We’ve regularly recommended 27-inches and 1440pa as the sweet spot of price to performance, given the immense potency that this sect of monitors have offered over the years. As a result of their ubiquity, prices have fallen dramatically in all corners of the market, be it on more ‘standard’ LCD options or higher-end OLED ones.
With this in mind, from Laptops Direct’s eBay Store, this 27-inch 1440p IPS 180Hz option from ElectriQ is down to just £110 with code LILY15 – that’s a fantastic price for a monitor of these specs.
That 27-inch panel and a 2560×1440 resolution provides the ideal combination of screen size and resolution to provide excellent detail, without the need for a high-end GPU you’d want for a 4K panel. A 180Hz refresh rate also helps to keep motion smooth, while a 1ms response time makes this a quick choice. Oddly, ElectriQ haven’t give any details on brightness on the product page, although its manual states 300 nits, which should allow for decent vibrancy. They also disclose some form of HDR support alongside a typical 1000:1 contrast ratio for reasonable dynamic range.
VRR is included as well to smooth out the on-screen action regardless of frame-rate, with compatibility with AMD’s FreeSync. Moreover, as an IPS screen, this panel also provides the excellent combo of great viewing angles and marvellous colour reproduction for a vibrant gaming experience. ElectriQ doesn’t provide any accuracy figures, though.
This panel also comes with a stand that comes with basic tilt adjustment, although it comes with a reasonable port selection that features a pair of DP 1.4 ports, alongside a headphone jack for connecting up an external audio source. This ElectriQ monitor doesn’t have speakers, so you’re likely to need to make use of that port. There are also two HDMI ports, although the website lists them as HDMI 2.1, but the manual says HDMI 2.1. It’s likely the case that these are HDMI 2.1 TMDS ports. As much as these may be HDMI 2.1 ports, there’s no mention of support for the newer FRL standard. This essentially means they’re operating as HDMI 2.0 ports, just under a different label, given HDMI 2.1 is backwards compatible with TMDS. In short, they don’t support 4K/120Hz output, as we’d expect a port of this kind to, but are merely ‘newer’ versions of the older HDMI 2.0 standards. Given this panel doesn’t hit the heights of 4K/120Hz on one side of the equation, it’s not a sore miss.
If you want to grab one of the cheapest 27-inch 1440p gaming screens we’ve seen, this ElectriQ 27QHD180I is a bargain from Laptops Direct’s eBAy store.