Asus ROG Strix XG27JCG review

The last time I gamed on a 4K 27-inch display, what I really wanted was even more pixels. Over eight million obviously just ain't enough.

Actually, no I absolutely didn't. But the new Asus ROG Strix XG27JCG is giving them to me anyway, all 15 million of tiny RGB suckers thanks to a 5K native resolution of 5,120 by 2,880 pixels from its 27-inch IPS panel. The result is frankly epic pixel density, plus a whole raft of questions about what, exactly, the point of this kind of display is for gaming.

But before you dismiss the idea of a 5K gaming monitor out of hand on account of low refresh rates, know that the ROG Strix XG27JCG will do fully 180 Hz at the 5K native. Okay, that's pretty pedestrian by the standards of really quick gaming monitors, which clock in upwards of 500 Hz these days. But still, 180 Hz at 5K. Bananas, isn't it?

Actually, this monitor's high-refresh chops extend beyond that thanks to a 1440p dual-mode functionality that supports 330 Hz. The idea here is the same as 4K dual-mode monitors that offer an alternative 1080p "native" at a higher refresh, like Asus' own ROG Strix XG27UCG. But since this is a 5K rather than 4K panel, if you double up the pixels in both horizontal and the vertical—effectively using a square block of four pixels from the 5K grid to form a single pixel—you end up with an alternative 1440p "native" mode of 2,560 by 1440.

So, yeah, this monitor is basically four 1440p panels with a total of 14,745,600 pixels. That's how ridiculously high the resolution is with 5K. But with that dual-mode functionality, in theory you can have all the benefits of 5K—which we'll come to—plus a more realistic 1440p mode that promises to make this monitor usable with vaguely affordable GPUs and also a decent option for esports. After all, running at the full native 5K native in the latest games is a very big ask in terms of raw PC performance, not to mention largely pointless for online shooters where frame rate rather than image detail is king.

The 5K and dual-mode functionality aside, however, this is a fairly mainstream monitor by most other metrics. As I mentioned, it's an IPS panel rather than OLED and while it is HDR 600 certified and has local dimming, it's limited to 10 edge-lit zones and so HDR support is very basic indeed. That said, the HDR 600 certification at least means that the panel can hit 600 nits, which is plenty bright enough. The exception is the 0.3 ms GtG claimed pixel response time. That's quick for an IPS monitor.

Rounding out the feature set is good connectivity thanks to DisplayPort, HDMI and USB-C, the latter with basic 15 W power delivery which is probably good enough for sharing this screen between a gaming desktop and a thin-and-light work laptop, or similar. Just note that the full 180 Hz at 5K isn't available over USB-C, you'll need to use one of the other interfaces for that.

Anyway back to that 5K native res and the nearly 15 million pixels. What, you might ask, is the point? Surely 4K on a 27-inch panel is plenty, especially for gaming. And you'd definitely have a point. But, for the record, the increased pixel density on offer here, which comes in at 215 pixels per inch versus the 163 pixels per inch of a regular old 287-inch 4K monitor, is genuinely quite stunning at times.

Put it this way, you know those crisp, clean fonts that you're used to from your smartphone? Well, you get something approaching that on your desktop PC thanks to this monitor. Actually, it's not quite that good in Windows simply because that operating system's font rendering is a bit clunky. But plug this monitor into an Apple Mac and then you really do get that smartphone experience when it comes to text. A niche attraction, to be sure, but there you have it.

Whatever OS you use, there's huge image detail on offer. Indeed, you can view 4K content at full resolution in a window, leaving space for toolbars and controls. That's appealing for, say, 4K video editing. Actually, this screen reveals flaws in 4K video streams that you never noticed before; there's that much detail on offer.

As for the broader utility of 5K, well, in theory it gives huge desktop space. But in practice, running at 100% scaling would make everything ludicrously tiny. So your desktop elbow room will depend on your favoured scaling. In other words, there's no real advantage over a 4K monitor in that regard.

All of which leaves us with gaming. And that's actually quite a complicated proposition on this panel. The thing is, 5K isn't as preposterous a target resolution as it would have been a few years ago. Partly, that's thanks to more powerful GPUs, but mostly it's thanks to upscaling technologies such as Nvidia's DLSS.

The incredible thing is that, thanks to DLSS, you can get pretty playable results at 5K using something like an Nvidia RTX 4070 or RTX 5070. Those aren't budget GPUs, for sure, but they're also not $2,000 monsters. With Nvidia latest DLSS Transformer model upscaling, Performance mode looks remarkably good at 5K and gives you a base frame rate in something like Cyberpunk 2077 with most of the visual bells and whistles cranked up roughly in the low 30s with, say, an RTX 5070.

That's tolerable in latency terms, so you can then add some frame gen and end up with genuinely playable frame rates at 5K. Pretty impressive, right? Step up to, for instance, an RTX 5080 and that 5K native only gets more usable. Of course, you also have the 1440p alternative mode. I had high hopes for that given that 1440p on a 27-inch panel is still reasonably high resolution in gaming terms. But the results are a teensy bit disappointing.

As with basically every other dual-mode monitor I've tried, there's no mistaking it for an actual 1440p panel running at native. The image is somehow both softer and subjectively a bit more pixelated than that. Funnily enough, I think the 1440p alt mode actually looks better running some upscaling than it does running pure "native". Consequently, I think this panel probably doesn't use straight-up pixel doubling and instead has some kind of interpolation algorithm. Again, that seems to be the case for most if not all dual-mode monitors.

Of course, if you're using the 1440p mode for its higher refresh for esports as opposed to reduced GPU load for really demanding games, the finer detail of image quality probably doesn't matter. The only thing I'd say in that context is that if online shooters are your priority, the problem is that you can get a higher refresh and faster responding 1440p OLED at this price point, and that's got to be a better fit.

In the end, it's hard to draw a really clear conclusion about the whole 5K-with-dual-mode thing. On the one hand, the 5K native resolution is actually more usable than you might think thanks to modern upscaling technologies. On the other, the 1440p alternative mode isn't quite as crisp and sharp as you'd ideally want. Still, you can't argue that this monitor doesn't give you plenty of options.

It's also a really nice monitor is most other regards. The calibration is basically bob-on in every mode, be that sRGB and DCI-P3 SDR modes or with HDR enabled. As I said, this monitor doesn't have proper local dimming. So, the actual HDR capability is essentially negligible. But at least SDR content calibration in HDR mode is also really nicely judged. So, there's no real downside to enabling HDR.

So, this is a really nice IPS monitor with fantastic colours, plus that epic pixel density for razor-sharp image detail. The problem is that at this price point, there are also plenty of OLED options, and in that context the limited contrast is all too obvious. As with basically any IPS monitor, there's a lot of backlight bleed through the panel, leading to poor black levels. That's LCD tech for you.

Personally, I think that's less of an issue on a relatively compact monitor like this. When you have a really massive ultrawide monitor, backlight bleed and indeed the variability in how visible that can be across different parts of the panel, again thanks to the inherent viewing angle limitations of LCD tech, can be quite distracting. On a 27 incher, it's not quite as annoying.

And yet this is a very expensive display that ends up competing, as I said, with plenty of OLED options on price. Strictly speaking, none of those OLEDs can match this LCD when it comes to pixel density. But as I write these words, you can grab a 27-inch 4K OLED for about $200 less or a 144 Hz 27-inch 4K IPS panel for less than one-third the money. Either way, the alternatives end up making this 5K monitor, as impressive as it is in many ways, seem like a problematic value proposition.