Dell Alienware AW3423DW Monitor Review

The Dell AW3423DW has a very gamer-oriented design with a white and black body, and the slight curve helps bring the edges of the screen more within your field of view. It also has zone lighting on the back with lights around the stand attachment and on the Alienware logo.

The Dell AW3423DW has excellent build quality. It's well-built, and the plastic body feels solid. The stand is heavy and keeps the screen stable, even when you adjust it. Although there's a bit of flex along the top bezel and near the inputs in the back, neither are of major concern. However, the main downside is that the cooling fan is loud enough that you can hear it in a quiet environment, but if you have music playing or your headphones on while gaming, you won't hear it. If it bothers you, you sadly can't turn the fan off.

The Dell AW3423DW has decent ergonomics. It offers all the ergonomic adjustments you would expect from an ultrawide monitor, so it's easy to adjust. There's also a quick release button if you want to remove the display and mount it, and it comes with a bracket to make it easy to attach a wall-mount. Luckily, you can route your cables through the stand for cable management.

The stand supports the Dell Alieware AW3423DW well, and there's minimal wobble. However, the stand is big, so you need a deep table to place it on.

The bezels on the Dell AW3423DW aren't always even throughout, and they shift due to the pixel shift feature.

There's a joystick underneath the center of the screen to control the on-screen menu. Unlike past Alienware monitors, there aren't any physical shortcut buttons; instead, a virtual shortcut menu pops up when you press the center of the joystick, and you can assign those shortcuts to your preference. There's also a power button on the right side.

• DisplayPort cable
• Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power cable
• VESA adapter
• VESA screws
• Cardboard card holder:
• Safety info
• Alienware card
• Calibration report
• User guides

The Dell AW3423DW has a near-infinite contrast ratio thanks to its OLED panel. This means that blacks are deep and inky in a black room. However, in a bright room, the contrast doesn't appear as good because the panel lacks a polarizing layer, raising the black levels and causing a pink tint on black images. See the Reflections section to learn more about it.

The Dell AW3423DW doesn't have a backlight, so it doesn't require a local dimming feature. However, with a near-infinite contrast ratio, there isn't any blooming around bright objects, and it's the equivalent of a perfect local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can see how the screen performs and compare it with a monitor that has local dimming.

The Dell AW3423DW has alright SDR peak brightness. It doesn't get bright enough to fight a ton of glare, but it isn't an issue if you have some lights around, either. Luckily, it maintains the brightness consistent across different scenes, which is uncommon for an OLED to do as OLEDs usually get dimmer with larger areas. These results are from the 'Custom Color' Preset Mode with the Brightness at its max after calibration.

The Dell AW3423DW has decent HDR brightness. It gets bright enough to make really small highlights pop, but the brightness doesn't remain consistent with larger-sized highlights due to the Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL). The brightness visibly changes when minimizing and maximizing windows on the desktop, and it's so obvious that it looks like the screen is adjusting its brightness setting. However, this issue is only distracting in the desktop, and it's not a problem with videos or games.

Although the real scene brightness is closer to the 10% brightness, small highlights still get bright in real content. It also displays most highlights at their correct brightness until the sharp roll-off at the peak brightness, resulting in a loss of fine details with really bright highlights. However, the EOTF changes depending on the window size, as it's a slower roll-off with smaller highlights. The test is with an 18% window, and you can see the different EOTFs for various window sizes below:

• 2% EOTF
• 5% EOTF
• 10% EOTF
• 100% EOTF

The results are from the 'HDR Peak 1000' HDR Mode, but if the strong ABL bothers you, use the 'HDR 400 True Black' mode, which has less variation in brightness and a smoother roll-off at the max brightness, but small highlights aren't as bright:

• Peak 2% Window: 471 cd/m²
• Peak 10% Window: 467 cd/m²
• Peak 25% Window:404 cd/m²
• Peak 50% Window: 345 cd/m²
• Peak 100% Window: 292 cd/m²
• Sustained 2% Window: 466 cd/m²
• Sustained 10% Window: 463 cd/m²
• Sustained 25% Window: 401 cd/m²
• Sustained 50% Window: 340 cd/m²
• Sustained 100% Window: 289 cd/m²
• EOTF

The Dell Alienware AW3423DW has a remarkable horizontal viewing angle. Although it's technically not perfect, you won't notice any inaccuracies when viewing from the sides.

The Dell AW3423DW has an outstanding vertical viewing angle. The image looks the same if you're standing up and looking down at the screen.

The Dell AW3423DW has excellent overall gray uniformity. There's hardly any dirty screen effect in the center, and large areas of uniform colors in games or full-screen webpages look great. Like any OLED, it has thin vertical lines in near-dark scenes, as well as some Venetian Blind Effect with darker grays, but both issues aren't that noticeable with most content. You can also see the uniformity with darker shades of gray below:

• 5% gray
• 10% gray
• 15% gray
• 20% gray
• 25% gray
• 30% gray

As the Dell AW3423DW has an OLED panel, there's no blooming around bright objects, and it has perfect black uniformity.

The Dell AW3423DW comes factory calibrated and has remarkable out-of-the-box accuracy. The 'sRGB' Preset Mode results in extremely accurate colors and white balance, and the color temperature is close to the 6500K target. However, gamma doesn't follow the target curve very well as most scenes are too dark. The 'sRGB' mode only locks you out of the RGB controls, and other modes are less accurate.

The Dell AW3423DW has incredible accuracy after calibration, though calibrating it doesn't do much. The white balance and color temperature both improved, and while gamma is better, it's still not perfect.

The Dell AW3423DW has a fantastic SDR color gamut. It has perfect coverage of the sRGB color space, and while it has incredible coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, red and greens are inaccurate in this color space, but not in the common sRGB color space. This isn't ideal if you're a photo editor and need to use those colors.

The Dell AW3423DW has remarkable SDR color volume. It displays colors as bright as pure white, and thanks to the near-infinite contrast, it displays colors as dark as pure black.

Thanks to the quantum dot layer, the Dell AW3423DW has a remarkable HDR color gamut. It has near-perfect coverage of the commonly-used DCI-P3 color space with good tone mapping, and it has good Rec. 2020 coverage. This makes it future-proof as more content will start to use that color space.

The Dell AW3423DW has outstanding HDR color volume. It displays colors at a wide range of luminance levels, making them look vivid and pop.

One of the main goals of QD-OLED displays is to display brighter colors compared to W-OLED monitors or TVs. The QD-OLED Samsung S95B gets much brighter with most colors than regular OLEDs like the LG G2. This results in much better color volume on the Dell Alienware AW3423DW than on comparable W-OLED displays, like the LG 42 C2 OLED, Sony 42 A90K OLED, or the LG 48GQ900-B.

In theory, the Dell AW3423DW has incredible reflection handling. It handles dim light sources well, and unlike other glossy screens, there aren't any distracting reflections from strong light sources. However, bright light sources distort the reflections, as you can see in the bottom photo, and bright light sources affect the monitor's performance. The OLED panel doesn't have a polarizing layer, resulting in blacks having a pink tint when you have the display in a bright room. It also raises the black levels, effectively removing the near-infinite contrast OLEDs have, and if that bothers you, check out the LG 42 C2 OLED.

Even in regular content, you can see the pink tint on the screen in bright rooms, which is distracting. Because the screen is big, you can see other reflection photos that aren't cropped, but the screen is slightly tilted to show the reflections better:

• Average Room - Screen On
• Average Room - Screen Off
• Bright Room - Screen On
• Bright Room - Screen Off

You can see what it looks like next to the LG 48 C1 OLED (left) and the ViewSonic XG2431 (right) here and you can tell that the Dell Alienware AW3423DW has a purple screen even when it's off. Below are photos of the AW3423DW (left) and the XG2431 (right) displaying black images in bright and dark rooms:

• Bright Room 1
• Bright Room 2
• Dark Room

For comparison, we also measured the black level in a bright room on the AW3423DW as 2.83 nits. The black level on the IPS panel of the Dell S2721QS is 2.31 nits, which means that the black level is actually look worse on the Dell AW3423DW than on other IPS monitors in bright rooms. Both of these monitors were measured in the same bright room with the screen on. All in all, the monitor performs best in dark rooms and the picture quality is worse in bright rooms.

Overall, the Dell AW3423DW has decent text clarity. It uses a unique triangular RGB subpixel structure different from most displays with the three subpixels in a line. Because of this, text clarity isn't as good as on other ultrawide displays. Windows ClearType (top photo) doesn't improve the text clarity much. You can see two other examples with the camera zoomed out with ClearType on and ClearType off. While this subpixel structure isn't ideal, it's not a serious issue, either, and text is clear and easy to read for the most part. The free utility Better ClearType Tuner improves text clarity significantly, and the subpixel structure isn't noticeable with Font Antialiasing set to 'RGB' and Contrast set between 1800-2200, as shown here, but make sure you have access to run the program as an administrator for it to work.

However, due to the subpixel structure, there's slight color fringing on the edge of windows. If you have multiple windows open, you can see a thin green line at the top of every window and a thin red line at the bottom, but it's not very noticeable. Below you can see pixel photos from different configurations:

• White on black background - green color fringing on top
• White on black background - red color fringing on bottom
• White on black background - no color fringing on side
• White on black background - no color fringing on side
• Blue pixels
• Green pixels
• Red pixels
• Blue and red pixels
• Green and red pixels
• Green and blue pixels
• Green and blue pixels - fringing on bottom
• Green and blue pixels - fringing on top
• Blue and red pixels - no fringing
• Blue and red pixels - no fringing
• Green and red pixels - fringing on top
• Green and red pixels - fringing on bottom

The color fringing is also visible with larger text elements, like on the Google home page logo, as you can see here, which is pretty distracting.

The Dell AW3423DW has incredible gradient handling, and you won't see any banding.

The Dell AW3423DW has a high max refresh rate, but due to bandwidth limitations, you can only achieve that refresh rate with a DisplayPort connection and an 8-bit signal. You can achieve a 10-bit signal over DisplayPort or HDMI, but it lowers the refresh rate.

The Dell AW3423DW natively supports G-SYNC VRR, and even if AMD doesn't certify it, FreeSync works over its entire refresh rate range over a DisplayPort connection. Over HDMI, the max refresh rate is 100Hz, and both G-SYNC and FreeSync work.

The Dell AW3423DW has a near-instantaneous response time that results in almost no motion blur at its max refresh rate. There's a bit of overshoot when going from pure black to any shade, but other than that, motion looks exceptional. Unlike LED-backlit monitors, there's no option to adjust the pixel overdrive.

The Dell AW3423DW also has a near-instantaneous response time at 120Hz. However, due to the sample and hold method that OLEDs use, there's still some persistence blur.

The Dell AW3423DW has an incredible response time at 60Hz. There's a bit more overshoot with darker transitions that at higher refresh rates, but motion still looks smooth.

The Dell AW3423DW doesn't have a black frame insertion feature to reduce persistence blur. It can benefit from having a BFI feature because the sample-and-hold method of OLEDs causes persistence blur with fast-moving objects. However, motion looks smooth, especially at the max refresh rate, so you don't need a BFI feature.

The Dell AW3423DW isn't technically flicker-free because there's a small dip in brightness that corresponds with the 175Hz refresh rate. The dip represents when the screen refreshes itself, but it isn't noticeable because it's just an oscillation in brightness, and it isn't a full-screen on and off pattern like the flicker like on LED-backlit displays.

The Dell AW3423DW has low input lag with high-frame-rate signals, but it increases a bit with lower-frame-rate content. It's still low enough that you won't notice any delay, but it isn't ideal for competitive gaming.

The Dell AW3423DW has decent compatibility with the PS5. It works with 1080p games, but it doesn't downscale 4k content. HDR works with 1080p @ 60Hz signals but not with 120Hz signals. The PS5 doesn't support ultrawide signals; you'll see an image with black bars on the sides. The display automatically adjusts to the aspect ratio, and you don't need to change anything.

The Dell AW3423DW has disappointing compatibility with the Xbox Series X. 1080p and 1440p signals work without issue, but HDR doesn't work at all on it. Like the PS5, the Xbox doesn't support ultrawide gaming, and you'll see black bars on the sides. If you need better compatibility with the Xbox Series X|S, check out the Samsung Odyssey OLED G8/G85SB S34BG85.

The power input is on the back left side of the Dell Alienware AW3423DW, next to the service port.

The Dell AW3423DW has two audio outputs. You can use the one on the left for your earphones as the one on the back is designed for speakers with their own volume control. You can still plug headphones into the back port, but you can't change the volume unless they have their own volume control.

You need to connect the USB-B to USB-A cable to your PC if you want to use the USB-A ports to plug in your peripherals like your mouse and keyboard. It doesn't have any USB-C ports, but if you want something with USB-C, look into the MSI MEG 342C QD-OLED.

The Dell AW3423DW works well with recent MacBooks. VRR works on the desktop and in games. Unfortunately, due to the aggressive ABL, HDR doesn't look good during desktop usage as large areas are noticeably dimmer, so it's better to stick with SDR on the desktop. However, HDR looks amazing in games.

The same text clarity issues are present as on Windows PCs due to the unique subpixel layout, and you can see two additional text clarity photos on macOS here and here.

The Alienware Command Center software isn't available on macOS, so you can't access certain features like the color profiles.

The Dell AW3423DW has a few extra features, including:

• Alienware Command Center: Application to control the RGB backlighting and other basic functions like power consumption and color profiles. This software is only available on Windows, but you can still change the backlighting colors through the OSD if you have a macOS device.
• Ambient Light Sensor: Adjusts the screen's brightness according to your room's lighting.
• Dark Stabilizer Changes gamma in games so that you can see your opponents easier in darker areas.
• Display Alignment Displays a virtual grid that makes it easier to line up your screen next to another display.
• Eco Mode: Puts the monitor into standby mode when your PC is off.
• FPS Counter: Shows the current FPS of your source.
• OLED Panel Maintenance: Has features to reduce the risk of burn-in associated with OLEDs, which you can read about below. Dell also offers a 3-year burn-in warranty.
  • Pixel Refresh: The monitor runs a pixel shift cycle after every 4 hours of usage, or if you disable it, after 20 hours of usage. It takes about 7 minutes to complete.
  • Panel Refresh: This is a more complicated process that refreshes the whole panel and takes about an hour to do, but it only runs after 1500 hours of usage.
• Timer: Displays a timer on the screen.