 Recently we checked out the three cheapest 144Hz gaming monitors that we could get on Amazon.com and we were pretty impressed... well, mostly. Except for one common problem that they all had. They're all running a, by modern standards, lower 1920x1080 resolution. So, today we've got something new for you guys. We've actually never covered a product from AOC before, but this, the CQ27G127, stood out to us for a number of reasons. One, it's 144Hz, which means theoretically it should be great for gaming. Two, it's running at 2560x1440 resolution. Three, it's got a VA rather than a TN panel. And four, it comes in at just 280 US dollars. We couldn't find anything else that has this feature set at this price point. So we've got high expectations, and hopefully they don't disappoint us. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link in the video description. 🎵 I'm actually pretty excited about this because we've had a ton of requests to cover AOC in the past, but the main reason that we haven't done it is that ever since the CRT days, their presence in North America has been fairly limited. So I've been aware that they're kind of a big deal over in Europe and I believe Asia, but over here they've had basically very little availability and certainly no marketing. So I don't really know what to expect because even from other media outlets, I haven't like read a ton of reviews of their products or anything like that. First impressions of the stand are pretty good. It's got a nice metal base under a fairly tastefully, if a touch, gamery top. Tool-less assembly is always a nice touch. Honestly, I got to say initial impressions, pretty positive so far. Height adjustable stand, I mean to be clear, this is not like a $140 gaming monitor or anything like the ones we looked at last time, but considering how much higher their costs would be to get this better panel technology, it's a larger display, I'm pretty pleased so far with the overall fit and finish. Now I can't say that this is a perfect job that they've done of the plastic housing here. You can actually see some of the tape that they've used to probably put the, see this unit in the back here that houses the power supply and the scalar unit and all that stuff. You can see some of the tape they've used to like tape it on, but in terms of the overall feel of it, it doesn't feel cheap, it doesn't feel crappy, and we've got a reasonable if unexceptional I.O. So there's no built-in USB hub, but you've got dual HDMI ports, display port, a headphone jack, and a power supply built into the monitor rather than as an external brick, which some people care about, it's not a huge deal for me, but it is considered a better feature. Alright, the toollessness continues here, and we're just gonna peel this off. Bezels are looking pretty slim actually, and this is nice. Not just power cable included, but also display port and HDMI. So in terms of adjustability, we've got your tilt, we've got your swivel, no pivot, but we do have height adjust. I still remember when that used to be like a super premium feature. Now it's only really cheap stuff that it's not included on. It's really nice, makes a big difference. Immediately, the deep blacks on this monitor are quite noticeable compared to if we were looking at like an entry-level IPS or especially a TN. Like as this wallpaper fades off towards the edges, it's quite dark, not bad at all. Alright, 144 Hz of option showed up just fine there, yes. And because this is a variable refresh rate monitor, that means that even if it is not certified G-Sync compatible, we can enable G-Sync and it is in fact enabled right now. So without further ado, why don't we fire up some games? Now feels like a good time to have a look at the on-screen menu. Everything here is reasonably intuitive. Personally, I prefer just an instant switch rather than animation. I can see how they might do that. Bright frame. What even am I looking at here? Can you see anything that's... oh. What the crap? Oh, what? It just brightens the top corner of the screen. So it's like a faded out, washed out section in the top left corner. So you can change the brightness contrast, you can move the position of it around actually, you can put it wherever you want. Guys, let me know in the comments, what is this feature for? I would love to know. I thought that was interesting. Game mode is off by default. Oh, that's the FPS mode. That looks terrible. Okay, hold on a second. Let's get our settings adjusted here. I have to say, I have just never understood these weird color profiles that they create for particular genres of games. The correct color profile is the accurate color profile because that's the way that the developer intended it, quite frankly. At least they've got customizable ones so you can have gamer one, gamer two, gamer three, and then you can adjust things that might actually be meaningful, like whether you want the low blue light mode on, so you could have like nighttime gaming mode, whether you want the built-in frame counter on. That's pretty nice to have. So their gamer display modes are not necessarily useless, just the canned ones are stupid. Okay, overdrive can be adjusted to weak, medium, or strong. Medium is usually the best bet there, but we'll play around with that a little bit. And low input lag, we will leave on. I will say that there's no discernible increase in input lag compared to what I'd expect from a 144-hertz gaming monitor. So that's nice to see. Really responsive. A touch on the smeary side. So these are not the fastest pixels that I've ever seen by a long shot. If you pick up a decent TN gaming monitor or even one of those really high-end IPSs that LG released recently, you're gonna see better readability of things like text as you're moving around like this. You see that? Everything's got kind of a trail behind it. But for a VA panel, I would consider this perfectly reasonable and acceptable. Now one thing that's hard for me to tell right now, because I'm playing kind of a dark and gloomy game, is whether this gets any brighter. So what I'd like to do is get rid of Doom, let's switch to something like CSGO, and see if my impressions here are correct, because it seems like our maximum brightness, I mean, even just opening up something like, you know, our own website here. By the way, linustechtips.com is awesome for them, you guys should go check it out. This is supposed to be pretty much white-white, and it's kind of a gray, and it's not like we're at a very, very low brightness even. Actually the brightness is cranked to 100% already. Actually before we do that, I wanted to play around with the overdrive settings a little bit. Off is clearly terrible. Like you guys, I'm sure you can see these comet trails behind icons as I'm dragging this around on the desktop here. But as usual, strong also yields a really kind of over-sharpened visual artifact-y type look, and our best bet does once again appear to be medium overdrive. In fairness, white to dark is a very challenging scenario, so let's actually get that game fired up now. So this is a little bit more fair, and it's not great. And coming out here into the daytime Arabic friggin' sun here, I've been informed from off camera that this is a 250-nit peak brightness display, and I believe it, because while the blacks are deep, and that was impressive, it's a lot less impressive to have deep blacks when your monitor is just dark. I mean, maybe this would be the monitor for you if you're trying to game at night and be stealthy. And while you're at it, you could grab a hoodie like the one I'm wearing. It's the LTT Stealth Hoodie, LTTstore.com. Now to give credit to the strength of this monitor, the 1440p resolution does look a lot clearer than what we were dealing with with those 1080p monitors, but something that you guys have got to consider is that there is more to the perceived sharpness of an image than just the number of pixels, and contrast is actually a big part of what makes an image look clear and sharp and crisp. So yeah, the lines are fine, but the image doesn't look great. So it just feels like the monitor's a little self-defeating, because its key feature is that it manages 144Hz and higher resolution, but it gives up so much contrast that you lose a lot of the perceived image quality. And that's not a problem just for scenic games. It's a problem in general. It's noticeably bland. This is a bland looking game in the first place, but it's really bland. Can you tell on camera how bland this is? You know what? No, hold on. I think what we need to do is grab another monitor and swap it out for you guys. So David, hold it still as you can. Put the camera on sticks. Put the camera on sticks. Now this monitor costs about twice as much, and actually, you might have noticed that, especially in terms of brightness, it looks pretty similar. Except, funny story, this is actually the monitor that we use for B-roll shots, so it has its brightness turned down to 20 out of 100 in order to make it appear not too bright for certain shots that we do. So putting it up at something more reasonable, like around 80. Wow. That is a really, really different experience. Back to our AOC, the difference is very clear, and I'm just going to double check, yes, we are at 100% brightness on this thing. That's a little unfortunate. This looks a little bit more palatable, right? I think that's why all the gamer modes have this game color option turned up, because it might hurt the accuracy of your color, but it'll certainly make your games, as long as you don't go too far, like their FPS and their RTS modes, it'll certainly make your game look a little bit more vibrant. You can see I've overdone it a little bit here. So I'd probably say that if it's purely for gaming use, knowing that you're giving up some of the color accuracy that you might have gotten in the native profile, going to a game color of somewhere in the 11 to 13 range improves the playability a lot. It makes it not look like I'm looking at a super cheap, washed out monitor. And what's interesting, you saw how that flashbang wasn't even bright. What's interesting is part of the reason for that is that the way that humans perceive brightness is affected by the saturation of the color. So looking at a more saturated color makes you think that you're looking at something brighter, even though the panel itself is not particularly bright. And if we were to alt tab out of the game, you can see things like my icons look way overdone here. So this is a monitor that you're definitely giving something up at the price point. But if you're willing to fidget around with your onscreen menu, which to their credit is quite usable, actually has workarounds that work if you're willing to go around them. So bringing our AD27QD back up on the table, this is a clearly better display. It looks great not only in games when you adjust this dial, or on the desktop if you adjust it the other way, but in both all the time thanks to its 10-bit IPS panel and its much higher brightness. But if you think about it as paying yourself $250 to adjust a knob every once in a while, I still think there's a very compelling value argument to be made for AOC's display here, even if it does give up some of the creature comforts that you might get with a higher end panel. So guys let us know, does this look like a great option or do you want us to explore some of the other 1440p 144Hz monitors on the market? They are a bit more expensive, but there's options from Viotek, Roxul, Dell has one that's a fair bit more expensive. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it if you do leave a comment about that. Do you need to create a beautiful website without the hassle? Well check out Squarespace. 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