Alienware AW2725QF review: Are two monitors better than one?

Alienware’s new AW2725QF wants to be the only gaming monitor you need. The company says that it’s two monitors in one, allowing you to switch between 4K at 180Hz to 1080p at 360Hz at the press (or rather, two-second hold) of a button. It wants to play both sides of the field, giving you resolution when you want it or refresh rate when you need it.

Despite an impressive IPS panel with good color coverage and shocking brightness, the AW2725QF falls just short of the mark. Unfortunately, that comes down to its marquee feature and the premium that Alienware is charging for it. At $600, it’s hard to justify Alienware’s new display when you can save money by giving up the dual refresh rates or get a much nicer mini-LED display while spending the same amount — heck, even some of the best OLED monitors are getting down to around $600.

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Alienware AW2725QF specs

Design

Alienware has carved out a niche for itself with its gaming monitors, and the AW2725QF carries forward the familiar design we saw on the Alienware 27 QD-OLED. It’s not insanely thin like the crop of 27-inch OLED monitors we’ve seen, but Alienware makes the look come together. The curved plastic back is adorned with an Alienware logo and a “27,” both illuminated in RGB, and the monolithic stand minimizes the size of the display on your desk.

The monitor looks fantastic, but I appreciate how Alienware handles cable management most. A cable routing channel runs up the rear of the stand, with the cables exiting toward the top of the stand. This keeps all of your cable clutter clearly behind the monitor so you don’t see any dangling connections after setting everything up.

Otherwise, Alienware carried forward the headphone stand that we saw on its 500Hz gaming monitor. You can pop it out the side of the display to rest your headphones when you’re done gaming. It’s just a piece of plastic, sure, but a nice addition nonetheless.

For the stand, Alienware offers a solid range of adjustment. You get just over 4 inches of height adjustment, 26 degrees of tilt, 40 degrees of swivel, and 180 degrees of pivot, allowing you to turn the monitor vertically to either side. You can ditch the stand and mount the monitor with the 100 x 100mm VESA mount, but you have a lot of options with the included stand.

Features

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the AW2725QF isn’t packed with features. This is a $600 4K gaming monitor, and although that’s quickly becoming the higher end of non-OLED 4K displays, the unique dual refresh rate feature is what takes center stage here. You can go from 4K at 180Hz to 1080p at 360Hz by holding down the joystick for two seconds, or by selecting your preferred resolution/refresh rate combo in the menu.

This isn’t the first dual refresh rate monitor we’ve seen, though previous versions have used a 32-inch panel. At 27 inches, the AW2725QF is in an interesting position. This is the ideal size for a 1440p monitor, so one end, you have insane pixel density if you’re running in the 4K mode, and at the other, you’re not giving up much sharpness if running the monitor at 1080p.

You don’t get any strange fringing when switching the resolution, either. When going from 4K to 1080p, a square of four pixels essentially turns into one. Both the 1080p and 4K modes look excellent on the AW2725QF, and I really wouldn’t mind using either of them, especially in games.

Outside of the dual refresh rate, you get picture-by-picture and picture-in-picture features, which are common among Alienware monitors, as well as 15W of power through the USB-C connection. This isn’t a display input, however. Because of that, the AW2725QF doesn’t support a KVM switch.

Ports and controls

There aren’t too many surprises when it comes to the port selection on the Alienware AW2725QF. You get two HDMI 2.1 ports and a single DisplayPort 1.4 connection. One of the HDMI 2.1 supports eARC if you’re hooking up a device like a console, as well as Dolby Atmos passthrough. Both ports support 4K a 165Hz or 1080p at 330Hz, which you can overclock to 180Hz or 360Hz, respectively.

In addition, you get a USB hub built into the monitor. Two of the USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports are hidden alongside the display connections, but you get a third just under the bottom lip of the display, too. You also get a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port under the front lip of the monitor, which can deliver up to 15W. It’s important to note that this USB-C connection isn’t a display input, and the Alienware AW2725QF doesn’t include a KVM switch.

I love Alienware’s on-screen display (OSD) and how it cleanly lays out your options while showing the status of some critical features at the top of the screen. Controlling the monitor is simple, too, with a four-way joystick right under the front lip of the monitor. It’s simple to control the monitor this way, though displays like the Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP have moved onto desktop apps that allow you to control the monitor with your keyboard and mouse. Alienware doesn’t have that.

The bigger thing is activating the dual refresh rate feature. Unlike the LG UltraGear Dual Mode OLED, Alienware doesn’t have a dedicated button to switch the resolution and refresh rate on its monitor. Instead of a dedicated button, you can select the mode you want to use through the OSD or hold down the joystick for two seconds. It’s not too much of a pain, though I would prefer a dedicated button.

Image quality

As far as IPS panels go, the AW2725QF is impressive. Alienware doesn’t make any bold claims about brightness or color coverage, and my numbers back up what Alienware laid out. In SDR, I measured a peak brightness of 474 nits with a black level at 0.41 nits. That leaves the contrast ratio at right around 1,100:1, which is where an IPS monitor should fall. You’re not going far beyond that, though. Despite Dolby Vision HDR support, the AW2725QF doesn’t have Full Array Local Dimming (FALD).

For color, the AW2725QF produced 100% of sRGB and 92% of DCI-P3, which is just below the 95% mark that Alienware claims. It also managed 85% of AdobeRGB, which is impressive. Most IPS monitors fall in the range of 75% coverage of AdobeRGB, and although newer OLEDs like MSI MPG 321URX post higher coverage, this monitor is shockingly close.

Color accuracy out of the box wasn’t great, with the AW2725QF posting an average color error of 1.99. It’s acceptable, but you should definitely calibrate the monitor further if you plan on doing any intense color work. Other recent 4K gaming monitors like the HP Omen 27k are able to achieve much better color performance out of the box, so that’s definitely a mark against Alienware here.

Alienware plays up the HDR performance of this display with DisplayHDR 600 certification and Dolby Vision support, but you shouldn’t expect a stunning HDR image. The monitor can get bright enough, no doubt, but contrast is where it struggles. The AW2725QF uses an edge-lit backlight, and I counted 16 vertical dimming zones on the display. There’s no FALD like you find on the Sony InZone M9 or Cooler Master Tempest GP27Q.

Instead, you get some faux HDR enhancements with Dolby Vision. It looks great when you’re rolling an HDR demo, but it can lead to some unexpected results in image quality elsewhere. You can see the odd contrast in the Google logo below as an example.

On the upside, Alienware doesn’t trigger the zones haphazardly. Moving your cursor across a black screen don’t result in an insane bloom, for example. You need something decently large on screen to full trigger the zone to light up, which means less bloom around elements like subtitles when you’re watching a movie.

Gaming

Gaming on the AW2725QF is fantastic regardless of the refresh rate mode you choose, but I rarely found myself switching between them. As mentioned, the size of the monitor plays a big role in how well 4K and 1080p show up on this monitor. Although there’s a pretty clear difference in sharpness between the two modes on the desktop, where fine details like text give away what resolution you’re running at, that difference starts to fade away when you’re playing a game. The 1080p mode looks softer, but it’s less extreme than you might suspect.

I look at it like a form of upscaling. Going from 4K down to 1080p looks similar to what you’ll see with something like AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) turned on, just without the ghosting or artifacts that pop up with upscaling. In Returnal, I had no issue playing in the 1080p mode, and just a minute into a run of the game, I forgot I was running at 1080p at all. There’s a strong argument for a display like this if you can’t run all of your games at 4K. Maybe you have a PC that’s powerful enough for most games to run at 4K, but you have the option to prioritize refresh rate if you bump down the resolution to 1080p in more demanding titles.

The dual mode feature fits that role well, but it doesn’t fit the same role I saw with the LG UltraGear Dual Mode OLED. You’re going between 180Hz and 360Hz here, which is not a super significant jump on an IPS panel. Once you start pushing past 240Hz on anything other than an OLED display, you get diminishing returns with the (relatively) slow pixel response time of IPS compared to OLED.

That’s where I run into issues with the dual mode feature on display here. It’s not the jack-of-all-trades feature that we’ve seen on the dual mode OLEDs. It leaves me feeling like you can get more bang for your buck by choosing a cheaper 4K display with a similar refresh rate like the aforementioned HP Omen 27k or going down to 1440p and getting better HDR with a mini-LED display like the recent Cooler Master displays we’ve seen.

As is the case with the dual-mode OLEDs, you’re definitely paying for the dual refresh rate feature here. At $600, Alienware is coming in above budget 4K gaming displays that hover around $400 to $500, as well as competitive 1080p displays like Alienware’s own 500Hz gaming monitor. The difference is that with a dual mode OLED, you’re getting both a true esports and cinematic display all in one. Here, it feels like you’re getting a watered-down version of each experience.

Should you buy the Alienware AW2725QF?

The AW2725QF brings dual refresh rates down to a more reasonable price, but it brings into question why a dual refresh rate feature needs to exist in the first place. The idea is to use 4K when you want the immersive, cinematic experience and to switch to 1080p when you need to get competitive. There are some gamers who are split down the middle, but for most, you can either save money by choosing one resolution or the other, or you can get much nicer HDR performance while spending the same amount.

Once you consider that you can pick up monitors like the 240Hz LG UltraGear OLED 27 for around the same price as Alienware’s new display, the AW2725QF starts to make less sense. Although it has solid performance for an IPS panel, the premium on the dual refresh rate feature makes it hard to justify for most buyers.