Digital saturation enhancements such as increasing ‘Color Vibrance’ in the OSD or making a similar adjustment in the graphics driver pull shades closer to the edge of the gamut, without expanding the gamut itself. With an expanded gamut instead providing the extra saturation, you maintain good spacing on the gamut and therefore don’t lose shade variety. The gamut in this case is particularly generous in the green region, so some shades containing green showcased particularly strong saturation and vibrancy. This made for some impressively lush-looking forest greens, for example, but some green shades appeared too strongly saturated with a slightly unnatural and neon appearance in places. Reddish browns also had their red component brought out a bit too strongly, although not as strongly as we’ve seen on some models. The extension in the red region is focused more towards the yellow and orange side than pure red. This affected certain skin tones, tree trunks and wooden objects for example which didn’t look quite as neutral as intended and sometimes had a bit of an orange-red push. Blues and cyans shared in the strong saturation – some areas of sky, for example, looked decidedly vivid but not really as they should.