Alienware AW5520QF 55-Inch OLED Gaming Monitor Review
Our Verdict
The Alienware AW5520QF 55-inch OLED straddles the line between high-stop gaming monitor and premium Tv to bring superb PC gaming performance to the living room. Just even with fantastic performance and securely thoughtful design, it'south a niche product that's way more expensive than the value it delivers.
For
- Cute, polished design
- Superb OLED panel
- DisplayPort and multiple USB 3.0 ports
Confronting
- Crazy expensive
- Complicated to enable features like HDR
Tom's Guide Verdict
The Alienware AW5520QF 55-inch OLED straddles the line betwixt loftier-end gaming monitor and premium TV to bring superb PC gaming performance to the living room. But fifty-fifty with fantastic performance and deeply thoughtful design, it'due south a niche product that'southward way more expensive than the value it delivers.
Pros
- +
Beautiful, polished pattern
- +
Superb OLED console
- +
DisplayPort and multiple USB 3.0 ports
Cons
- -
Crazy expensive
- -
Complicated to enable features like HDR
The Alienware proper name has had a prominent place in the gaming world seemingly forever, but the visitor's latest innovation feels big. That'southward largely because it's physically huge. The Alienware AW5520QF 55-inch OLED is a beautiful behemoth of a gaming monitor, a behemothic OLED display that dwarfs the TVs in many living rooms and offers a cornucopia of specs and features tailored to gamers. A quick rundown of the highlights should be enough to inspire gadget animalism in any game enthusiast, from the gorgeous OLED console to the 120-Hz refresh rate, built-in FreeSync back up and Alienware'due south customizable RGB lighting.
Only hither's a number to give you break: $3,999. Aye, Alienware's new gaming monitor is selling for 4 yard, making it several times more than expensive than fifty-fifty pricey, curved ultrawide-screen monitors and even most premium 4K TVs. Information technology all circles back to one key question: Does Alienware really have one of the all-time gaming monitors (and ane of the all-time monitors in general) for the living room, or is this a slick repackaging of old technologies, hoping to score points with the Alienware proper name?
What makes information technology a monitor and not a Tv set?
Staring at the 55-inch AW5520QF OLED display, it'southward like shooting fish in a barrel to think to yourself, "This is just a Idiot box with an Alienware logo on information technology. Why is it so expensive?"
But, dear reader, you're only one-half right. While the 55-inch brandish is certainly Telly-like in its dimensions, and the size of the thing lends itself more than to gaming on the couch than at a traditional desk-bound gaming rig, the TV comparisons only go so far.
For starters, this ain't a TV. With no connection for an over-the-air antenna and no digital tuner for receiving whatsoever antenna point anyhow, the Alienware is, past definition, non a Television receiver. Even the standard "sold as TVs without a tuner" models from major TV manufacturers are technically required to call themselves "home theater displays" instead of televisions or TVs, because they aren't equipped for an over-the-air signal. Is information technology a nitpicky style to ascertain what is and isn't a Boob tube? Yup. Just it'southward besides the industry standard.
On the other hand, as a gaming monitor, the AW5520QF offers some features and capabilities that you won't find on any TV, even the best 4K gaming TVs. Main among those is a DisplayPort, which is the superior connectivity standard over HDMI two.0, and the main output for whatever graphics card worth its salt. And as for the ports offered on the AW5520QF, only the DisplayPort is poised to handle full 4K resolution at 120 Hz; the HDMI ports can offer 4K resolution or 120-Hz refresh rates, only non both at the same fourth dimension. DisplayPorts are likewise extremely rare on TVs — we oasis't seen a TV in 2019 to offer a single DisplayPort, with manufacturers opting exclusively for HDMI.
What about HDMI 2.1?
But this is where things kickoff to become tricky, because HDMI 2.1 has arrived on the scene, showing up on 4K TVs from both LG and Samsung. This new standard has much higher bandwidth, allowing for 4K at 120 Hz, and, fifty-fifty meliorate, offering variable refresh rate (VRR) back up, for an experience very similar to AMD'southward FreeSync.
To top it all off, the HDMI 2.1 spec isn't currently supported by whatsoever gaming GPUs, so even on those TVs that take 2.ane support, you'll still want to be able to game over DisplayPort rather than HDMI — well, for the moment, anyway.
To complicate things even more than, Nvidia has but certified the LG E9 and C9 OLED TVs as the beginning Nvidia Grand-Sync TVs, as role of a new certification program from Nvidia that offers frame-rate syncing without the demand for proprietary Nvidia hardware inside the TV. This comes dorsum to VRR back up, merely Nvidia also adds a number of stringent requirements that dictate response times, format back up and more to ensure that the Chiliad-Sync proper noun but gets applied to top-of-the-line TVs. Correct at present, that'due south offered merely on LG OLEDs.
Design
The key feature of the Alienware AW5520QF is the size. While it'south being billed as a gaming monitor, it measures 55 inches diagonally from corner to corner, putting it in the same class as many of the 4K TVs we review on Tom's Guide. The entire monitor measures thirty.iii x 48.3 10 iii.2 inches and weighs 90 pounds, putting it firmly in the same weight course as TVs.
The included stand has a boomerang-shaped base of operations and affixes to the dorsum of the brandish with an fastened mounting plate. If the TV-like dimensions of the AW5520QF leave yous wanting to wall mountain the OLED monitor, you tin remove the stand up and back panel and hang it on the wall with a 400 x 400-millimeter VESA mount.
The back of the AW5520QF combines that same white-gray coloring with a blackness panel that covers the back side of the slim OLED brandish. The rear panel is etched with the number 55 but is otherwise blank. The near-white rear panel covers the back of the monitor with a seamless surface, but remove information technology and yous'll find recessed connectors for power, HDMI and USB, along with channels for running cables without the usual tangled mess.
Removing the panel is uncommonly easy, thank you to a series of magnetic clasps that guide the plastic cover into place and snap it into proper position. It's an incredibly polished pattern chemical element that left me wishing that something similar were used on other monitors and TVs.
And in truthful Alienware fashion, the AW5520QF OLED gets some gamer-oriented eye processed, like RGB lighting on the back side of the set, and the cabinet is dressed up to match the aesthetics of the new "Legend design" seen on the Alienware Aurora desktop. The stripe of neon-similar RGB lighting and the glowing Alienware logo can both be tweaked to you liking, whether it's a specific shade of pink or green, or a pulsing blueprint that cycles through every color of the rainbow.
Ports and interface
One area where the AW5520QF OLED is more monitor than Telly is in the collection of ports. Similar a Boob tube, yous'll go three HDMI ii.0 ports, but unlike whatsoever Tv nosotros've seen in the last twelvemonth, information technology also comes equipped with a single DisplayPort i.4. Aside from these video inputs, the fix offers iv USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack and SPDIF audio output for connecting to surround-sound speakers.
These connections are divvied up between a rear set of ports in the back (secreted away backside the removable back panel) and a side-mounted cluster that offers one HDMI connection and ii USB 3.0 ports. This keeps things adequately accessible while all the same taming the snarl of cables that often accumulates between and behind a gaming desktop and monitor.
Gaming performance
A screen this big is but begging to be hooked up to a PC for hours of gaming. So we did. We started with Far Cry: New Dawn and ran the mission to free Timber, our fluffy Akita, from becoming literal canis familiaris nutrient. As we made our way to the compound, we chop-chop gained an audience who were pretty generous with the oohs and ahhs for the game's vibrant landscape, specifically the pink verbena flowers against the verdant properties. When I finally freed Timber, we could see the private hairs in her red-orange fur. And when she attacked a nearby enemy, she was fiercely flooffy.
It's easy to expect good in a bright setting, just the dark is another story. And nosotros're glad to report that we're not afraid of the night — and neither is the Alienware. Exploring the depths of an ancient crypt in Witcher iii was fun with the right amount of creepy. Even though we were making our way through a darkened crypt, at that place was a clear difference in blacks, marking a clear depiction between nighttime, gloomy and pitch blackness. Merely fifty-fifty at the screen's darkest, I could still make out infinitesimal details, similar the raised filigree on a subconscious treasure breast.
For all its fancy features and Goggle box-like size, the Alienware AW5520QF OLED is all the same a gaming monitor. And so how does it stack upwardly against the all-time gaming monitors nosotros've seen? To find out, we tested the display with the same equipment we utilise for other gaming monitors, using a Klein K10-A colorimeter for testing color and effulgence.
And hither's where things become mucilaginous. While Alienware claims that the AW5520QF can produce 400 nits of brightness, initially the best we could coax out of the display in our testing setup was 113 nits. Even so, afterward toggling between settings and rebooting the desktop, we managed to go closer to Alienware's nit merits.
MORE: Best Gaming Monitor - Budget, G-Sync and 4K Monitors
Even so, discrepancies between manufacturer brightness claims and lab results aren't uncommon, peculiarly every bit HDR-capable displays widen the gap between what a monitor can practise for an instant in peculiarly formatted live content and what can be sustained, in a standardized testing environs.
But even with those considerations, the Alienware wasn't quite as impressive as the imposing size and cost might suggest. The all-time brightness reading we could get was 113.four nits. Our favorite 4K monitor from a few years back, the Asus ROG Swift PG27A (234.2 nits) offered better, and HDR-capable models, like the Samsung CHG70 (364.8 nits) and the LG 38GL950G UltraGear (558 nits) blow information technology out of the water.
Color reproduction was far amend, with the Alienware covering 141.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, which exceeds the Asus ROG Swift PG27A (130%) and the Acer Predator X34 (98.ix%), and is but slightly backside the LG 38GL950G UltraGear (148.9%) and the Samsung CHG70 (154.ane%).
And when we measured operation in the DCI colour space, which is fast becoming the more relevant standard, the Alienware OLED reproduced 100.five% of the color space, in line with our recent Editor's Choice LG 38GL950G UltraGear (105.v%).
Colour accuracy was also impressive, with a Delta-E rating of 0.27, indicating almost ephemeral departure from perfectly truthful colors. That'south extremely close to the accuracy offered by the LG 38GL950G UltraGear (0.24), and that rating easily bests the Asus ROG Swift PG27A (ane.96) and Acer Predator X34 (1.77), despite the relatively impressive accuracy of the latter two.
TV performance
Though the Alienware AW5520QF is technically not a TV, it makes sense to compare it with similar-size displays, particularly since TVs are being used to fill the same ultralarge gaming niche that the AW5520QF is positioned to fill.
To that cease, we ran our usual TV tests on the giant gaming display, using our 10-Rite spectrophotometer and CalMAN calibration software, and and so compared it with some of the best TVs on the market. Specifically, nosotros compared it with both the LG C9 OLED and the Sony Primary Series A9F — two OLED TVs that take also sourced their OLED panels from LG Display, and tin can make comparable claims about contrast, color accuracy and overall visual performance. Nosotros also compared information technology with the Samsung Q60 QLED TV, which is currently our favorite Television for gaming, thanks to its mix of operation, short lag times and relatively affordable toll.
In some areas, the AW5520QF offers fierce competition. In terms of color, the AW5520QF produced 130.1% of the sRGB color gamut and was adequately accurate, with a Delta-E rating of three.8 (lower scores are improve). That's correct in line with other premium OLED displays, with the Sony Main Series A9F edging ahead by only a fraction of a percent point (130.8%) in gamut reproduction and coming in with a rating that was only a hair more precise (Delta-Due east 3.5). The LG C9 OLED, on the other hand, edged out both with a 132.1% color gamut and a Delta-E rating of i.8. Any way you look at it, that'southward superb color performance from the Alienware, but it'due south non dramatically meliorate than comparable OLED TVs.
The AW5520QF fared slightly better against the Samsung Q60 QLED Goggle box, which reproduced a more small 99.9% of the sRGB color gamut, merely an impressive Delta-Due east rating of 1.vi, offering the best accuracy of the models we compared with the Alienware.
More: What Is OLED?
But there's i surface area where the AW5520QF fell below our expectations, and that was lag time. When tested with our Leo Bodnar input lag tester over HDMI, the AW5520QF consistently clocked a lag time of 29.five milliseconds. While nigh of our tests were performed in standard picture mode, we made sure to perform lag testing across every way the Alienware offered, just information technology stayed consequent in every mode. While that's not far out of line with premium OLED TVs, like the Sony A9F (27.five ms) and the LG C9 OLED (21.2 ms), it'due south significantly slower than the Samsung Q60 QLED, which offered a game way with lag times of sixteen.three ms. For a gaming-focused monitor, from one of the biggest brand names in gaming, I expected improve.
All the same, when I played The Witcher iii: Wild Hunt, the monitor had no problems keeping upwards with the action. Unsheathing my sword, I jumped into activity, deftly dodging, parrying and striking until the action reached its bloody and satisfying crescendo — a slow-motion shot of u.s. lopping off the last scoundrel's arm, sending a viscous ribbon of blood spinning through the air along with the newly disembodied limb. Throughout the fight, the FreeSync-assisted frame rate was silky smooth with not a stutter in sight.
Since they're both 4K and HDR capable, we hooked up both the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X to Alienware's giant monitor. At first, neither organization recognized the Alienware'due south HDR ability, which led to more than a bit of confusion and consternation. It took a fleck of futzing, merely nosotros figured out that we needed to enable Smart HDR style on the monitor and restart the consoles to get everything to work. And fifty-fifty though we saw an immediate crash-land in vibrancy, I wish in that location was an icon or something to let united states know HDR was enabled similar you lot go on an LG Television. But checking the in-game settings confirmed that I was playing in captivating HDR.
Streaming performance
To test how the AW5520QF handles streaming content, nosotros immediately made a beeline for the 4K UHD content, starting with the David Attenborough-narrated Our Planet on Netflix.
Even though the AW550QF delivers more realistic colour compared with competing OLED TVs, we couldn't aid but be impressed past the monitor. A scene with flamingo hatchlings showed off small birds with white, downy feathers flanked by their stunningly pink-colored parent, its heart a peppery brawl of ruddy with a deep-black pupil. Details were so clear that nosotros could come across the large common salt crystals that solidified around the legs of a chick, impeding its movements.
Remote command
One more Television-esque characteristic of the AW5520QF is the included remote control. (Merely one more than manner that the Alienware, while not technically a TV, is still totally a Goggle box.) The remote has rounded ends, for a look non dissimilar the Roku remote control, merely with fifty-fifty more than of a rounded sheathing shape.
The buttons and controls include a ring-shaped directional pad, buttons for book and brightness control, and four additional navigation buttons for pulling up menus and navigating through on-screen options, each marked with an icon.
The remote has the aforementioned ii-toned white-grey and black colour scheme equally the monitor, and the Alienware logo peeks out at the lesser of the controller. Just unlike many remote controls, y'all won't accept to fiddle with whatever bulletproof bombardment compartment here. The white-gray faceplate and the black lesser half of the remote are two halves that tin can be hands separated, cheers to a magnetic closure that holds everything securely together in use, but makes it super convenient when yous're changing batteries.
Audio
Although we would withal invest in a soundbar of some sort, on their own, the Alienware's pair of 14-watt speakers have some serious kick. We could hear the frustration in Aloy'south voice as she inner monologued through a mission in Horizon: Zip Dawn. The groundwork strings were and so gentle, they all just faded from our immediate consciousness. However, the startled call of a flim-flam and the jostling of Aloy's armor brought everything into aural focus. And when we went to battle with a rampaging Sawtooth, nosotros were treated to weighty explosions as the rogue motorcar ran into our booby-trapped trip wires.
Alienware AW5520QF vs. the contest
With monitor engineering science packed into a brandish that has TV dimensions, the Alienware AW5520QF squares off against a surprisingly varied field of competitors. Plainly, with other gaming monitors offering 4K resolution, ultrawide displays and all sorts of gaming center processed, there are traditional gaming monitors to worry most.
There are also TVs, which have steadily been encroaching on the territory traditionally held by monitors. Equally display technologies advance and more than media is purely digital, the lines between monitor and Boob tube are getting blurry, and new TVs are going farther to erase those distinctions, with gaming support that only wasn't imaginable for TVs a few short years ago.
MORE: Aid Me, Tom's Guide: Which Goggle box Tin I Use as a Gaming Monitor?
I of those is variable refresh rate (VRR), which makes the aforementioned sort of GPU-to-frame rate matching possible over HDMI that is currently handled by technologies like AMD's FreeSync and Nvidia'south 1000-Sync. The Alienware is certified for the former. On top of this, FreeSync is fully supported on Samsung's new TVs, and LG'due south OLED TVs are getting the start Nvidia G-Sync certifications.
Finally, Alienware isn't the only company with dreams of gaming on much larger screens. Nvidia'south BFGD initiative puts G-Sync hardware into Telly-sized gaming monitors also. The HP Omen Ten Emperium, Asus ROG Swift PG65 and Acer Predator CG437K P are all fleshing out the nascent category between monitors and TVs.
Bottom line
The Alienware AW5520QF 55-inch OLED gaming monitor is 1 of the best gaming monitors bachelor today, and if coin is no object, in that location'south no proficient reason non to buy it. Information technology offers some of the all-time aspects of PC gaming monitors in a TV-sized bundle, a combination that is arguably the pinnacle of gaming displays.
Only unlimited budgets simply aren't realistic for most people, and $4,000 is an awful lot to enquire for whatsoever chip of gaming gear that doesn't actually have a GPU. The even larger question is whether the Alienware AW5520QF offers plenty of an comeback over existing products to justify the leap to this detail solution.
And that'southward where it gets difficult to recommend the AW5520QF, to anyone. Is it beautiful? Yeah. Is it better than other options? Current leading gaming monitors, like the Editors' Selection LG 38GL950G UltraGear, offer improve performance across the board: improve brightness and color accuracy G-Sync, and a cost tag that looks downright reasonable by comparison. It'south simply designed for the desktop, with a 38-inch curved design.
For gaming in the living room, an LG C9 OLED Television will deliver similar big-screen gaming with all the aforementioned benefits of OLED — perfect blackness levels, decent (but non dandy) responsiveness and a rich combination of visual and audio operation. And unlike the Alienware AW5520QF, the LG C9 boasts future-proof HDMI 2.i connections and costs less than half of what Alienware's charging for the same 55-inch panel.
Neither is a perfect replacement for what the Alienware AW5520QF is offer. If you lot're one to drop big bucks to be an early on adopter, go for it, but we'll concur off for now. However, we really hope this isn't just a ane-off endeavor from Alienware, because the design is fantastic, the features are thoughtful and well-implemented, and the technology is but nearly there. In the new niche of living room PC gaming, a 2d generation of this production could be unbeatable, and we really promise it gets in that location.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/alienware-aw5520qf-55-inch-oled-gaming-monitor
Posted by: landryabadvionand.blogspot.com
0 Response to "Alienware AW5520QF 55-Inch OLED Gaming Monitor Review"
Post a Comment