MSI MPG 272URX QD OLED monitor review: your eyes will thank you, your wallet won’t
The MSI MPG 272URX is a premium QD-OLED 4K gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate and the top-notch response time you’d expect from an OLED panel. Besides this, it comes with not only HDMI 2.1 (great news for console gamers) but also offers DisplayPort 2.1 technology, meaning extra-smooth uncompressed data flow thanks to the increased 80Gbps bandwidth.
The 27-inch size is somewhat modest for a 4K display, but for those after the highest ppi on their screen, who favour the classic size for gaming monitors, it could be the ideal pick. Read below to see how the MPG 272URX fared in our testing.
Specifications
- Panel type: QD-OLED
- Resolution: 3840 x 2160
- Refresh rate: 240Hz
- Response time: 0.03ms
- Panel size: 27″
- I/O ports: 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 2.1, 1x USB-C (DP & 98W Power Delivery), 2x USB-A, 1x USB-B, 1x 3.5mm headphone jack
What We Think
If you can justify paying such a high asking price for a 27-inch monitor and desire such high resolution on this size of screen, there’s really not much to criticise with the MSI MPG 272URX. The main drawback is the same one which affects nearly every OLED screen – a low peak SDR brightness, although HDR performance is solid.
Besides this you get a superbly crisp 4K image, a high refresh rate for this resolution, plus a near-perfect response time. The HDMI 2.1 port and DisplayPort 2.1 make it great for both console gamers and high-end PC users. Contrast ratio is excellent, color accuracy and gamut coverage is fantastic within sRGB, and it manages a good 98% DCI-P3 coverage. The KVM Switch and very high 98W USB-C power delivery are also both welcome.
We would have liked to have seen a nicer aesthetic design, plus full native G-Sync integration, though we didn’t have any problems with G-Sync in our testing. All-in-all, a fantastic high-end gaming monitor.
Reasons to Buy
- 240Hz refresh rate at 4K resolution
- High 166ppi means good text clarity
- OLED panel has fantastic contrast ratio
- Excellent response time & motion clarity
- 100% sRGB & 98% DCI-P3 coverage & very high color accuracy
- DisplayPort 2.1 & HDMI 2.1
- 98W USB-C Power Delivery & KVM switch
- A good array of ports
Reasons to Avoid
- Very expensive
- Peak SDR brightness low as with other OLEDs
- Full native G-Sync integration would have been nice
- Aesthetics are not quite premium
Pricing & availability
As mentioned, the MSI MPG 272URX is not cheap: it has an MSRP of $1,099 / £999 in the UK, though we have seen it reduced in that region to £749 in limited-time deals on Amazon UK.
By comparison, you can get the 32-inch MSI MPG 321URX for a similar asking price; although it doesn’t have DisplayPort 2.1 and has slightly lower dpi, its specifications are very similar besides this. You could alternatively pick up a lower-res 1440p model of the same size with a higher refresh rate, like the 27-inch ASUS ROG Strix OLED XG27ACDNG, for several hundred dollars cheaper.
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Design & specifications
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The screen only comes with a light anti-reflective coating, giving it a semi-glossy finish overall. The bezels are of a reasonable size for a 27-inch screen, and the raised edges of the monitor are very thin on the top and sides, but with the bottom section being a bit thicker, showing the MSI logo in the centre. Underneath lies the OSD (On Screen Display) joystick, which is pretty standard in design.
Aesthetically, we weren’t exactly blown away by the design of the MPG 272URX: it’s not ugly, it’s just a bit bland (considering what you’re paying for it), consisting of a matte black plastic with some metal sections on the reverse. Most of the visual flourishes, like the MSI dragon design plus limited RGB logo strip on the top, are located round the back of the screen. The front of the screen looks very ‘office-y’ and utilitarian.
The base of the monitor is the classic ‘square-ish’ wide design that you can find on the majority of MSI monitors from recent years: it’s nice and sturdy, if a bit visually uninspiring. The adjustability of the stand is good, with a tilt of -5° to +20°, a swivel of ±30°, height adjustment of 0-110mm, and a pivot either way of 90°, meaning you can arrange it into portrait mode if you need. If you want to swap out the stand, the monitor is also compatible with a 100x100mm VESA mount.
Connectivity is excellent. As mentioned, it comes with HDMI 2.1 connectivity, in the form of two ports – a big benefit for console users that want to game at 4K and use the extra features the bandwidth allows. The single dedicated DisplayPort 2.1a socket is the best connection you can get at the moment, with a hugely impressive 80Gbps bandwidth, it gives the monitor plenty of future proofing. The single USB-C port can also be used as a DisplayPort socket, plus it comes with 98W of power delivery for connecting and charging an array of devices – this is the highest power delivery we’ve seen in a monitor and is more than capable of charging a laptop or similar. Besides this, you get a couple of USB-A ports, a USB-B upstream socket, plus a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The monitor does not include built-in speakers, though we wouldn’t class this as a negative, as the vast majority of people will never use them anyway.
OSD, features, settings & warranty
The On Screen Display menu is the same as in every other MPG gaming monitor from MSI that we’ve tested, and is fairly good overall, being reasonably easy to navigate, though the separating of the different visual presets under ‘Game Mode’ and ‘Pro Mode’ and having these located in completely different subsections of the menu is quite annoying when you’re trying to switch between them. Besides that, though, we have no complaints with the menu.
The different visual presets are all pretty good, and you’re likely to find what you want amongst them. The standard brightness setting on each of them is very low for some reason, though manually increasing the brightness easily resolves this. We’ll discuss these more under the Screen testing section.
The menu has all the standard options you’d expect, plus it comes with OLED Care 2.0, meaning it has the latest anti-burn in features on the market. ‘Less Blue Light Pro’ is useful for eye care in general productivity tasks too.
The features we were less impressed with, though, are the touted AI-driven ones like AI Vision (which ‘optimizes brightness and color saturation settings’) and AI Crosshair (which changes the color of the crosshair during gameplay to improve visibility) – neither of which were very useful in real-world scenarios. Night Vision AI, which improves visibility in darker scenes, could have a small amount of utility but ultimately is meddling with the creative visual design of a game – if it’s dark, it’s usually meant to be. Ultimately, as with many AI-related features in gaming tech (besides performance-related ones like AI-powered rendering) these are pretty much just gimmicks.
MSI provides a three-year warranty that does cover OLED burn-in, which is generally the best you can expect and matches that offered by other brands.
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Screen testing & performance
Subjectively, the screen looks great, but how did it hold up in our testing? In this section, we test the monitor for color accuracy, gamut coverage, brightness, and overall panel uniformity – allowing us to determine the best use cases for it (outside of gaming-tailored performance factors like refresh rates and response times).
Color gamut
When testing for the color gamut coverage of the display, the sRGB score was effectively 100% as you’d expect (99.6% to be precise). DCI-P3 coverage was marginally below the 99% claimed by MSI, achieving 96.7%, which is still high enough to do color-accurate work in this space, although for high-end professional work, you might want something a bit higher.
Color accuracy, contrast, gamma & brightness
As with every monitor we review, we tested a good number of the presets available from within the OSD. For each, we measure the white point, black point, contrast ratio, average deltaE*00 (a measure of color accuracy), gamma, and brightness. These can be compared against the top row, which contains the ideal results for each data point (ideal from a technical standpoint, that is – it doesn’t account for subjective taste when watching different media).
We found on this monitor that the standard brightness setting for each preset was pretty low for some reason (set to 15/100), so for the purposes of this test we upped it manually for each to as close to 120nits as possible, which is the standard value for natural light (this typically required increasing the brightness slider to 36/15 in each case).
| Preset | White | Black | Contrast | Average DeltaE*00 | Max DeltaE*00 | Gamma |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IDEAL | 6500K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 0 | 2.2 | |
| Premium Color (Game Mode) | 6502K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 4.64 | 10.68 | 2.27 |
| FPS (Game Mode) | 6499K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 3.52 | 9.42 | 2.31 |
| sRGB (Pro Mode) | 6465K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 1.08 | 2.95 | 2.28 |
| DCI-P3 (Pro Mode) | 6478K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 2.53 | 5.92 | 2.29 |
| Adobe (Pro Mode) | 6489K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 3.22 | 7.31 | 2.27 |
Given this is an OLED panel, you can assume that the black point and contrast ratio will be effectively perfect no matter what preset you use (you can see this in the results).
As you can see in the above table, the sRGB preset had the best results overall, with a near enough perfect white point as well as terrific deltaE*00 scores, making it ideal for color-accurate work. The DCI-P3 preset came in second place and was fairly impressive, although its average and max deltaE*00 scores weren’t as good. We wouldn’t recommend the rest for color-accurate work, although, as ever, if you like how they look, that’s all that matters in most other cases.
The maximum SDR brightness that we recorded was 244.02cd/m2 when we set the brightness to 100% under the Premium Color (Gamer Mode) preset – not a great result, but what you have to expect with an OLED panel. If you desire something brighter, we recommend going for a Mini-LED monitor or just a standard IPS instead. The lowest brightness measurement we recorded was 25.29cd/m2 at 0% under the same Premium Color preset.
Like the MSI MPG 321URX that we’ve previously tested, the MPG 321URXW has two HDR modes: ‘True Black 400′ (which is better for brighter scenes) and ‘Peak 1000 nits’ (which is better for darker scenes with very bright highlights). Measuring a 10% size window under True Black 400 we recorded a sustained brightness of around 370cd/m2. Switching to Peak 1000 nits, we recorded a 1,006cd/m2 result on a 2% window test, pretty much bang on the claimed max brightness.
Panel uniformity
Finally, in terms of our technical testing of the screen, we look at panel uniformity. Using the DisplayCAL software, the screen is divided into 25 separate segments in a 5×5 grid, with the central segment acting as the reference point. From this reference point, all the other segments are tested for variance in their Average Luminance and deltaE*00 score.
Variance below 1.00 is signified by a green segment, which means the level of variance cannot be detected by the naked eye – this is the ideal result and what you hope to see in every section, although it’s not the end of the world if not. Variation between 1.00 – 3.00 shows up as yellow, although towards the lower end of this range, most people still won’t be able to notice any difference, and you could still possibly use it for color-accurate work. Greater variance shows as red, which is not good for accuracy.
Looking at the results in the image above, the MPG 272URX showed results in the optimum ‘green’ range in every segment bar one: this single, leftmost segment in yellow was still within pretty acceptable parameters, however, meaning this monitor would definitely be suitable for color-accurate work. It should be noted that there can be variation between different units of the same monitor, as per the so-called ‘panel lottery’, but the above results still can give us a strong indication that most MPG 272URX screens are likely to be strong in this area.
Viewing angles
Like virtually all monitors with OLED panels, the viewing angles on the MPG 272URX are exceptional. The screen is rated for up to 178°, and this certainly held up in our time with it, with no perceptible color shift as you approach this angle.
Gaming performance
We tested the screen on our usual array of titles, including Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and CS2, and it performed very well.
The colors on the semi-glossy panel looked vibrant, and the blacks were as impressively deep as you’d expect on an OLED, especially in darker scenes. Thanks to its high resolution and screen size, visuals appeared exceptionally sharp and detailed.
The 240Hz refresh rate means the 272URX handles fast-moving action with ease, making it ideal for competitive online gameplay. The extremely fast 0.03ms response time – among the fastest available – meant that motion remained smooth and sharp even at the max refresh rate, with very little ghosting observed in both real-world gaming and during the Alien UFO motion test.
There is no native G-Sync on the 272URX, meaning there is no physical module in the monitor itself to guarantee it operates to the best standard; however, it does have G-Sync compatibility, and we didn’t notice any screen tearing in our testing at the native 240Hz.
General performance & productivity
Whilst a gaming monitor first and foremost, the reality is most people buying this monitor will also be using it for general productivity as well, so the suitability of the screen for this should be considered. The screen comes with a few features that benefit it in this area, chiefly the strong array of ports and sockets, including the 98W USB-C charging, which can support phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as a built-in KVM switch if you have multiple PCs/devices that you want to share the same screen. Although you are limited in terms of screen space with the 27-inch size, not everybody is looking for a large monitor.
Text clarity, often an issue with OLED panels due to their sub-pixel rendering, is actually pretty good on this monitor, thanks to its very high 166ppi and the high resolution at this size of screen.
The low peak brightness and semi-glossy screen does mean that working in well-lit environments is not ideal, given the increased chance of screen glare, and this is the main reason that this (and most other OLED monitors) might not be suitable for your needs.
OLED panels do carry a bit of a risk with burn-in for productivity uses (when there is a lot of static images on the screen over a period of time) if not properly managed, however, with sensible use of the various OLED care refresh settings, you should be completely fine.
