LG 27GN950-B Monitor Review

The LG 27GN950 looks like most other monitors in LG's UltraGear lineup, such as the LG 34GN850-B, except it doesn't have a curved screen. It's mainly black with red accents throughout, and the RGB ring on the back adds to its gamer-oriented design. It's fairly well-built, and its stand offers cable management, but it has disappointing ergonomics.

The LG 27GN950 has a decent build quality, similar to most of LG's UltraGear models. It's entirely made out of plastic, but there aren't any obvious issues to its build. If you want a similar monitor with a sturdier build, check out the Dell Alienware AW2721D.

The LG 27GN950 has decent ergonomics. It doesn't offer any swivel range, but you can rotate it into portrait mode. You can also rotate it an extra 5 degrees counterclockwise when in landscape mode, and 2 degrees clockwise when in portrait mode, allowing for more precise placement of the screen.

The back has a gamer-oriented look with red accents. There's an RGB ring near the vents, and there's cable management through the hook in the stand. There's also a quick-release button for when you need to remove the screen from the stand.

There's a wide V-shaped stand that holds the monitor well, and there's enough room to place stuff in front.

There are a joystick and a dial underneath the center of the monitor to control the on-screen menu.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B cable
• Power cable and brick
• Mouse cable management clip
• User manual and driver

The LG 27GN950 has a mediocre contrast ratio and blacks appear gray when viewed in the dark, which is typical of IPS monitors. It's slightly higher than the advertised 1000:1 contrast, but this may vary between units. Sadly, the local dimming feature doesn't really improve the contrast by much, if at all.

Update 02/9/2022: The local dimming video was mistakenly filmed with HDR enabled. It has been reshot in SDR for consistency with our other reviews.

Like most monitors, the LG 27GN950 has an edge-lit local dimming feature, and it performs terribly. There are a limited number of dimming zones, so even though transitions between zones are quick, it's quite noticeable. Most zones turn on when there's a bright object in a dark scene, resulting in blooming and bad uniformity. The local dimming feature raises the black level and doesn't improve picture quality in dark scenes. It's more aggressive in HDR than SDR with our test pattern, but it doesn't seem to do much in real scenes unless it's a dark scene, at which point its bad uniformity and blooming become distracting.

The LG 27GN950 has impressive SDR peak brightness. It easily gets bright enough to combat glare and it's very consistent across varied content. We measured peak brightness after calibration in the 'Gamer 1' Picture Mode with Color set to 'Custom.'

The HDR peak brightness is decent. It gets bright enough to make small highlights pop and it meets its DisplayHDR 600 certification. However, it quickly loses brightness the longer an image stays on the screen, as seen in the difference between the Peak and Sustained windows. Also, it's not as consistent between different content as it is with SDR content, but this shouldn't be noticeable for most people.

The LG 27GN950 has a good wide horizontal viewing angle, which is expected from an IPS panel. The image remains accurate when viewing from the side, which is great for sharing your screen with others.

The vertical viewing angle is great, which is once again expected from an IPS panel. The image remains accurate if you mount it above eye-level.

The LG 27GN950's gray uniformity is excellent. The edges of the screen are a bit darker, but there's no dirty screen effect in the center. Uniformity is much better in near-dark scenes. Note that gray uniformity may vary between units.

The LG 27GN950 has terrible black uniformity, but this may vary between units. There's severe backlight bleed in the corners, clouding throughout, and the entire screen looks blueish/gray. The uniformity is actually worse with local dimming enabled as the edges are visibly darker.

The out-of-the-box accuracy is very good. There are only slight inaccuracies with most colors that most people shouldn't notice, except some yellows and greens are more inaccurate. The sRGB mode locks the colors to the sRGB color space well, but some colors are slightly over-saturated. The sRGB mode also locks many picture settings, and if you use another mode, colors are oversaturated. The color temperature is only slightly warmer than our 6500K target. However, gamma doesn't follow the sRGB target curve all that well, and most scenes are darker than they should be.

The LG 27GN950's accuracy after calibration is incredible. Any remaining inaccuracies can't be spotted by the naked eye and gamma follows the target curve a lot better. The color temperature is slightly cooler from before calibration, but it's closer to the target.

The SDR color gamut is incredible. It has perfect coverage of the sRGB color space used in most web content and excellent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in photo editing.

The LG 27GN950 has exceptional color volume. It displays bright colors well thanks to its high peak brightness, but it struggles with dark colors due to the low contrast ratio.

The LG 27GN950 has amazing HDR color gamut. It's considered a wide color gamut and has fantastic coverage of the DCI P3 color space used in most HDR content. However, its coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space is more limiting.

The HDR color volume is decent. Its wide color gamut helps it display a range of colors at different luminance levels, but it can't display dark, saturated colors well.

The LG 27GN950 has disappointing reflection handling, and it's much worse than the lower-end LG 27GN750-B. The reflections may become too distracting even in moderately-lit rooms, but thankfully, it gets bright enough to combat glare. If you want a similar monitor with better reflection handling, check out the ASUS ROG Strix XG27UQ.

Thanks to the high 4k resolution, the LG 27GN950-B has outstanding text clarity. Enabling ClearType (top photo) makes text even easier to read.

The LG 27GN950-B has fantastic gradient handling. There are almost no visible signs of banding within shades.

Note: We ran this test with a 1080p resolution instead of 4k. Our software kept crashing with a 10-bit, 4k resolution, so we had to lower the resolution to 1080p, but it didn't affect the gradient handling score.

The Adaptive Sync feature needs to be enabled for the overclock feature to work. Due to bandwidth limitations, the refresh rate over HDMI is limited with a 4k signals.

Update 02/26/2021: We retested the refresh rate with the latest firmware. There's now an overclock option in the OSD settings that allows the refresh rate to go up to 160Hz. Enabling it locks Adaptive Sync to 'On'. 160Hz is only achievable at 4k; 1080p and 1440p are still locked at 144Hz, even with overclocking enabled.

Unfortunately, setting the refresh rate to 160Hz impacts VRR performance. Enabling G-SYNC in the NVIDIA Control Panel at 160Hz causes a black screen, and you need to force quit the application or game to get the image back. Additionally, there seems to be some form of V-SYNC active after getting the image back, so even if G-SYNC is disabled, there's no tearing in-game when there should be. The only way to fix it is to reboot the system. To get G-SYNC working again, you need to disable the overclock. We're leaving the maximum VRR range at 144Hz since it doesn't work properly at 160Hz.

The LG 27UN950-B has an incredible response time at its max refresh rate of 160Hz. Motion looks exceptionally clear and there's hardly any blur with fast-moving objects. We recommend using the 'Fast' overdrive setting as it has a lot less overshoot than the 'Faster' setting. There's still some overshoot in lighter transitions, and if that bothers you, setting it to 'Normal' results in a slightly slower response time, but no overshoot.

The response time at 120Hz remains equally quick with smooth motion. Like at its max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive setting is 'Fast' because there's a lot less overshoot than 'Faster'.

The LG 27GN950-B has an impressive response time at 60Hz, and once again, motions looks extremely clear. Unlike at its max refresh rate, we recommend using the 'Normal' overdrive setting as there's too much overshoot in the 'Fast' and 'Faster' settings, so you may have to change the setting if the frame rate of your game drops.

Unfortunately, there's no optional Black Frame Insertion feature.

The LG 27GN950 has a flicker-free backlight, which helps reduce eye strain.

The LG 27GN950-B has low input lag for a responsive feel. While the input lag with the overclocked 160Hz was initially high when the firmware first came out, make sure your monitor is updated to the latest firmware to get the lowest input lag possible.

The LG 27GN950 has an outstanding resolution and size. The 4k screen delivers crisp images and there's enough space to open multiple windows at once. If you don't need a 4k resolution and prefer a 1440p option, check out the LG 27GN850-B/27GN880-B.

While we don't specifically test for it, many users have reported that the monitor sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep mode, requiring users to unplug and plug it back in to solve the issue. Also, when waking the monitor up in a dual setup, opened windows shift to the second screen.

As the LG 27GN950-B doesn't feature HDMI 2.1 bandwidth like the LG 27GP950-B, you can't use it to play 4k @ 120Hz games. You're limited to 60Hz, and if you want a higher refresh rate, you'll have to lower the resolution.

Like with the PS5, you can't use this monitor for 4k @ 120Hz gaming from the Xbox Series X, but everything else works without issue.

Since the LG 27GN950 supports HDMI 2.0 and not HDMI 2.1, you can only achieve 4k @ 60Hz over an HDMI connection. You can achieve 4k @ 160Hz over a DisplayPort connection if your graphics card has support for VESA Display Stream Compression (DSC). If you want a monitor with HDMI 2.1 support, then check out the Acer Nitro XV282K KVbmiipruzx or the newer LG 27GP950-B.

The LG 27GN950 works well with recent M1 MacBooks. The overclock feature doesn't work, so you're limited to a 144Hz refresh rate, and it doesn't support Low Framerate Compensation for signals below 48Hz. However, everything works fine, and windows return to their position when waking up from sleep, but not when you close the lid, which is a common problem when using USB-C to DisplayPort adapters.

The LG 27GN950-B has a few extra features including DisplayPort 1.4 Display Stream Compression support. There's RGB illumination on the back, but the LG UltraGear Control Center doesn't appear to work on this monitor, so we weren't able to customize the RGB settings. If you have this monitor and it works, let us know. You can also add a virtual crosshair on the screen for FPS games.