The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD is an excellent 144Hz IPS monitor with excellent gaming performance. It has a 1440p resolution and delivers a decent picture quality. It has great design and supports HDR. Like most IPS monitors, the image remains accurate when viewed from the side at the expense of dark room performance, where blacks tend to look like gray. Motion on the AD27QD looks very crisp, thanks to the extremely fast response time and optional black frame insertion feature. The monitor responds immediately to your actions due to its low input lag, which is great for gaming. Finally, it has some neat additional features, designed to give gamers an extra little edge.
Pros
+ Outstanding motion handling and excellent low input lag
+ Great set of gaming features, including FreeSync support
+ Image remains accurate when viewed at an angle
Cons
- Mediocre dark room performance
Design
Size: 27″
Resolution: 2560×1440
Refresh Rate: 144Hz
LCD Type: IPS
The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD is the first Gigabyte monitor on the market. It has a great overall design and a good build quality. The Aorus feels solid and has a lot of metal. The stand supports the monitor well, but it won’t prevent wobbling if you nudge it. It has excellent ergonomics, and you can easily position it to your liking. It has a nice carrying handle at the top. Although the stand is wide, you can still place small objects in front of the V-shaped legs. The back of the monitor looks clean and has RBG bias lighting so you can illuminate the wall behind it, creating a pleasant ambient atmosphere. Finally, when the monitor is placed on its stand, it is relatively thick, but if you VESA mount it, it doesn’t protrude much.
Picture Quality
The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD has a decent picture quality. It is among the brightest monitors we’ve tested so far and is suitable for fairly bright rooms. However, you should avoid having lights facing directly at the monitor, as reflections can become distracting. The Aorus has mediocre dark room performance, with blacks looking more like gray, as the contrast ratio is only 1063:1 and the black uniformity is poor with noticeable backlight bleed. On the upside, the monitor has excellent gray uniformity and good viewing angles. When sitting up close, the image remains accurate across the entire screen, and the sides look just as good as the center. The Aorus also has excellent out of the box accuracy.
The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD covers most of the sRGB color space, but it can’t cover the Adobe RGB color space well, which might not be ideal for professional photo editing. The Aorus supports HDR content and has a wide color gamut and a decent HDR peak brightness. HDR content looks okay and surpasses the minimum requirements for VESA DisplayHDR 400, although some small highlights in some scenes aren’t as bright as they should be.
Motion
The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD has remarkable motion handling and an excellent 144Hz native refresh rate. The response time is extremely fast, and pixels change state in as fast as 3.7ms. This results in a very crisp image with just minimal blur trail behind fast-moving objects. The AD27QD has a flicker-free backlight, which is great, but it also gives you an option to insert flicker so you can make the image even crisper. Unfortunately, this does not work very well as it causes duplications and has a few minor glitches. The Aorus supports FreeSync and has a wide range of variable refresh rates to ensure a tear-free gaming experience.
Inputs
The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD has an excellent low input lag. We measured it at 4.1ms at its native resolution of 2560×1440. The input lag remains remarkably low even when more advanced features are enabled. We measured the input lag at 4.5ms with the variable refresh rate enabled, and at 4.8ms with Black Frame Insertion enabled. Even when in HDR mode, the Aorus has an outstanding low input lag of 3.9ms. The input lag is only just slightly higher when the refresh rate changes to 60Hz, where we measured it at 8.7ms. The monitor has an abundance of input ports. It has 1 DisplayPort 1.2, 2 HMDI 2.0, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 Analog Audio Out, and 1 Microphone In which is necessary if you wish to use the Active Noise Cancelling feature explained below.
Features
The AD27QD is equipped with a large number of additional features. It ships with a software called ‘Dashboard’ that is a customizable overlay. Apart from displaying your computer’s status, the ‘Dashboard’ allows you to control almost any aspect of the monitor, without the need to access the monitor’s OSD. You can enhance your gaming experience by adding custom crosshairs or display your computer’s vital stats directly on the monitor. The Aorus supports both picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture modes to give you greater flexibility. The Aorus offers an Active Noise Cancelling feature that we have not seen on any other monitor thus far. When you make all the proper connections, you can speak to your friend through the microphone and the monitor will remove all the ambient noise, so your voice reaches your friend loud and clear. In our tests, ANC was very effective.
Who Should Buy It?
The Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD is a great monitor for most usages and offers outstanding performance in gaming. Gamers will appreciate the fast response time, which delivers clear motion with very little blur trail, and its low input lag that makes it very responsive. The monitor supports FreeSync over both DisplayPort and HDMI, and has some additional gaming features to help you perform your best. However, if HDR gaming is what you’re looking for, it is not a great choice as the contrast ratio is low. It will keep you happy if you wish to use it for media creation or for multimedia consumption. It has wide viewing angles and great ergonomics so you can easily share your work. This is great, especially for office use.
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To see all our measurements and our test results of the Gigabyte Aorus AD27QD, please go here.
