Gigabyte MO27Q28G  Monitor Review

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has a slightly subdued gamer design, with a small, thin stand and a futuristic design on the back. There's no RGB lighting so it doesn't stick out in an office setup, but there's a holographic logo on the back.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has excellent build quality. The stand is lightweight, but mostly made of metal, and it feels solid. The housing around the display is made of plastic, but it feels well-made.

This monitor has excellent ergonomics. Its swivel range is a bit limited, but aside from that, you'll have no issues adjusting it to an ideal viewing position. There's a clip on the back of the stand to help with cable management.

The stand is made of thin metal but is solid and supports the monitor well. The monitor doesn't wobble easily, and when it does, it recovers quickly.

Note that the bezel measurement includes 2 mm of extra space on either side that the monitor uses to shift the image with the OLED Screen Move setting.

There's a joystick on the back of the monitor to control the on-screen display and turn the monitor on/off, and two other buttons. It's easy to use, and we didn't encounter any issues like sticky or stiff buttons.

• Power cable (Type B/I/J)
• Power supply
• HDMI cable
• DisplayPort cable
• USB-A/USB-B cable
• Calibration report
• Documentation

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has a near-infinite contrast ratio. This results in deep, inky blacks even when they're right next to bright highlights.

This monitor doesn't have a backlight, so it doesn't require a local dimming feature. However, with a near-infinite contrast ratio, there's no haloing 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.

Settings

• Game Mode: Custom (after calibration)
• Brightness: 100
• APL Stabilize: High

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has great SDR peak brightness. The RGB Tandem OLED panel delivers much higher peaks and brighter full-field scenes than older WOLED panels. It's bright enough to easily overcome glare in most viewing conditions.

The monitor gets the brightest with APL Stabilize set to 'High,' but this setting also results in the greatest variation in brightness with different content. Setting it to a lower setting reduces brightness variation but also limits how bright the monitor gets. At max brightness, the 'High' setting is also the least accurate. You can see the results with the other APL Stabilize settings below:

Settings

• Game Mode: HDR Peak 1500
• Hyper Nits: High
• All OLED care settings disabled

This monitor has good peak brightness in HDR, mainly thanks to its RGB Tandem OLED panel. It makes small highlights pop, and it fights glare well in bright rooms. Like any OLED, though, larger highlights are dimmer.

As of firmware F07, released in February 2026, there's a Hyper Nits setting that boosts brightness in the 'HDR Peak 1500' Picture Mode. It gets brightest with it on 'High,' but it overbrightens the brightest highlights before having a sharp cut-off at its peak brightness. The 'Medium' Hyper Nits setting performs similarly, but is dimmer, while the 'Low' setting results in darker images than intended.

Before firmware update F07, the APL Stabilize setting was available in the 'HDR Peak 1500' mode, but was dimmer than after the update. The APL Stabilize setting is now available in the 'HDR' Picture Mode. It performs similarly to the 'HDR Peak 1500' mode, as you can see below:

The gray uniformity on this monitor is excellent with mid and bright grays. Unfortunately, the gray uniformity is worse with darker grays, as there's vertical banding. While this is common on all OLEDs, it seems to be a more common issue with RGB Tandem panels.

However, we noticed that the banding is a lot more visible at high refresh rates than at lower refresh rates, as you can see below. These photos were taken at 0.2 nits.

• 5% gray, 280Hz
• 5% gray, 60Hz

Uniformity changes over time depending on your usage, but running a pixel cleaning cycle is very effective at cleaning up any uniformity issues that can pop up over time. The images in the review were taken immediately after a refresh cycle, but here are some examples taken before the refresh cycle.

• 50% DSE
• 5% Gray

Our unit also has a noticeable red tint with certain gray levels, but this varies between units, and our LG 27GX700A-B, which uses the same panel, doesn't have this issue.

The black uniformity is perfect as it maintains a uniform black level across the screen.

The accuracy in SDR before calibration is great. There's a dedicated 'sRGB' Picture Mode that mostly locks colors to the sRGB color space, although reds and blues are still slightly oversaturated. The white balance and color accuracy are both slightly off, but it's barely noticeable, and the color temperature is very close to the 6500K target. Gamma tracks the sRGB curve well in the low-end, but most midtones and bright highlights are slightly too dark.

Using the 'sRGB' Picture Mode locks most picture settings, including Color Temperature and Gamma, but brightness is unlocked. You'd have to use another mode with significantly worse accuracy if you want access to those settings.

This monitor has fantastic accuracy after calibration. Gamma, white balance, and color accuracy are all nearly perfect after a full calibration. While the differences aren't noticeable to most users, a full calibration allows you to adjust the settings that are locked under the 'sRGB' Picture Mode.

These results are with APL Stabilize set to 'High'. Other settings impact gamma tracking significantly, so the calibration settings needed vary depending on the setting used.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has a fantastic SDR color gamut. It covers all of the sRGB color space used by most web content. It also covers most of the wider Adobe RGB color space, but it's recommended to switch the Color Space setting to 'Adobe' when working in this space. If you leave it to 'Native', some colors are inaccurate when working in this space.

The HDR color gamut is remarkable. It covers all of the DCI-P3 color space, but it struggles with saturated colors in the Rec. 2020 color space.

The RGB Tandem OLED panel allows for better color purity compared to previous-generation WOLED panels. Looking at its spectral power distribution (SPD) graph compared to the SPD of the LG 27GX790A-B, which uses a third-gen WOLED panel, you can see that the Gigabyte MO27Q28G has much stronger spectral peaks with red and green, with better separation of the color channels.

This monitor has excellent HDR color volume. Even though it uses a new panel structure, it still relies on a white subpixel, so whites are brighter than saturated colors. Saturated colors are more vibrant than they are on older third-generation WOLED panels, but they're not as good as QD-OLED monitors.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has an amazing viewing angle. There's a slight color shift at a very wide angle, but it's barely noticeable.

The text clarity is okay. Most Windows programs don't render text correctly due to the panel's RGWB subpixel layout, so there's fringing around letters, and text looks worse than LCD monitors with the same pixel density. How much this bothers you changes from person to person.

These photos are in Windows 10, and you can also see them in Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

The direct reflection handling is great. The matte coating significantly reduces the appearance of direct reflections, but does so by spreading them out a bit. There's also a glossy variant if you prefer a glossy screen coating.

Ambient light has no significant impact on black levels on this monitor. However, like the LG 27GX700A-B, direct reflections cause a noticeable purple tint in a very bright room.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has great reflection handling overall. It absorbs light well, reducing the intensity of all reflections, but it stretches them a bit, which can be distracting in a very bright room.

Unfortunately, although the Gigabyte MO27Q28G handles gradients well for the most part, there's a noticeable red tint on certain gray levels. Switching to different picture settings has no impact on this, and it's still there after warming up the monitor, running multiple screen cleaning passes, and factory resetting the display.

This issue appears to vary between individual units, with some users reporting very similar results to our own. The LG 27GX700A-B we bought and tested doesn't have this issue, despite using the same panel.

SDR

• Example 1
• Example 2

HDR

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3

This monitor requires Display Stream Compression (DSC) to reach its maximum refresh rate at its native resolution. You can disable DSC if you don't want to use it, but this severely limits the maximum refresh rate over DisplayPort, as only a few officially supported modes are exposed by the monitor's EDID.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G also supports HDMI Forum VRR. There's a bug with this monitor's VRR support, as changing inputs from HDMI to DP can sometimes cause the source to no longer see that the monitor supports VRR. Changing inputs back and forth repeatedly eventually gets it to handshake again and for VRR to work properly, but it can sometimes take up to 10 minutes for it to work.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has superb motion handling across its entire VRR range. Motion is incredibly sharp, with no motion blur at all. There's some blur when gaming at low refresh rates, but this is caused by persistence blur, not motion blur.

The refresh rate compliance is remarkable. Thanks to its near-instantaneous response time, it makes full-color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame at most frame rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 280Hz is incredible. Motion looks incredibly sharp, with no noticeable motion issues like overshoot or inverse ghosting.

Dropping down to a 120Hz refresh rate has no noticeable impact on motion handling. There's some very slight persistence blur, but no motion blur.

The CAD at 60Hz is superb. There's more noticeable persistence blur when gaming at a 60Hz refresh rate, but there's no motion blur.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has an optional black frame insertion feature, which reduces the appearance of persistence blur. The BFI feature is fairly basic, though, as it can only be used at 120Hz and you can only adjust the amplitude control to adjust the brightness. You also have to disable VRR for this feature to work.

Like the vast majority of OLEDs, this monitor has noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates. The flicker is particularly distracting in dark scenes.

There's an Anti-Flicker setting that helps reduce flicker a bit, but not by much. You can only use this feature over DisplayPort, and not HDMI. The 'High' setting performs a bit better than 'Middle,' as you can see below:

• Middle
• High

While not the same as pulse-width modulation (PWM), there's a slight dip in brightness that corresponds to the monitor's refresh rate. There's also an additional dip or jump halfway through the cycle.

This monitor has extremely low input lag, especially at the max refresh rate. It's a bit higher than usual when gaming at 60 or 120Hz, but it's still low enough for most casual gamers. The Low Input Lag setting has no measurable impact on input lag; the results in the review were with it on.

This monitor is fully compatible with all features of the PS5 and PS5 Pro, but it downscales 4k signals to match the monitor's 1440p native resolution.

This monitor supports almost all signals with an Xbox Series X|S, but it doesn't support Dolby Vision. However, it needs to downscale 4k signals to match its 1440p native resolution. This is the only way to get HDR, as the Xbox doesn't support HDR with 1080p and 1440p signals.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has a good selection of inputs. Unlike most recent high-end gaming monitors, though, it lacks DP 2.1 support and its HDMI 2.1 ports are limited to 24Gbps instead of the full 48Gbps bandwidth. This means it relies more on DSC to support high refresh rates over HDMI.

Although it supports USB-C Power Delivery, it doesn't deliver enough power to keep a laptop charged, so you'll need a separate charging cable.

Tested with: M2 MacBook Pro (Sequoia 15.6.1)

This monitor works well with macOS, with no obvious issues. The 'HDR' and 'Peak 1500' Picture Modes deliver the closest image to the MacBook's internal display, but HDR is a bit desaturated in comparison.

Over USB-C, the connected MacBook stays awake even with the lid closed. Putting the MacBook to sleep places the monitor in its idle power state. Over HDMI 2.1, it behaves a bit differently, though. If you close the MacBook's lid while being plugged into power, you can continue working on the monitor. However, if the MacBook isn't plugged into power and you close the lid, the monitor goes to sleep. Apps return to their original positions when reopening the lid or waking the laptop up from sleep.

The Gigabyte MO27Q28G has a few features, including:

• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair that your system's anti-cheat tool won't detect.
• Dashboard: This feature allows you to display vital statistics from your computer, including CPU and GPU temps, fan speeds, memory usage, etc.
• Flash Dimming: This feature suppresses sudden bright flashes of light on the screen.
• KVM: The KVM button at the back of the monitor allows you to quickly switch from controlling one device to another, with just one keyboard and mouse, by connecting them to the back of the monitor instead of your PC.
• Reader Mode: Reduces brightness and blue light to reduce eye strain.
• Resolution Switch: Adjusts the screen display size and resolution that's reported to the source. Note that this isn't a dual mode feature; the maximum refresh rate doesn't increase when you drop down to a lower resolution. It's only meant to solve compatibility issues with certain devices.

It also has a great selection of OLED screen protection settings, which are designed to extend the life of your OLED panel and prevent burn-in:

• Corner Dim: Reduces the brightness at the four corners of the screen.
• Pixel Clean: This small compensation cycle should be run after 4 hours of use to reduce image retention.
• Pixel Shift: This feature moves the screen content around, using a small area of extra space around the screen to reduce image retention.
• Static Control: Reduces screen brightness when the image remains static.
• Sub-Logo Dim: Reduces the brightness of fixed items on the screen like the taskbar or other static logos.