Gadgetory

welcome back to hard-on box today I'm taking a look at gigabytes first ever monitor the horas ad 27 QD tactical monitor you have tactical modeler gigabyte makes a big deal about this being the world's first tactical monitor on their website which seems to be a case of gigabyte just inventing a product category out of thin air to claim being the first is something bit strange but anyway that really has nothing to do whether this monitor is any good in terms of specifications we're looking at a 27-inch 1440p flat IPS panel with a maximum refresh rate of 144 Hertz and freesync support its NIT you can now use these sorts of monitors with NVIDIA GPUs as well so there's no need for gigabyte to make a qi sync equivalent also because this is a 144 Hertz monitor it supports low framerate compensation for adaptive sync support from one Hertz all the way up to 144 Hertz gigabyte it's also advertising HDR support with display HDR 400 certification for what it's worth this isn't the first monitor to use this gaming grade IPS panel in conjunction with HDR be gigabyte are attempting to differentiate it from the pack with tactical branding and a massive amount of additional features and 599 US dollars it's at the higher end of the price bracket for these sorts of displays but I suspect gigabyte are hoping their feature set will get the nod over cheaper alternatives we'll see about that a bit later I'm always interested to see what companies do with their first entry into the gaming monitor market because it's not always as simple as picking a display module off the shelf building a housing and calling it a day but in the case of the Auris ad 27 QD it seems the Gigabyte have put a lot of time into researching what other brands are doing with their products to ensure that a gigabytes first product is ticking all the boxes the design for example is pretty impressive gigabyte has gone down the path of a more gamer style design which I'm personally not a huge fan of it looks similar to recent a seuss ROG and ASA predator monitors but it's undoubtedly a quality construction the stand is solid metal for the most part and while the plastic on the rear is unspectacular everything is well put together without she seems like you can find with more budget and displays right out of the gate gigabytes monitor build quality is at least as good as the other major players which surprised me somewhat most of the game elements are hidden around the back with angled plastic a large vented section at the top and plenty of RGB lighting that syncs up with gigabytes fusions software you get RGB LEDs on the back of the monitor plus the back and sides of the stand all customizable the stand is also very adjustable supporting tilt pivot swivel and height adjustments which you'd expect from a premium class product inputs as well all very standard stuff with a single DisplayPort input and two HDMI 2.0 ports plus a two port USB hub and some audio jacks before getting into the performance numbers I did want to spend a bit of time on the software because what gigabyte has achieved here is pretty impressive normally newer OMS just come out with a basic selection of features that they build on over time big gigabyte has gone all out with the ad 27 QD this morning--i boasts a feature set that's not only the equal of companies like a soos and Acer but it's even better in many regards the many monitor features are accessible either through the on-screen display controlled through a directional toggle blow the Auris logo or via a Windows software utility called OSD sidekick you get control of basically every feature so that's the color controls cheap features and more a lot of these features aren't unique to the ad 27 QD things like the aim stabilizer is just a different brand name for backlight strobing blur reduction which allows the monitor to hit its one millisecond MP RT response time spec others like picture-in-picture low blue light and so on we've all seen before but there are some unique things in here that I wanted to draw attention to firstly there are more cheap features here than I have seen before gigabyte calls these tactical features or game assets but really they're just ways to add things into a game without triggering cheat detection the crosshair is a primary example of that in gigabytes crosshair feature is the most comprehensive I've seen because it allows you to draw your own crosshair and have that overlaid this could give you an advantage in games that don't have a crosshair and don't allow on via cheat software you also get features like a black equalizer to boost shadows timers counters and more on top of this gigabyte has a - bored you can enable that overlays PC statistics like CPU and GPU usage temperatures and clock speeds I couldn't get this feature to work and I don't think it would be superior to an afterburner overlay for example but it could come in handy again if software overlays are banned or detected as chief software the final feature worth mentioning is something relatively unique I can't recall any other monitor that includes it and that's active microphone noise cancellation basically when you plug in a microphone to the monitor you can use the monitors built-in microphones to provide active noise cancellation of noises in your gaming environment this allows your voice to be sent through clearly while your keyboard sounds can be canceled out for example it's pretty neat stuff and it works quite well if your headset doesn't already have noise cancellation so the ad 27 QD has an impressive array of features in the on-screen display now it's time to see how the display itself performs we're looking at a 27-inch 1440p 144 Hertz IPS panel here these specs are also available in TN and VA panels but the VA selection right now is entirely curved so if you want good color reproduction and a flat display this IPS is for you while those after deeper blacks will need to go with a curved panel unfortunately IPS is typically a faster display technology than VA but this isn't really the case with the gigabyte or as a d-27 QD with an average grader great response time of 8.4 one milliseconds this puts the monitor right among the pack of gaming great VA panels that typically have a 7 to 9 millisecond response time this is using the default balanced overdrive mode as the faster speed mode introduces upwards of 20% overshoot for some transitions looking at the difference in transition times between the bounced and speed modes I'd say that gigabyte probably could have optimized things a bit further here the speed mode is much faster than the bounce mode cutting some transition times in half or better but due to the overshoot we can't recommend using it I feel what is required here is a mode between balanced and speed that pushes closer to overshooting without doing so and I suspect if that mode existed we would get transition times down around that 16 millisecond mark which is more in line with high-end IPS displays and getting down to 6 milliseconds is important for a 144 Hertz despise the refresh rate when dough is 6.9 four milliseconds the ad 27 QD can only achieve transitions faster than this with its speed mode that induces overshoot while the bounced mode is too slow and delivers an experience more like a 120 Hertz display so this is a disappointing result 4 gigabytes first displayed though as it's one of the trickier performance metrics to get right I'm hoping this is something gigabytes engineering team is working on for future models in terms of input lag again still working on updating our test results with version 2.0 of our input lag test however I can say the ad 27 QT is one of the fastest displays I've tested in terms of latency coming in at around four point seven milliseconds so it's good to verify gigabyte is using fast gaming great display processing Hardware here looking at brightness and contrast nothing out of the ordinary for an IPS display in fact it's tending towards an above average experience brightness peaked at 448 nits above gigabytes claims while the default contrast is around 1150 to 1 this contrast ratio is well below what you get with a VA panel but again there are no flat VA panels with these specifications and IPS panels have superior viewing angles for what it's worth color performance is an interesting situation with the ad 27 QD gigabyte has done a lot of things right here but still has a long way to go to make this display perfect so this is a wide gamut monitor gigabyte advertisers 95% DCI p3 coverage and 10 bit of color processing through an 8-bit plus FRC panel and when looking at default DCI p3 accuracy it's pretty decent we're getting a good CCT curve and average with good Gama and an acceptable though not fantastic grayscale Delta a average of around 2.5 0 however both saturation and color checker tests produced a delta e average below 2.0 which is very good it's not elite T accuracy but for a gaming monitor this is well above average especially considering it's a wide gamut we're looking at however things start to fall away when examining srgb accuracy and that's because there is no display mode that clamps this monitor to an sRGB gamut there is an sRGB mode in the settings but because it doesn't limit the gamut to srgb instead leaves it in an unclamped DCI p3 state it's completely useless effectively so when measuring default srgb performance were left with Delta above three-pointer across many of our tests this isn't nearly as good as its DCI p3 performance and you can quite clearly see in the saturation chart that srgb colors are being stretched out to DCI p3 leading to over saturation there's no good way to solve this problem for those that want color accuracy across the vast majority of Windows applications that use the sRGB color space what's missing is a simple switch in the on-screen display that allows you to set the gamma to srgb and still allows control over brightness and color temperature you can nail down the color temperature using the OSD as it is but that only improves accuracy slightly I did manage to find one sort of hack that limits the despite srgb Boots not a very good one basically if you enable the windows HDR mode and use SDR apps it will be limited to srgb but only if you set some specific OSD settings and then you may run into a variety of issues when using the HDR mode for SDR apps the mode has come a long way but I'd still recommend you leave it disabled for SDR usage in most cases the only proper way to solved the unclamped gamut is to use a software profile I created one using spectral cows cow man 5 that was very accurate producing average Delta is below 1.0 along with a tight grayscale curve crucially this sort of calibration came only at a slight loss to contrast ratio now sitting at eleven hundred to one which is still very good for an IPS panel members of our patreon can download the software profile we created for this monitor links in the description panel uniformity is close to being decent but stumbles at the last hurdle Center uniformity is quite decent almost the entire center area and along the bottom edge deviates from the center by less than 2.5 however it's the outer edges that suffer especially the top corners this wouldn't be good enough for a professional-grade display but I'd say it's an average result for a gaming monitor the final aspect of performance I wanted to discuss is HDR this is a display hgr 400 certified panel so needless to say HDR performance won't be very good as I've mentioned in previous reviews there are three key pillars to HDR performance brightness contrast and color gamut the gigabyte ad 27 QD only provides a better than SDR experience in one of those areas and that's : gamut thanks to US 95 % DCI p3 coverage brightness falls short at a peak of only 400 nits and that's exacerbated by a contrast ratio that's far too low for HDR at just 1100 to 1 there's no local dimming here and not even a dynamic backlight which means that for a lot of content you won't even get an 1100 to 1 contrast ratio for example to get a peak brightness of 400 nits you have to turn up the brightness to the maximum but that means if the displays asked to show our modest 200 nits the contrast ratio is reduced to around 500 to 1 which is nowhere near an HDR experience the panel is actually quite accurate at showing nits levels it's capable for example when content targets 116 it's the panel produces 165 nits but this doesn't matter much when peak brightness is low and contrast isn't good enough Judah failing a number of metrics in my age to our checklist and say this display isn't even semi HDR capable it's just flat-out not an HDR display it's a very good wide gamut display but it's simply not an HDR display so that's all the performance tyne have done let's talk about my overall thoughts at $600 this is a high-end monitor in its specification class with models like the pic Co px 2 7 7 H offering similar specs in the budget class for just 420 dollars a soos also offers a similar display the mg 27 9q for five hundred and fifty dollars so gigabyte need to be providing a lot of extra value than either of those two options to justify the higher priced at I think gigabyte has made a good attempt at adding this value the ad 27 QD well it's a wider gamut display than either of the monitors I just mentioned and it does so with accurate DCI p3 coverage out of the box if you want a gaming display there's also wide gamut the ad 207 QD would be right at the top of my list it also supports a slightly wider gamut than similar VA offerings and it's not curved which is a good thing in my eyes however there are some issues with clamping this display - srgb it's doable with the software profile but I'd have liked to see a mode in the OSD that takes care of it response times also week for an IPS panel if you are buying this monitor because it's faster than VI options I'd probably think again luckily input lag is excellent and while the HDR mode is poor you won't comparing panel that offers decent hga anyway so it's a bit of a moot point gigabyte has also done a decent job of adding value through this displays functionality in particularly the active noise cancellation and some of the unique shape features for a first-time product the software suite is impressive as is the build quality which is right up there with other high-end monitors this definitely doesn't have a budget feel to it when it comes to recommending this monitor there are a few things I'd consider though if you just want a budget 27-inch 1440p high refresh monitor for gaming I'd go down one of two paths either get a $300 curve VA like the Samsung JG 50 or opt for the flat IPS pick 0px 277 H if you're just after decent specs and a good gaming experience I think those monitors offer better value than the much more expensive gigabyte ad 27 QD but if you're specifically after a wide gamut monitor or interested in some of the unique features this monitor provides I think there is some merit in spending $600 on the gigabyte ad 27 QD at this price it definitely won't be for everyone but there's enough good stuff here that for some buyers it might be the right fit depending on what you want while it is potentially a good buy for some I think overall it's about $100 too expensive to get a more broad recommendation $500 would be a really good price for this display and $450 would be an instant recommendation that said I do want to commend gigabyte for a strong showing with their first monitor there are still some things to be worked on but this is a much better product than I expected from a first generation product line I'll be very interested to see where gigabytes monitor division goes in the future that's it for this review we have links to check out current prices for the monitors I've been discussing in the description below you can subscribe for more monitor reviews consider supporting us on patreon where you can get access to our monitor profiles and exclusive discord chat and I'll catch you in the next one