We review this beastly monitor!

We’re going to be perfectly blunt: chances are that your PC at home won’t be able to take advantage of the ROG Swift PG27UQ’s full feature set. Even if you could, there’s an even bigger chance that you probably wouldn’t cough up the Php 142,990 that ASUS Philippines is asking for one.

But if you’re one of the lucky few that has a desktop PC beefy enough to take full advantage of what the ROG Swift PG27UQ has to offer and has pockets deep enough to afford it, you’ll probably appreciate probably THE best non-professional, 4K gaming displays around.

What is it?

The ASUS ROG Swift PG27UQ is the pinnacle of gaming monitors. This 27-inch display has plenty of features that gamers look for, along with a slew of other add-on features that makes it pretty much future proof and should last you several PC builds before you’ll have to replace it.

It definitely looks like a gaming monitor.

That it does. ASUS’ ROG brand follows a certain gamer aesthetic that’s unmistakable, which basically means lots of angular, aggressive lines, vaguely Mayan design cues and of course, wholly unnecessary LED lighting.

In the ROG Swift PG27UQ’s case, there are two sources: one on the bottom that projects the ROG logo downward, and another on the top of the stand that projects it towards the wall opposite the monitor.

Think of it as a bat signal but instead of a bat projected onto the clouds, you get ASUS’ eye logo that’ll terrify anyone that walks into your room at night the first time they see it.

Despite its gaudy appearance, the ROG Swift PG27UQ does offer a few nice, ergonomic features that we really appreciate.

It has height adjustments up to 120mm, can tilt -5°/20°, can swivel 35° in either direction and can pivot up to 90°. That pretty much means you can position the ROG Swift PG27UQ however you want without any issues.

For such a chunky monitor, input is limited to a single DisplayPort, a single HDMI port, 3.5mm jack, and two USB 3.0 ports.

It’s also the only monitor we’ve tested so far that requires an active cooling fan. We’ll be coming back to this later.

Alright, what makes it so special?

The ROG Swift PG27UQ can display content up to 4K resolution, has a 144Hz refresh rate, NVIDIA G-Sync and HDR capabilities (VESA DisplayHDR), along with a 4ms response time.

The monitor is also factory-calibrated to Delta E ? 3 and covers 97% of the DCI-P3 color space and 99% of the Adobe RGB, which means it can also be used by professionals that require a color-accurate monitor.

Why would I need an HDR-capable monitor?

There’s a lot of reasons, chief of which being better color output and truer image reproduction. That’s important when it comes to gaming, as you essentially get brighter, more true-to-life images along with higher contrast, more vibrant colors and more vivid details compared to a regular monitor without it.

There’s a catch though – games need to support HDR for it to display properly on the monitor, and sadly not a lot of games do right now. So keep that in mind if HDR support is one of the things you’re looking at with the ROG Swift PG27UQ.

Enough talk, how does it perform?

Extremely well, considering the price that you pay for this monster. Thanks to the HDR capabilities of the ROG Swift PG27UQ, you can expect a contrast ratio of 50:000:1 along with a peak luminance of 1,000 nits for HDR content.

The monitor has full-array local dimming with 384 zones, which essentially allows it to dim more parts of the display for dark scenes in games. This, in a nutshell, improves overall dynamic range that other, non-HDR-capable monitors simply cannot match.

When playing games that have HDR support like Far Cry 5 for example, the monitor’s capability to render extremely bright areas along with dark scenes convincingly without either element getting blown out is an experience in of itself.

There is a catch though, and it relates to DisplayPort 1.4’s limitations rather than the fault of the hardware on ROG Swift PG27UQ. Simply put, there’s barely enough bandwidth in DisplayPort 1.4 to run the display at 3840 x 2160 resolution, with a refresh rate of 120Hz with 8bpc. Running a display at 3840 x 2160 with a refresh rate of 144Hz and 10bpc simply isn’t possible, as there’s only really enough bandwidth to run it at 98Hz, at least without some kind of software solution.

That comes in the form of Chroma subsampling, which basically reduces the amount of chroma or color data in an image. This link simplifies the technique that’s easy to understand.

In Chroma subsampling, 4:4:4 has the full-color information equivalent to RGB and has the best quality, 4:2:2 is half chroma and 4:2:0 is quarter chroma.

Going back to the ROG Swift PG27UQ, it can run 144Hz at 4K with 4:2:2 chroma subsampling with an 8-bit color depth while overclocked, 120Hz at 4K with 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, up to 120Hz at 4K with HDR and 4:2:2 chroma subsampling and up to 98Hz at 4K with HDR and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling.

That basically means you’ll have to sacrifice a bit of refresh rate to get the best image possible. Right now that’s not really an issue, as even our test machine pimped out with an FE GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is barely cruising above 60 FPS in 4K with most games, but it’s a consideration for people who are looking at the ROG Swift PG27UQ as a long-term investment.

All of those features, along with NVIDIA’s G-Sync HDR capabilities means that the ROG Swift PG27UQ sucks down quite a bit of power, and produces a bit of fan noise. Remember that active cooling module on the back? It’s quite audible especially in a quiet room, so you’ll have to contend with that if you like silent builds.

Should you buy it?

At its core, the ROG Swift PG27UQ is one of the best 4K monitors available today. There’s not many 4K, 144Hz capable monitors in the market today, and there are even fewer G-Sync HDR equipped ones floating around the local marketplace.

Priced at Php 142,990, it certainly is pricey, but for many people already considering it in their next rig can certainly count on it being future-proof, and will serve as the centerpiece of their builds for years to come if they decide to splurge.