This gorgeous 34-inch ultrawide OLED gaming monitor from Dell is $200 off
The Dell AW3423DWF delivers an incredible gaming experience.
Dell's Alienware AW3423DWF gaming monitor is a 34-inch curved ultrawide OLED that delivers an incredible gaming experience, thanks to its perfect contrast, excellent motion clarity and gorgeous colour reproduction. It's also normally extremely expensive at $1000, but today you can pick up this model for $800 at Best Buy following a $200 price cut.
So what makes the AW3423DWF worth its high asking price? Well, it's all down to the Samsung QD-OLED panel that the monitor is built around. You get all the stuff you'd expect from OLED displays - perfect blacks, wide viewing angles, near-instant pixel response times - but Samsung's QD-OLED offer even better colour reproduction and higher brightness figures. The latter is key too, as it means that this monitor is much more usable in brighter envrionments than most of its OLED peers.
However, you do still have to contend with an unusual subpixel layout that results in text fringing in Windows - something that Microsoft could fix with improvements to their TrueType feature but so far haven't. There's also the spectre of burn-in, though given safeguards like the automatic brightness limiter, dimming of static elements and pixel rotation, it's unlikely to be an issue with normal use cases.
Interestingly, the AW3423DWF isn't the first Alienware ultrawide OLED; it's actually the cheaper FreeSync version of the AW3423DW that arrived last year for $1300. According to a comprehensive comparison from Monitors Unboxed though, the AW3423DWF performs basically identically to its more expensive predecessor but is quieter with less input lag, user-upgradeable firmware and more OSD features. You're only sacrificing maximum refresh rate (165Hz vs 175Hz) and a physical G-Sync model, which are both nice-to-haves but not worth paying hundreds of dollars more for.
In any case, if you're in the privileged position to be able to drop $800 on a gaming monitor, this is my number one choice of what to drop it on.
For more recommendations, check out our top gaming monitor picks.