Alienware is no stranger to making great gaming monitors, but its wares tend to tilt towards the premium end of the market. However, thanks to an early Black Friday discount, you can grab a superbly-specced 27-inch gaming monitor from the company for an incredible price, saving you 33% off its MSRP.
Not only is this Alienware panel packing great specs, but it offers a sleek design, too, with a stand that’s fully adjustable – there’s no need to resort to a stack of books to prop up your monitor here. While this particular model isn’t featured on our best gaming monitor guide, with this discount right now, it’s one of the best early Black Friday deals we’ve seen so far.
The core of this monitor is its 27-inch IPS LCD display that has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels, which is a combination we’ve long considered ideal for general gaming and PC use. The 27-inch size is a Goldilocks one that’s not too big and not too small, and when combined with a QHD resolution, it gets you a sharp image that doesn’t look pixellated (like 1080p resolutions do on 27-inch displays) but also doesn’t make pixels so small that you need to use larger fonts or Windows scaling options to make everything readable. It also doesn’t put a big strain on your graphics card, unlike 4K displays.
The use of an IPS LCD panel is also a great choice. You can get IPS, TN, or VA types of LCD, and we consider IPS to offer the best balance of contrast, viewing angles, image stability, color accuracy, and response time. Alienware rates this display as having a 1ms gray-to-gray response time, which should ensure that there’s minimal ghosting/smearing, resulting in a sharp picture even during fast motion.
Speaking of fast, the 180Hz refresh rate of this panel isn’t the speediest these days by any stretch – you can get 360Hz IPS panels now – but it’s still fast enough for any single-player games and will still keep you competitive in most multiplayer titles too. If you’re just upgrading from an old 144Hz 1080p panel, it’ll still feel like a big overall upgrade.
As well as a great size, resolution, and choice of LCD panel, this display can also boast HDR capabilities. It’s rated to DisplayHDR 400 and can hit 95% of the DCI-P3 color space – the extended color space used by most HDR standards. It doesn’t have particularly high contrast – just the 1,000:1 of a normal IPS LCD – but colors will have the richness and vividness demanded by HDR.
All this, and the display includes official support for AMD Freesync, Nvidia G-Sync, and general adaptive sync, so the display’s refresh rate can sync with your graphics card’s frame rate to eliminate image tearing and stutter, no matter what graphics card you own.
This display’s sleek-looking and compact stand supports height, rotation, tilt, and pivot movements, and when it comes to connections, you get two HDMI (1.4 and 2.3), a DisplayPort 1.4, and a USB hub with two USB-A ports for connecting your peripherals. Included in the box are also six-foot-long DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB cables, along with a power cable.
So, all told, it’s a great display for the price, and we don’t anticipate many, if any, better monitor bargains this Black Friday. Just head on over to Amazon via this link to grab this fantastic discount.