I love the 27-inch Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM 4K monitor, but I find its design flaws baffling

Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM: ONE-MINUTE REVIEW

OLED monitors are becoming widespread, and Asus is among the first manufacturers to release a gaming monitor with the panel technology on a 27-inch 4K display. The result is essentially a smaller, slightly less powerful screen than the company’s larger ROG screens, shedding the ultrawide and curved properties that many gamers (myself included) consider unnecessary – but it’s ROG, so it can’t be that simple, can it?

What we’ve got here is an exceptional piece of technology with a bunch of old gimmicks bolted to the sides.

On the tech side, the panel is gorgeous, pulling off 4K resolution paired with a 240Hz refresh rate and offering a max brightness of 450 nits (1,000 HDR). Its selection of ports on the back is quite generous, including several USB-A ports to keep your cabling situation a bit tidier. The integrated monitor interface is also quite easy to use and provides an amazing level of depth to tailor screen performance to your needs.

On the extras side, like many of Asus’ top-end Swift monitors, you’ll find a downward-facing projector that shoots the Republic of Gamers logo onto your desk in red. This resides in the monitor stand with the lens protruding between the screen’s three feet. The feet extend out quite far from the monitor and are both huge and very over the top. It’s a signature of the ROG Swift range of monitors and it exists to be distinct.

Complementing the projector is a programmable RGB logo on the front of the screen and a larger one on the rear left of the monitor, along with some lighting around the projector housing. These lighting details I’m fine with, I have no axe to grind with RGB provided it’s not over the top, but the accumulation of all of these aesthetic extras has left me with a feeling of ‘why are we doing this?’

And this criticism manifests best when we get to pricing. Despite offering a combination of features that are new and in-demand on the market, slightly older monitors with more impressive specs (like larger screen size) can be picked up for less.

With these things in mind, while I’ll applaud Asus for offering a display with a technology arrangement previously unseen, and likely in demand from at least a subset of PC users, I’m content with the opinion that a 4K, OLED, high refresh rate monitor better appeals to a graphics and visual quality lover – and that such a user likely wouldn’t mind going a size up to 32 inches and pocketing the potential savings.

Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM: PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

• How much does it cost? $1,099 / £1,098 / AU$2,099
• When is it available? Available now
• Where can you get it? Technology retailers in the US, UK and Australia

The ROG Swift 27-inch OLED breaks new ground by offering the gorgeous, darkness-enhancing panel technology at a high refresh rate at a 4K resolution on a screen of this size. This explains the high cost, but the price is driven higher by a combination of things.

Asus’ inclusion of RGB lighting, a unique stand and its iconic (if unnecessary) downward-facing projector add to its appeal, but its great user interface and array of ports are more deserving of praise.

Similar monitors are available from LG, Gigabyte and Alienware, often sporting larger displays at the same price, or the same size at a lower cost. This monitor’s closest competitor is the MSI MPG 272URX, starting at $799.99 / £999.99 / AU$1,799.

Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM: DESIGN

Asus is awesome, not just because it always does top-quality stuff, but also because it’s always doing something interesting. In the display category, the brand has been strapping downward-facing projectors to its premium ‘Swift’ range for a long time, while incorporating a tripod-style stand with three feet extending out from the base of the stand.

This is iconically ROG and… well, getting old. The company has strapped this projector to its top-end screens for some time, all while other gaming peripheral aesthetics have matured. Competitors like Alienware and MSI now look more grown up across their entire product line-ups. Even much of the ROG range looks more charming and less gamer-y.

Even if the projector didn’t leave a poor taste in my mouth, I’d still be disappointed in the stand. It spans a far greater space across my desk than it has any right to, and its footprint limits my ability to push the display further from me without it falling off the back of the desk. Though this wouldn’t be a problem for users mounting the display elsewhere, as it’s VESA wall-mount compatible. On the default stand, it also allows a 90º pivot (allowing for a uniform portrait orientation) and 110mm height adjustment, along with 30º of swivel.

A programmable RGB light on the rear left side gives a nice illumination against the wall, and lights on the monitor stand itself look quite good when viewing the screen from the back, but many users likely won’t engage with these. The ROG logo on the front, the stand lights and the projector light can’t be changed from red, which might be disappointing to folks fond of a particular color.

In terms of interaction, hidden behind the ROG logo on the front of the monitor is a handy set of buttons: two on the left and right, and a joystick nub in the middle that's perfect for adjusting display settings.

Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM: FEATURES

The ROG Swift 27-inch monitor is one of the few screens of such a size operating a 4K resolution on an OLED panel – a feature in itself worthy of praise and certainly appealing to some users. It offers this combination of features with a tiny 0.03ms response time and a whopping 240Hz refresh rate, combined with a maximum brightness of 450 nits (1,000 nits HDR).

Dolby Vision HDR is also available, but I elected to disable this and switched to standard HDR, as it kept turning my display off and on again when entering different programs.

The screen itself is slightly glossy and the in-built monitor software gives the user quite a lot of control over its performance. A single nub behind the ROG logo on the front of the screen allows you to adjust quick settings, including superfluous things like enabling an FPS counter, a persistent crosshair or even a stopwatch or timer. This software is generally more useful for selecting your preferred HDR calibration, adjusting brightness, and tailoring the screen’s performance to your needs.

Obviously because it’s an OLED panel, there is worry of burn-in occurring, and Asus’ solution is quaint. Simply by pressing the button on the left (beside the nub) you can activate the company’s OLED Care program, which refreshes the pixels to avoid damage. The program runs for about six minutes and it’s recommended that you perform this action often to increase the longevity of your device. The monitor will remind you every eight hours or so by default to run the program, but you can disable this pop-up in the on-device settings.

The ports on offer with this display are also very accommodating. A USB-B port running to and from the monitor and your computer allows the three integrated USB-A 3.2 ports to communicate with your PC, cutting down on cable clutter. There’s also a USB-C port with 90W power delivery (great for charging a phone or even a laptop), a DisplayPort 2.1 and two HDMI 2.1 ports.

Finally, bringing the panel's main range of features back into range (4K, 240Hz), it’s worth considering this as a monitor for an already particularly dedicated enthusiast. Operating a 4K monitor at a high frame rate in most new games is going to require a fairly competent (and expensive) gaming rig, though most competitive games (think League of Legends and Valorant) that run smoothly on a broad range of computers will typically complement this monitor well – so perhaps it’s more a screen for gamers looking to compete online.

Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM: PERFORMANCE

The ROG Swift OLED 27-inch is perfect for making gorgeous games look amazing. An upgrade to an OLED screen continues to be the best way to upgrade your gaming visual experience in a single purchase – you can upgrade your computer’s internal components, sure, but the output monitor’s better handling of darkness and contrast will always be more noticeable than slightly higher graphics fidelity.

A 27-inch sized screen is fairly common among gaming PC setups, though a 4K resolution can be difficult to cater for as games become more demanding as quality scales up – though this will certainly appeal to gamers craving beautiful visuals. The panel performed exceptionally well in every game that I played, and the deep blacks were particularly welcome in games like The Headliners, Helldivers 2 and Ghost of Tsushima, where darkness is a big part of the gameplay.

TV shows look awesome too. Invincible, Severance and For All Mankind in particular looked great, with the color clarity up to scratch, but the experience would have been made better by integrated speakers. Built-in sound isn’t a top feature request for monitor shoppers but it’s nice to have when it’s there, for convenience at least.

And it’s not all about gaming – the monitor is also a more-than-capable productivity monitor, and I didn’t notice any text fringing when using Google Docs or Google Keep. Its dealing with apps in dark mode is splendid, and I liked the inclusion of a KVM switch, allowing you to quickly switch between your connected computers. The USB-A ports aren’t difficult to access in the back of the monitor, so you won’t be spending much time pulling cables and dongles out of your actual PC if you don’t want to.

Maximum brightness of 450 nits – or 1,000 nits with HDR enabled – was also notable as it’s easy to find similar monitors with slightly higher HDR brightness. Nevertheless, it’s serviceable and hardly an issue.

Should I buy the Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM?

ROG Swift 4K OLED 27-INCH: Report Card

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HOW I TESTED THE ROG Swift 4K OLED 27-INCH

From the moment I received the ROG Swift 4K OLED 27-inch for testing, I got to work setting it up and optimizing it for gameplay and productivity tasks. I quickly assembled it and replaced my monitor with it at home, using it over a three-week period. I used it every day that I was home over this time, whether it was for watching YouTube videos, Twitch streams, TV shows or playing videogames.

Most of my time with the monitor was spent playing videogames. Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, The Headliners, Helldivers 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Car Manufacture and FlyKnight were among the games I tested the monitor with. I used the monitor with a variety of settings enabled and disabled, and used a DisplayPort connection.

Read more about how we test

[First reviewed February 2025]