Gigabyte Aorus CV27F Monitor Review: 27" Of 165Hz Curved Gaming Bliss
Gigabyte Aorus CV27F Review: Viewing Angles and RGB control
To test viewing angles, we loaded up the HotHardware home page in Google Chrome to see how colors shift. Then, in a totally dark room, we photographed the display at several different angles. Since the CV27F has a VA panel, colors will probably shift more than a typical IPS display. The benefits of VA panels are that there's typically little to no backlight bleeding or glow around the edges, response times are generally quicker, and the image usually has an overall higher contrast ratio than their IPS rivals. Considering you'll typically sit and look at the monitor head-on, using a VA panel should be a good choice for gamers. These viewing angles represent a worst-case scenario where multiple people need to look at the screen.
Prior to testing, we reset the monitor to factory defaults and then calibrated the display using our ColorMunki Smile colorimeter and the free, open-source DisplayCAL 3 calibration software. Head-on, the CV27F looks outstanding; white is bright and black is very dark. Colors are rich and saturated, contrast is excellent, and overall images look great. We did have to manually set the refresh rate in Windows to the panel's native 165 Hz the first time we connected the CV27F to our test PC, but that is common for high-refresh displays. Even the fastest scroll of a webpage or the fastest movement of a mouse pointer was animated fluidly.
The CV27F has a VA panel with a light but effective anti-glare coating. The viewing angles aren't quite as good as an IPS display, but they're far better than even the best TN panels. At extreme viewing angles, the display starts to dim slightly and colors get washed out. Despite the overall less contrast-y look, text was still very legible and there was no hint of color inversion like you see in a TN monitor. The curved nature of the CV27F's big panel means that the viewing angle is never uniform, which aids readability on the far side of the monitor when you are centered in front. As the panel starts to curve back around towards the far end, colors start coming back.
From an extreme top angle, the panel had the same washed out look that it did from the sides, but just like before, text is very legible. Every accessibly-priced display technology today has to deal with this to some degree or another, so we don't count this as a strike against this particular model. Once you sit down in front of the CV27F the image quality is bright and saturated.
The CV27F has some RGB LED accents on the back, which work with Aorus's RGB Fusion 2.0 app. There's a total of 18 presets baked into the app, and most of them support selecting one of 16.7 million colors. While it's not possible to set the RGB LED accents to sync with video on the screen like you can on a Philips Ambilux TV, there are plenty of customization options. Our only complaint with this is that in most setups, the back of the monitor isn't visible. The LEDs don't get particularly bright, either, so there's very little light reflected off the wall. In short, there's no way to see the lights if your desk is pushed up against a wall like ours was and the back-bias lighting effect is minimal.
Of course, having a normal wall-facing setup didn't stop us from moving the test equipment around so we could put on a laser light show. One oddity is that Gigabyte's RGB Fusion software shows the eagle logo lit up, but the actual emblem on the back of the monitor remains dark. Also unlike the software's mock-up, the LEDs only show one color at a time, even in color cycle mode. The array can show any color you can think of, though, and the transitions between colors are smooth.
We mentioned that the panel is bright and has well-saturated colors, but how bright and saturated is it? We'll find out thanks to our colorimeter and DisplayCAL 3's built-in reporting tools next.
Prior to testing, we reset the monitor to factory defaults and then calibrated the display using our ColorMunki Smile colorimeter and the free, open-source DisplayCAL 3 calibration software. Head-on, the CV27F looks outstanding; white is bright and black is very dark. Colors are rich and saturated, contrast is excellent, and overall images look great. We did have to manually set the refresh rate in Windows to the panel's native 165 Hz the first time we connected the CV27F to our test PC, but that is common for high-refresh displays. Even the fastest scroll of a webpage or the fastest movement of a mouse pointer was animated fluidly.
The CV27F has a VA panel with a light but effective anti-glare coating. The viewing angles aren't quite as good as an IPS display, but they're far better than even the best TN panels. At extreme viewing angles, the display starts to dim slightly and colors get washed out. Despite the overall less contrast-y look, text was still very legible and there was no hint of color inversion like you see in a TN monitor. The curved nature of the CV27F's big panel means that the viewing angle is never uniform, which aids readability on the far side of the monitor when you are centered in front. As the panel starts to curve back around towards the far end, colors start coming back.
From an extreme top angle, the panel had the same washed out look that it did from the sides, but just like before, text is very legible. Every accessibly-priced display technology today has to deal with this to some degree or another, so we don't count this as a strike against this particular model. Once you sit down in front of the CV27F the image quality is bright and saturated.
The CV27F has some RGB LED accents on the back, which work with Aorus's RGB Fusion 2.0 app. There's a total of 18 presets baked into the app, and most of them support selecting one of 16.7 million colors. While it's not possible to set the RGB LED accents to sync with video on the screen like you can on a Philips Ambilux TV, there are plenty of customization options. Our only complaint with this is that in most setups, the back of the monitor isn't visible. The LEDs don't get particularly bright, either, so there's very little light reflected off the wall. In short, there's no way to see the lights if your desk is pushed up against a wall like ours was and the back-bias lighting effect is minimal.
Of course, having a normal wall-facing setup didn't stop us from moving the test equipment around so we could put on a laser light show. One oddity is that Gigabyte's RGB Fusion software shows the eagle logo lit up, but the actual emblem on the back of the monitor remains dark. Also unlike the software's mock-up, the LEDs only show one color at a time, even in color cycle mode. The array can show any color you can think of, though, and the transitions between colors are smooth.
We mentioned that the panel is bright and has well-saturated colors, but how bright and saturated is it? We'll find out thanks to our colorimeter and DisplayCAL 3's built-in reporting tools next.
