is a senior reviews editor who’s been testing tech since 2007. Previously at Wirecutter and Maximum PC. Current fixations: keyboards, DIY tech, and the smart home.
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I keep accidentally ruining regular things for myself. I already can’t use a standard keyboard layout, and now I think I have to buy a really nice monitor.
I’ve spent the last few months living with the Alienware AW2725Q, a 27-inch gaming monitor with a 240Hz 4K resolution QD-OLED panel. It’s one of a spate of gaming monitors that came out this year, all bearing the same Samsung Display panel, but with minor differences in features, ports, and looks.
I plopped the AW2725Q on my desk in March, replacing my hulking 32-inch BenQ monitor I’ve been using since 2022. I hadn’t really considered getting a high-refresh-rate 4K OLED monitor before this year, for a couple of reasons. The main one is that they’re expensive: the AW2725Q is about the cheapest of them, at $900. The second is that I just don’t have that much time to game anymore, and my gaming rig wasn’t exactly in danger of exceeding 60fps on my existing monitor. And my 60Hz IPS monitor was, and is, working just fine. I was happy with it. I had a suspicion that if I tried a high-refresh-rate OLED I would no longer be fine with it.
The lesson here is: trust your gut.
It might be hard to see in SDR photos, but the Alienware OLED monitor has much deeper blacks and brighter highlights. It’s also physically smaller, which is easier to see. My 32-inch IPS monitor seems bulky and washed-out by comparison.
At first, I was underwhelmed. Ninety percent of what I do at my desk is work, and you don’t really need a 240Hz OLED for Google Docs, Slack, and browser tabs. The OLED’s perfect black levels, infinite contrast, and bold colors did make watching YouTube videos a lot nicer, but that’s not really a big part of my job. My work laptop — an M1 MacBook Air — tops out at 60Hz output anyway, so the only real benefit I got from going to the Alienware on that machine was better pixel density, because the screen is physically smaller but has the same resolution as my old monitor.
Actually, for non-gaming laptop use, the Alienware is a step backward, because it lacks a KVM switch or single-cable connection. I could just connect my MacBook to the BenQ’s USB-C port for power, data, and video all in one. With the AW2725Q, I need a USB hub or dongle to get that same convenience.
Here’s the part where the reader will say, Nathan, you dingbat, surely you’re not going to judge a $900 gaming monitor by how convenient it is to use with a five-year-old Macbook, are you?
No, that’d be silly. I also used it with a mostly six-year-old gaming PC.
When I started using the Alienware monitor, my gaming rig was quite long in the tooth, with a mid-range Core i5 CPU circa 2018 and an Nvidia GTX 1070. To my surprise, though, the high-refresh-rate panel helped even when my PC was chugging along. It’s not so much the 240Hz, though, as it is the variable refresh rate technology, which lets the monitor match its panel refresh timing to the actual frame output of the GPU, as opposed to being stuck at 60Hz and grabbing whatever frame happens to be rendered at the time, which results in screen tearing.
Up until now, I’ve dealt with screen tearing by, well, dealing with it, or by enabling V-Sync, or by not playing many games that involve rapid horizontal camera movements. I didn’t really notice its absence at first.
Even when I upgraded my GPU (at long last) to a 4070 Super, it was so bottlenecked by my CPU that I didn’t see that much of a frame rate upgrade — possibly because I was playing the notoriously CPU-heavy act III of Baldur’s Gate III. I played Blue Prince when it came out in April; even that was a little CPU-bound.
But then I upgraded my CPU from a Core i5-9400F to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which unbottlenecked my graphics card, and I started playing Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk is a game that now — five years after it launched, and a couple years after it got good — still chews through as much CPU and GPU power as you can give it, and it’s a game that really benefits from a high-refresh-rate OLED. With my upgraded PC, I’m getting about 95fps at 4K resolution, high texture quality, and medium ray tracing, plus 2x DLSS frame gen and performance super resolution, and it looks buttery smooth thanks to adaptive refresh.
I can’t believe I’m a fake frames guy.
Turning off super resolution and frame gen dropped my frame rate down to a stuttery 20. Maybe some of the textures looked nicer, but it’s not that fun playing a PowerPoint presentation. Screw that noise. Give me the super resolution and the fake frames; turns out my eyes can’t tell the difference. But they can tell the difference between the 56fps I got with just the actual raster power of the GPU and the 95fps I got with frame generation, and I like the second one better. I can’t believe I’m a fake frames guy.
Of course, if I was still using my 60Hz monitor, and I’d never tried the OLED or experienced adaptive refresh rate, 56fps would have seemed great. But when I went back to my old monitor as prep for writing this article, Night City looked washed out. My old IPS monitor can’t display true black. Without an OLED display, Night City’s neon lights are duller, its seedy alleys lighter. Colors aren’t as vibrant, and in a late-game fight at the NCX spaceport, I could see the screen tearing every time V drew a bead on a new enemy or flung herself at them with a katana. Without the glossy bright colors and smooth motion, the game just didn’t grab me as much.
Granted, most of what I use my monitor for is work, not gaming. When I went back to my old monitor for work, I didn’t mind the rougher cursor movement and less-smooth scrolling the way I thought I would. The only thing I really missed about the 27-inch 4K screen was its smaller physical size, which made my desk look less cluttered. My BenQ monitor has a three-computer KVM switch and a one-cable USB-C connection, which are much more useful for my day-to-day, since I’m often switching between different computers with the same peripherals and monitor. I rarely play Cyberpunk.
Okay, maybe not rarely. More than I ought to, for sure.
Here’s what’s good about the Alienware AW2725Q:
Great picture. Just phenomenal.
Adaptive refresh rate
The casing and stand are kinda navy blue in a fun way.
The power button light is RGB and can sync with compatible games. It glows yellow when I’m playing Cyberpunk. Same with the alien head logo thing on the back, but it’s on the back, so I can’t see it.
There’s a USB-C port and a USB-A port on the left side of the bottom bezel, perfect for USB-C headset and/or a wireless dongle.
Here’s what I would like to be different:
There’s a bug where the screen doesn’t always come back on when the computer wakes up . Maybe it’s Windows, maybe it’s the monitor, but I don’t care for it.
There should be more USB ports.
I wish it had a KVM switch. The competing Asus monitor does. When I switch between my laptop and desktop, if I want to use the monitor’s onboard USB ports with both computers, I also have to move the monitor’s downstream USB cable. If you’re only using this with one computer, that’s not a problem.
Alienware Command Center manages to be annoying before you even install it, with its constant nags, and is poorly laid out once installed. It also downloads a dozen or more little Dell processes that run constantly.
The on-screen display is also awkward to navigate, but I’ve rarely used one that wasn’t.
This isn’t the monitor’s fault, but Windows’s HDR support is still wretched.
Would it be an Alienware without an RGB alien head logo? Please don’t look at my cable situation.
A high-refresh-rate OLED gaming monitor is a luxury, obviously. You can get a high-refresh-rate monitor, or an OLED, or a 4K monitor, for a lot less than the $900 the Alienware costs (to say nothing of the $1,200 for the Asus monitor with the same panel, which does have a KVM switch). And the problem with luxury, as the saying goes, is that once you get used to it, it becomes a necessity.
I don’t need a 240Hz OLED, given my frankly midtier gaming rig or the amount of time I actually spend gaming. But if I were to buy one — and I might! — I’d still go for a 240Hz OLED, and not a more affordable option like 144Hz. I keep monitors for a long time; 240Hz has plenty of overhead for my current gaming rig and should still feel acceptable for however long the OLED panel lasts. (I haven’t noticed any burn-in, and the panel shuts off every 4 hours or so to do a panel refresh, which is a pretty good cue to take a break)
The sensible thing, once I send this thing back to Dell, would be to go back to my 60Hz BenQ, with its KVM switch and IPS panel. It’s a perfectly great monitor for the vast majority of the things I actually use a monitor for. And the OLED monitor I’d probably get — one with a KVM switch — is twelve hundred dollars.
But I already saved $3,600 not getting the best keyboard on earth, so surely I’m good to spend a mere third of that on a really nice monitor, right?
Photography by Nathan Edwards / The Verge