Last week I purchased this 1440p Alienware OLED monitor. On paper, it was a downgrade from the 4K Samsung monitor I had been using. In reality, it was the best decision I had made in a long time.
First, to address the elephant in the room: the resolution downgrade. It’s negligible. This isn’t copium; I honestly can’t perceive the difference on the desktop, in web browsing, or games. I had been using a 4K monitor on the same desk, at the same distance away from me for years, and I truly don’t feel like I’ve lost anything in the downgrade. Look, I’m not Digital Foundry or anything so don’t hold me to this; YMMV. But whatever, all of the screenshots in this post are 1440p, so you can judge for yourself.
With that out of the way, here’s what rocks about this monitor: everything.
First, no “Smart” shit. You don’t have to navigate slow ass menus full of shitty streaming TV shows with a remote just to change your picture settings. This nearly broke me on the Samsung, but is definitely not the case on the Alienware. You just flick a little knob on the bottom of the monitor and quickly jump between settings, the way god intended.
As expected, dropping the resolution has increased the performance of my games, allowing for higher frame rates at max (or close) settings on my last gen (🥲) PC specs (32 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 7800X3D 8-Core Processor, GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16GB). My PC is connected to the monitor via DisplayPort cable.
Here’s how the two games I played the most last week performed.
Resident Evil Requiem
I have most settings maxed out (most notable drop is ray tracing at normal vs path tracing- the juice isn’t worth the squeeze with my setup, imo).
With these settings I was averaging between 180 – 220 fps in the hospital and basement. The game feels absurdly smooth and responsive throughout. And it looks great too!
World of Warcraft
This is a game I’ve been playing for over 20 years, on more hardware configurations than I can count. I can say without a doubt that on this monitor, this is the best the game has ever looked and ran for me.
I have settings (mostly) maxed out and the game runs consistently above 100 fps, but varies wildly by context. In a delve my fps pushes 250, but while flying above the overworld it’s closer to 120. Despite the wild fluctuations, the game feels ridiculously smooth throughout and I never felt the variance, thanks to VRR.
WoW is a colorful game and man those colors pop on an OLED display.
Bonus: WoW Classic:
Max settings, 320+ FPS. This is the future I dreamt of in 2004.
Not sure what else to say about the the display itself. Colors pop and blacks are deep. Regardless of resolution, OLED screens are just incredible.
The HDR on the monitor isn’t great, but PC HDR implementation is so messy and inconsistent I stopped using it years ago. Nits did not factor into my purchase at all.
I still have plenty more testing to do (once I stop playing Requiem and WoW: Midnight, which probably won’t be anytime soon), but as of right now I am beyond pleased with this monitor. OLED (and Alienware) forever.
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