Gigabyte AORUS FI27Q-P (Tech) Review

The Gigabyte AORUS FI27Q-P is one of the most high-end gaming monitors you can find on the market right now. It has some tough competition from some other brands but Gigabyte really went all out with this monitor. The FI27Q-P has everything you’d need if you want a 1440p display to game or multi-task with.

Right off the bat, let’s get into the technical specs.               

• Panel Size (diagonal): 27″
• Display Viewing Area (HxV): 596.736 x 335.664 (mm)
• Panel Backlight/ Type: ELED / IPS
• Display Surface(non-glare/ glare): Non-glare
• Color Saturation: 95% of DCI-P3
• True Resolution: 2560 x 1440 (QHD)
• Pixel Pitch: 0.2331 (H) x 0.2331 (V) (mm)
• Brightness: 350 cd/m2 (TYP)
• Contrast Ratio: 1000 : 1 (TYP)
• Dynamic Contrast Ratio: 12M:1
• Viewing Angle: 178°(H)/178°(V)
• Display Colors: 1.073G
• Response Time: 1ms (MPRT)
• Refresh Rate: 165Hz
• Flicker-free: YES
• Signal Input: HDMI 2.0 x2, Display port 1.4 x1 (HBR)
• Earphone Jack: Yes
• USB port(s): x2
• Power Type: Build-in
• AC Input Max: 75W
• Power Saving Mode: 0.5W
• Power Off Mode: 0.3W
• Voltage: AC 100V~240V
• Tilt(angle): -5∘~+21∘
• Swivel(angle): -20∘~+20∘
• Pivot(angle/direction): +90∘
• Height Adjustment (mm): 130mm
• VESA Wall Mounting(mm): 100*100mm
• Kensington lock: Yes
• Phys. Dimension with Stand(WxHxD): W614.9*H484.7*D236.9mm
• Phys. Dimension w/o stand  (WxHxD): W614.9*H371.1*D60mm
• Box Dimension (WxHxD): W720*H565*D279mm
• Net Weight (Esti.): 8.0kg
• Gross Weight (Esti.): 11.9kg
• Accessories: Power cable/HDMI cable/DP cable/USB cable/QSG

Coming in at 27’’ inches diagonally, the Aorus FI27Q-P is a large screen monitor. Combined with the stand, this will take up a hefty portion of your desk. Thankfully though, the monitor has a gorgeous aesthetic to it and the stand leaves plenty of room to route cables through and around. When you initially unbox the device, the stand is snugly packaged away from the screen itself, so some assembly will be required. This is ridiculously easy with the stand simply plugging straight into the back of the monitor and then sliding the detachable “feet” into the stand’s bottom. You will need a screwdriver to tighten the screw located at the bottom to secure the feet into position but this is super easy to do once in place.

The Aorus FI27Q-P has all the important connectivity ports located at the back, neatly tucked away underneath a portion of the panel. What this means though is that you would want to route your cables into this before attaching the stand to the panel. This allows for easier cable management when positioning the monitor onto your desk. The ports on the FI27Q-P include a Kensington Lock, Earphone Jack, 2 HDMI 2.0 ports, 1 Display Port 1.4 (HBR), Superspeed USB port (for connecting into your motherboard to allow data transfer) and 2 USB 3.0 ports. Everything you would need from a modern day monitor is here and it’s really great to see the addition of 2 USB 3.0 ports allowing for data transfer.

Once you’ve set up the monitor, it’s good to go straight away. The default settings look brilliant and you don’t really need to do anything to them. However, for those of you out there that absolutely must have the perfect colour settings, contrast and more, you can easily tweak these settings using the monitor’s built in menus. There’s a tiny analog joystick which doubles as the monitor’s power button which you can use to navigate the On-Screen Display (OSD) settings. This is located right smack dab in the mid section of the underside of the monitor panel. Users can move the joystick around in four directions to navigate the OSD settings. Using the joystick made changing the monitor’s settings a breeze. It’s also easily located since there’s a tiny power LED on the monitor directly aligned with it. 

Once you’ve switched the monitor on, one of the first things you’ll notice is the RGB lighting effects that will start up. Gigabyte’s Aorus FI27Q-P screams gaming with their logo being illuminated in glorious RGB on the monitor stand. The back of the monitor has two RGB illuminated areas and the stand itself has two strips that light up too. Overall, the RGB aesthetic on the monitor is beautiful but in reality, not many people are going to see this if the monitor is up against a wall. If however, you’re at a LAN (Yes, these do still happen. Trust us!), the flashy RGB effects will definitely attract attention. The RGB on the monitor is also fully supported by RGB Fusion 2.0 which can be downloaded from Gigabyte’s website. This allows users to have a decent amount of control over the lighting effects. Being able to cycle through some presets as well as assign a standard lighting colour is easy to do too.

Circling back to the monitor itself. As mentioned above, the default settings look great. If you want to change your settings depending on what type of content you’ll be displaying, there are a couple of presets to cycle through as well as an sRGB mode. Standard looks perfectly fine and is the setting that most users will opt to use daily. The other modes such as FPS, RTS/RPG, Movie and Reader have their own use cases too but if you really want your colours to pop and look as vibrant and gorgeous as possible, just stick to standard and change the brightness/contrast and black equalisation to your liking. Gigabyte have also opted to allow users to save up to 3 Custom profiles so you can easily save your preferred settings and swap between them easily. 

If you use the Superspeed USB connection and download Gigabyte’s OSD Sidekick software, you can adjust the monitor’s settings straight from your pc using the software suite. This is great for users who don’t want to physically move the joystick around and would prefer to just change settings in the software on the fly. The OSD Sidekick software suite is quite powerful too allowing users to change numerous settings to get the monitor to perform to their liking. If you want to use the monitor’s built in Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) for example, you would need to plug a headset into it, and then use the OSD Sidekick software to manage the ANC.

Moving onto the monitor’s resolution, at 2560 x 1440 (QHD), you’re getting a lot of pixels per inch on this 27’’ inch screen. Since it’s 1440p, this also opens the monitor up to a larger user base since you won’t need say, an RTX 3080 or above to play games at 1440p using this monitor. If this were a 4K resolution screen, users would need the appropriate hardware to get the best out of it when gaming. However, since it’s 165Hz 1440p, lower specced desktop users can still enjoy using the AORUS FI27Q-P monitor and won’t really have any issues in games unless they decide to crank up graphical settings. That however becomes a game specific issue and not a monitor issue. 

When it comes to displaying colours, the Aorus FI27Q-P is fantastic. You’ll immediately notice just how vibrant and amazingly colour accurate it is when using it to browse through images with rich colours. This translates well into gaming too since you can use the built-in black equaliser to help accentuate darker areas during gaming to your liking. The AORUS FI27Q-P covers the full sRGB colour space and has 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 standard. Straight out of the box, the colours are just so beautiful you’ll want to make this monitor your main screen immediately. 

In our testing, we noticed that the Aorus FI27Q-P does suffer from a slight brightness bleed when displaying black colours but this is a given on pretty much all monitors that aren’t OLEDs. Thankfully, the Aorus FI27Q-P features an IPS panel so you won’t be getting washed out colours as seen with older VA and TN panels. The brightness bleed effects when displaying black colours can be mitigated somewhat by simply turning down the maximum brightness of the monitor. At 350 cd/m2 or 350 nits, this is brighter than most standard monitors out there. The screen surface itself is matte and is thankfully not very reflective at all so even in a brightly lit environment, you won’t get much glare coming off of it.

One of the monitor’s best features, especially in 2021 is the fact that it has a 165Hz refresh rate. This puts it slightly above competing brands monitors which tend to be 144Hz. Gigabyte also has a slightly newer version of this monitor that goes up to 240Hz so if you’re a refresh rate junkie, be sure to keep an eye out for that particular version. The Aorus FI27Q-P also supports NVIDIA G-SYNC and has Freesync 3 support which is great to see, especially since it helps prevent unsightly screen tearing and stuttering in games. 

The Aorus FI27Q-P is VESA DisplayHDR Certified and with the High Bit Rate 3 support, the monitor is able to output ridiculously good picture quality that’s super colour accurate across a range of applications. The monitor is easily adjustable too with enough swivel, tilt and vertical height adjustment available. One slightly unfortunate aspect though lies with the fact that it can only be pivoted 90 degrees in one direction and not in the other too. Hopefully a future version of the monitor allows for pivoting in both directions on the stand. 

The screen doesn’t hog too much desk space despite being 27 inches wide, the monitor stand is well crafted and the build quality seems rather solid and sturdy. When it comes to the panel itself, the colours are rich and vibrant and the 350 nits brightness certainly helps drive that fact home. Using it for gaming in the time we had it for review purposes was flat out amazing and we can safely recommend the Gigabyte Aorus FI27Q-P to gamers in the market for a new monitor. The only major caveat to the monitor being its expensive price point and the stand not allowing for a 90 degree pivot in the other direction. The latter being more of a personal preference issue rather than anything truly detrimental to the screen’s functionality. 

Overall, the Gigabyte Aorus FI27Q-P quite literally has every single feature a gamer would need on a monitor in 2021 and gets two thumbs up from us. Just be prepared to fork out a hefty amount of money for this product because quality like this certainly does not come cheap.