MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED gaming monitor review – 360Hz meets OLED

2024 is ready to see an enormous choice of OLED gaming displays seem, with a far better vary of corporations providing shows based mostly on LG and Samsung’s newest OLED panel tech. The MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED is the primary of the brand new batch to get a full take a look at run by us, and whereas the velocity on supply right here is spectacular, there are nonetheless loads of the reason why panels reminiscent of this one gained’t be for everybody.

Nonetheless, the sheer gaming efficiency on supply right here ensures MSI‘s newest OLED display screen earns a spot on our greatest gaming monitor information, because it’s merely the quickest 27-inch panel accessible that we’ve examined proper now.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED specs

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED options

For such an costly monitor, there surprisingly aren’t all that many options to essentially point out on the subject of the MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED. It has its 360Hz refresh fee, 27-inch QD-OLED panel, 2,560 x 1,440 decision, a couple of connections, a smattering of RGB on the again,  and that’s your lot.

Not that many customers need or count on extra from a gaming monitor, however you don’t get inside audio system, a flip-down headphone holder, a distant management (as on the LG 27GR95QE and Samsung Odyssey G9 G95SC), or any extras of that kind. It’s largely only a display screen.

However what a display screen it’s. These core specs actually are hanging. Whereas many video games really high out with a most body fee beneath the refresh fee of this display screen – even aggressive FPS titles reminiscent of Apex Legends, which doesn’t go above 300fps – many extra can hold going into ludicrously quick charges, making the 360Hz accessible right here a bonus, at the very least on paper.

In the meantime, for all that many players insist they will’t inform the distinction between 60Hz and 120Hz, not to mention 240Hz and 360Hz, I’ve definitely been capable of detect that latter change, though the returns are diminishing when in comparison with the distinction between 120Hz and 240Hz.

All that’s simply contemplating the refresh fee too. Once we additionally issue within the basically instantaneous response time of OLED panels, you’ve gotten a show that ought to mainly supply a flawlessly quick gaming expertise.

Outdoors of the display screen, what you do get is a primary choice of video inputs, with one DisplayPort 1.4a connector, two HDMI 2.1 ports, and a USB-C enter with 90W energy supply. The 90W energy is a helpful characteristic you probably have a laptop computer you would possibly need to plug into this display screen, because it’ll imply there’s a great probability you gained’t want to make use of an additional energy brick. There’s additionally a USB hub with two USB-A ports for connecting peripherals to your monitor.

Speaking of energy bricks, this show has an inside energy provide, so it takes an IEC C14 mains cable and doesn’t go away you with a big exterior energy brick to stow away someplace.

The again of the show additionally consists of an RGB backlit MSI brand, which cycles by way of a multi-colored sample (it wouldn’t work, for some cause, simply as I used to be taking pictures of the display screen). The brightness of this brand may be modified. however no different points of it may be adjusted, making it an underwhelming addition.

Fortunately, there are many changes accessible on the stand, which incorporates top, pivot (each clockwise and counterclockwise), rotation, and tilt actions. Alternatively, the panel may be mounted onto monitor arms by way of its 100 x 100mm VESA mount.

In the meantime, the onscreen menus are navigated by a mini joystick on the central rear of the panel. On both aspect of this management are buttons for powering the show on and off, and a button for activating the monitor’s Gaming Intelligence app. Sure, that’s a devoted {hardware} button on the show for an app, which we’ll focus on later.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED OSD menus

In any other case, that’s your lot for bodily options. Nonetheless, this show has fairly a couple of further tips up its sleeve. You may arrange a restricted KVM operate, for instance, which may swap your keyboard and mouse to a special gadget if you change the video enter.

It solely has choices for switching between the USB-C enter and the primary USB hub, although. So, when you can swap between controlling your laptop computer and your predominant PC (assuming that’s the gadget linked to the USB hub upstream cable), for those who swap over to any of the opposite commonplace video inputs, the keyboard and mouse connections gained’t be maintained.

A crosshair overlay can also be accessible within the onscreen menus, which basically helps you to cheat in video games the place sure weapons don’t have clear websites, and the place and shade of the crosshair may be modified. There’s additionally a zoom characteristic that stretches an adjustable central portion of the display screen. It’s a bit like having a sniper scope in the midst of the display screen, and it’s an fascinating approach of gaining a bonus however not a vastly efficient one.

Image-in-picture and picture-by-picture modes are additionally accessible so you possibly can see two video sources without delay, and you’ll organize all of the video inputs for these modes in no matter mixture you need.

Outdoors of extra feature-based additions to the menus, you additionally get a complete choice of picture high quality tweaking settings, the flexibility to set hotkeys for every of the menu management’s instructions, plus there are a great deal of OLED panel care and sport tweaking choices.

When it comes to OLED panel care, there are settings reminiscent of Pixel Shift, Panel Defend, Static Display screen Detection, Taskbar Detection, and Boundary Detection. Many of the detection modes strive to find out when the display screen has been displaying a static component, reminiscent of a taskbar, for a very long time and dim it to scale back the possibilities of OLED display screen burn creating on this space.

In the meantime, Pixel Shift works by barely shifting particular person pixels throughout the entire display screen to once more try to make sure anybody pixel isn’t shining too vibrant for too lengthy. As for Panel Defend, it’s a panel refresh operate that once more helps delay the lifetime of the panel, and which does generally tend to pop up at annoying instances.

Notably, this panel doesn’t have a very aggressive brightness-altering operate within the background. When reviewing the LG 27GR95QE, it very clearly modified the brightness of the display screen when shifting from a small white window to a big white window, as an example, which was very distracting. Whereas that’s occurring right here, although, the impact is way much less drastic or apparent.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED Gaming Intelligence app

Now, what about that app we talked about earlier? The Gaming Intelligence app isn’t a mandatory obtain to make use of this monitor, nevertheless it means you possibly can shortly change the show’s settings out of your PC – assuming you’ve gotten the USB hub/upstream cable linked to your PC. It helps you to change all of the OSD settings, in addition to program that spare hotkey talked about above (choices embrace utilizing it to fireplace up PIP/PBP modes, swap show profiles, and swap KVM connections).

Different options embrace having the ability to change your PCs keyboard and mouse settings, and alter show window modes, all of that are basically duplicates of settings accessible in Home windows. It’s also possible to create new profiles, with one which’s confusingly named Ray Tracing already arrange by default. The app additionally supposedly features a firmware replace characteristic for the show, however we had been unable to discover it wherever.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED design

Circling again to the bodily design of the 271QRX, it’s a gorgeous sufficient little bit of package, largely due to the sheer indisputable fact that it makes use of a very slim OLED panel. Nonetheless, there are some unusual design selections elsewhere.

For a begin, the panel is actually skinny on the outer two or three inches of the highest and sides, nevertheless it then simply has the thicker central part the place all of the connections are plonked on high – it isn’t probably the most elegant design we’ve seen, particularly if you examine it to the gently broadening curve of the Samsung G95SC, as an example. Furthermore, the skinny edges don’t provide you with a lot to carry, making it a barely unnerving show to deal with, particularly because the panel is surprisingly heavy.

One other minor grumble is that the highest and aspect bezels aren’t the identical width. The highest one is round 5mm and the perimeters are round 1cm. It’s a really small criticism, however if you’re paying this a lot for a monitor, all of it provides up. As talked about earlier, the RGB brand on the rear is especially small too.

It’s the same story with the stand, which is simply plain wanting, but additionally not fully flat on the backside. That’s an irritation, as it will in any other case nonetheless provide you with a usable area to position different desk gadgets.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED picture high quality

First impressions of the 271QRX’s picture high quality are lower than stellar, as by default it’s to a Premium Shade mode within the Gaming part of the menus, and to the Eco mode throughout the Skilled part of the menus. The previous mode imbues this show with an unpleasant oversaturated high quality, making colours look unnatural – the orange of this web site seems to be purple, as an example, whereas the greens and browns within the left aspect of the beneath picture look too luminous and orange respectively.

In the meantime, the Eco mode restricts most brightness to only 158nits (in response to our assessments), which means the show doesn’t precisely impress with its dazzling OLED distinction and claimed Show HDR 400 ranking (which requires a 400nits most brightness) at these settings.

Fortunately, although, all it takes to get a much more convincing picture is to swap to the Consumer gaming mode and swap to one of many non-Eco picture modes. There’s a complete host of selections right here, together with Consumer, Anti-Blue (which makes all the things look yellow/sepia for simpler studying/much less eyestrain), Film (which oversaturates the picture once more), Workplace (which bafflingly finally ends up eradicating the visibility of cell strains in Excel or the gray textual content containers utilized in a number of apps), together with sRGB, Adobe RGB, and Show P3.

The latter three modes set the show to evolve to the outlined shade ranges of these three shade areas, with sRGB considerably decreasing the general shade saturation, Show P3 maximizing it, and Adobe RGB sitting someplace within the center. I ended up utilizing this monitor primarily within the Show P3 mode, as this produced vivid, fully-saturated colours with out the unnatural look of the Film or Premium Shade modes. The precise half of the picture above is utilizing this setting.

Testing for shade accuracy, the panel usually delivered an correct shade steadiness (aiming for a shade temp of 6,500K) within the Eco, sRGB, and Show P3 modes, with gamma near the best determine of two.2 as nicely. Within the Premium Shade mode, gamma is a contact excessive (partly explaining its poor picture high quality), whereas the sRGB mode had a barely excessive shade temp of 6,728K, however by and enormous, the show is correct when used within the three shade area modes for which it needs to be correct.

Utilizing our most well-liked Show P3 mode, the MSI’s most brightness was simply 254nits, which nonetheless isn’t very excessive. Nonetheless, it’s sufficient that, when mixed with the pure black that may be produced by the OLED pixels, means you get technically infinite distinction. This interprets to a gorgeous, punchy, high-contrast picture, even in fairly vibrant circumstances, though this does require the show to be set to its full brightness. At its default 70/100 brightness, it tops out at 213nits.

As for HDR, that is the place we lastly see this show ship a brightness degree near its claimed 400nits. As with many OLED panels, this show can solely ship its most brightness in small areas, which we had been capable of measure with an HDR take a look at sample. Utilizing the Show HDR 400 setting, the panel would peak as excessive as 370nits for a small space (4% white window on a black background), with this determine steadily dropping because the take a look at window elevated in dimension. With the window dimension at its largest out (which wasn’t really full display screen in our assessments, however round half crammed) the show maxed out at 300nits.

Switching the show to its different HDR mode, referred to as “Peak 1000 nits” noticed the panel crank up its brightness one other notch, hitting 410nits for the smallest take a look at window and 320nits for the biggest. This resulted in a noticeable further bump in perceived distinction, making for a very punchy HDR picture. Nonetheless, you lose element with this setting, because it barely crushes among the darker colours (turning darkish grays into black, as you possibly can within the rightmost third of the photographs above and beneath).

As an alternative, the Show HDR 400 mode is the one to use, and this nonetheless produced spectacular HDR imagery, even when the height brightness can’t fairly compete with the 1,000nits of miniLED displays. The above and beneath photographs present the identical picture in SDR, HDR with Show HDR 400, and HDR with the 1,000 nits setting, when going from left to proper.

As for textual content readability, this panel is respectable, with it having related readability to the Samsung G95SC and being usable for work, in contrast to the LG 27GR95QE. Nonetheless, textual content is only a contact fuzzier than LCD panels of the identical pixel density.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED  gaming efficiency

With regards to gaming efficiency, this show doesn’t disappoint. We measured its common preliminary response time as 0.88ms, which is larger than the claimed 0.03ms peak response time however nonetheless extremely quick. Mixed with the 360Hz refresh fee this makes for extremely responsive gaming efficiency – you actually could have no excuses.

The one issue to think about – aside from Asus having a fair quicker 540Hz TN LCD gaming monitor – is that this show doesn’t have a black body insertion mode to scale back the impact of eye-tracking movement blur.

Some shows, such because the BenQ Zowie XL2566K, used within the present CS2 Main event, embrace a mode that flashes the backlight/pixels on and off, which helps the attention understand a sharper picture. Nonetheless, this MSI panel continues to be a tournament-ready grade of gaming monitor that may present all of the velocity 99.9% of players want.

One issue to notice, although, is that the excessive distinction and shade saturation supplied right here really hampered my efficiency in aggressive FPS video games. All these modes you get on gaming screens that enhance the brightness of darkish components of the picture – referred to as Night time Imaginative and prescient and Black Equaliser on the BenQ Zowie XL2566K – are literally an important characteristic for this show, as proven above the place the left half of the picture is with out Night time Imaginative and prescient and the proper half is with it on (set to most).

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED worth

The MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED worth is $799.99, which affords affordable worth in comparison with earlier technology OLED gaming displays. The likes of the LG 27GR95QE value barely extra at launch, and now go for round $700 lately, whereas providing ‘solely’ a 240Hz refresh fee and inferior picture high quality.

Nonetheless, $799.99 continues to be some huge cash, particularly for a 27-inch, 1440p display screen. This makes 27-inch OLED displays reminiscent of this one appear like comparatively poor worth in comparison with bigger 34-inch and 49-inch OLED panels, which provide much more display screen area for proportionally much less further money.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED evaluate conclusion

The MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED is a spectacularly succesful gaming monitor, providing blisteringly quick gaming efficiency and usually incredible picture high quality (with a little bit of tweaking), and its HDR replica is incredible. Its worth can also be fairly aggressive for the kind and dimension of display screen it affords.

Nonetheless, it’s a comparatively no-frills monitor, with few further options, together with no audio system, and its design isn’t the sleekest we’ve seen. The worth of 27-inch OLED gaming displays can also be questionable, as you may get a a lot larger OLED display screen for not that rather more cash.

MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED options

LG 27GR95QE

Though it usually affords much less of all the things than the 271QRX, LG’s flagship 27-inch panel from final yr is probably the most inexpensive 27-inch OLED gaming monitor round on the minute. If you happen to simply need uncooked OLED gaming efficiency, the LG 27GR95QE is barely cheaper than the MSI.

Asus ROG Swift PG27AQN

If you happen to’re not lifeless set on having an OLED display screen, the Asus PG27AQN affords a lot of the uncooked gaming efficiency of the 271QRX, however utilizing a 360Hz IPS panel. Crucially, it additionally consists of ULMB 2 backlight strobing for incredible movement blur discount.