Hello, good local-time-zone-adjusted afternoon, and let’s just say it’s been a while. But I come back to you now at the turn of the technological tide. Well, sort of. Sadly I’m not here to predict an end to the ridiculous AI-fuelled chip crisis. That whole mess has a couple of years to run, surely.
Instead I speak of screens, where there is actually some very good news. In short, have you seen how cheap PC gaming monitors are? I mean remarkably, almost stupendously, cheap. I’m talking £60 / $60 for an entry-level 1080p panel with triple-digit refresh rate, sub-£200 / $250 for high-refresh 4K gaming. Heck, even OLED monitors now start with a “2” in both currencies.
Also bear in mind we’ve had a fair old bit of inflation in recent years. A 4K panel bought today for £200 is equivalent to paying roughly £150 back in 2020. All the while, that same £200 / $200 right now won’t buy you a current-model gaming graphics card at all, even the most feeble example, and will barely secure a basic dual-channel 16GB DDR5 memory kit. Youch.
So, I think we can all agree monitors are cheap in the current chip-catastrophe context. The immediate question is why? The answer isn’t all that complicated, actually. Most obviously, the display market isn’t being devoured by the AI craze. All those data centres are stuffed with GPUs, memory chips and NAND flash, not monitors.
AI isn’t really driving demand on the end-user side of the equation, either. Put it this way: you don’t need to buy a new phone, laptop or PC to access the latest models. At the same time, the display market is suffering from something of a glut of overcapacity. Chinese companies built out huge capacity in LCD panel manufacturing over the past decade, to the extent factories are now running underutilised. Meanwhile, even the OLED market is arguably oversupplied.
In fact, Samsung and LG, the two big noises in large OLED panel manufacturing (as opposed to OLED displays for tablets and phones), have been shifting emphasis away from TV panels to PC monitors because the latter offer better margins. Meanwhile, the AI boom has almost definitely meant lower demand for new PCs. Certainly, the big research houses point to cratering PC sales thanks to higher component costs. Long story short, that’s oodles of capacity combined with weakening demand. Like I said, the explanation for cheap monitors isn’t exactly rocket surgery, if you know what I mean.
What is a bit more complicated is making sense of what’s available today in the gaming monitor market. With so much choice, where exactly is the very best value to be found? And are there any remaining pain points?
Monitor specifications, to be sure, can be tricksy at the best of times. But if you’re looking for some blanket rules to fling casually over the whole LCD monitor market – I’ll be digging deeper into OLED tech another day – try these for size. Look for, at minimum, 300 nits brightness and 1ms response times. Refresh rates are a slightly more complicated call, but for the vast majority of games, 144Hz is plenty. For “esports-grade multiplayer fare like Counter-Strike or Dota 2, or I think a refresh in the high 200s will get the job done for most. If you’ll benefit from more than that, you almost certainly know who you are already.
Oh, and heavily favour IPS over VA panels. Exceptions exist: there are some decent “Rapid VA” panels these days and Samsung, in particular, does some nippy VA models. But a lot of the cheaper stuff is pretty slow and smeary, making VA a risky buy. Finally, don’t worry too much about claimed HDR capability, save for the fact that HDR 400 certification at least means the monitor can do 400 nits. Unless a monitor has local dimming, it won’t be truly HDR capable.
Anywho, one immediate and rather ironic issue is the growing mismatch between monitors and GPUs. For sure, it’s great you can grab a high-refresh 4K monitor for such little money. It’s almost hard to believe that you can have this 27-inch IPS MSI for sub-£200 (you’re looking at $250 for the same model in the US), and it even has a 288Hz 1080p dual mode.
I actually favour 32 inches with my 4K gaming, and that’s naturally a little pricier, especially if you insist on an IPS – which again, you probably should. But even $350 for that kind of panel (here’s a comparable model for £340 in the UK) is a fraction of what you’d have paid for a similarly specced model a few years ago. And it probably wouldn’t have included dual-mode functionality.
Here’s the problem, though. How are you going to drive the thing, what with its eight million-plus pixels? After all, the cheapest RTX 5090 on Newegg right now is over $6,500. So high-end Nvidia GPUs now cost about as much as a decent used car.
Of course, you might be surprised just how effective the likes of an AMD RX 9070 XT or Nvidia RTX 5070-class GPU is at 4K thanks to upscaling technologies including DLSS and FSR. The latest transformer model upscalers really do knock out pretty stellar image quality. Add in a bit of frame gen and you have a compelling combination of visual sharpness, reasonably low latency and nice smoothframe rates, even in the most demanding of games. Perhaps the one thing you can’t do is enable full path tracing in a game like Cyberpunk 2077 and still expect a slick experience, but standard ray tracing remains an option.
The bigger snag, unsurprisingly, is that you can no longer bag a 5070 at (let alone below) its original £539 / $549 MSRP. Instead, you’re looking at the thick end of £800 / $900. That’s a bit of an ask for pairing with a £200 monitor, isn’t it?
I’d therefore argue that, for pure gaming purposes, the bang-for-buck sweet spot remains just where it’s been sat twiddling its thumbs for the better part of a decade, namely 1440p. That applies to both its vanilla 16:9 aspect variety and my personally preferred ultrawide format, the latter being so very immersive and also pretty nifty for daily multi-tasking. Indeed, the 27-inch 1440p segment even brings the vibrant colours and infinite contrast of OLED panels into a reasonably affordable window.
The 34-inch 1440p ultrawide segment is a bit trickier, however. The good news is that conventional LCD models can be had for relative peanuts, with prices starting at about £220 or $249 for game-focused, high-refresh models. But those two example both use a VA panel, which usually means inferior pixel response.
IPS models are a little thin on the ground when it comes to 34-inch ultrawide, but sneaking in below £300 / $300 is generally possible. The real bummer is OLED, where going ultrawide invokes a massive premium. The best price I can find on a big-brand 34-inch ultrawide today is $629 for this Asus model in the US and £648 for this MSI option in the UK.
That’s awfully toppy, especially when you consider that you can grab a 49-inch, 5,120×1,440 ultrawide OLED for barely any more money. I do actually quite like those 49-inch ultrawides, but I have to concede the ergonomics are challenging. However, 4K OLEDs in 27-inch and 32-inch formats can also be had for as much as £100 / $100 less than the current cheapest 34-inch 1440p ultrawides, which doesn’t make much sense to me.
Again, with 4K, there’s the challenge of keeping all those pixels updated. If you already have a sufficiently mighty graphics card, though, I a 32-inch 4K OLED can make a fantastic all-round option, and something like this MSI model for £549 would be absolutely lovely. You get good pixel density and lots of space for daily desktopping, plus OLED visuals and a large enough panel to be really get you into your games.
It’s just a pity that 34-inch OLED ultrawides remain so weirdly expensive, it being a format that ticks so many different boxes. As for my own personal money-no-object pick, well, I’m typing these words on the new Alienware AW3926QW, the 39-inch 5K2K beast with a Tandem WOLED panel and RGB subpixels.
One could argue it’s a relative steal at £1,079 or $1,100. I mean, it’s pretty much peak current PC gaming display technology, and it’s about half the price of what Nvidia’s second-tier RTX 5080 graphics card is going for lately. Assuming you can even find one in stock.
At this point, the one major category I haven’t covered is LCD monitors with mini-LED full-array local dimming. Cards on the table, I’m not a huge fan of mini-LED monitors. The detailed reasons for that are, perhaps, the subject for another day. But I’ve reviewed countless models and have yet to see one that didn’t come with pretty serious compromises.
That said, the technology has gotten a lot more accessible in the last 12 to 18 months, to the extent that 27-inch 1440p models start at just over $250. I’ve had that specific model in and came away pretty impressed. It’s very, very punchy, and even factoring in the limitations of mini-LED versus OLED when it comes to lighting control and speed, I cannot deny the temptation.
Just for completeness, one further exception to the general rule of cheap gaming monitors involves ultra-high refresh monitors aimed at serious esports aficionados. I’m talking about panels like this 1,000Hz LG I sampled elsewhere. At £800 / $1,000 for a 25-inch 1080p IPS panel it’s inevitably a niche proposition, and poor value by normal standards.
I think a much better compromise for just about everyone, short of an actual esports pro, is to grab a larger, higher resolution monitor that offers one of those windowed 1080p modes running at about 500Hz or thereabouts. That way you’ve got a nice high-res panel for both work and play, as well as that ultra-low latency mode for when you want to dance around Dust 2 doling out the headshots or whatever.
Incidentally, I realise I’ve gone in a bit hot and heavy with the OLED content here, the implicit assumption being OLED is all that, and notably without addressing the obvious objections like the risk of burn-in. But all that, I hope you’ll be pleased to hear, is very much the subject for my next RPS post on all things OLED.
Until then, all I can say is thank goodness PC monitors provide relative respite from the parlous state of much of the rest of the PC component market. It’s absolutely brutal out there if you’re building a gaming PC, but at least you’ll get a lot of screen for your money.
Just to round things out, if anyone has any specific queries at any given price point, form factor or panel type, shout out below and I’ll try to steer you in the direction of a decent model.
