The Alienware AW3423DW is a new kind of gaming monitor. Featuring a Quantum Dot enhanced OLED display, it’s bright, vivid, and almost supernaturally fast. With the incredible contrast only an OLED panel can provide and peak brightness of 1000 nits, it delivers an HDR experience unlike any other gaming monitor today. It’s the first of its kind, and that’s reflected in its $1299 price, but if you’re in the market for an ultrawide gaming monitor, the Alienware AW3423DW is out of this world.
If features and specs were living things, the AW3423DW would be the gaming monitor equivalent of a supergroup. It features a 34-inch ultrawide-screen display and an impressive 3440x1440 (2K) resolution. That resolution can run natively at 144Hz with 10-bit color or overclock to 175Hz if you stick with 8-bit. It’s an OLED panel, so blacks are well and truly black, and are enhanced with quantum dots for improved colors and luminance. That brightness can shine all the way to 1000 nits, providing a true HDR experience, or lock to its HDR400 True Black mode for improved dynamic range and a still excellent HDR experience. Dell also quotes a ridiculously fast 0.1ms gray-to-gray response time, putting it on par with even faster monitors designed for competitive esports, all while offering one of the best pictures available you’ll find in a gaming monitor today. If that weren’t enough, it’s G-Sync Ultimate certified, which means it’s been put through more than 300 tests at Nvidia HQ to ensure it delivers a top-tier experience. This display may leave you with turned out pockets, but it will also leave a smile on your face.
Console and laptop gamers have long known the joys of OLED gaming, but it’s been slow in coming to the PC gaming market. So far, most of the monitors to feature OLED technology have been aimed at creators or have been so large that they’re just not practical to use at a desk (Gigabyte’s FO48U is a whopping 48-inches, for example). The desire for them is easy to understand. Since OLED panels don’t rely on backlights and instead dim individual pixels, they’re able to deliver incredible contrast and dynamic range. Blacks can be truly black since the pixel is literally turned off. Because of that granular level of pixel control, HDR content is better than ever, even without the ability to hit 1000 nits of peak brightness, which this panel can also do.
To overcome the challenges previously plaguing OLED panels and enhance image quality, Dell has coated the pixels in Quantum Dots, referring to this panel as a QD-OLED to set it apart. Quantum Dots have been leveraged to good effect in other monitors, and here they make all the difference. Not only is the AW3423DW able to deliver true blacks, but the QD layer enhances its overall luminance all the way up to 1000 nits and boosts color vibrance, as well as improving its power efficiency.
Brightness on this display is more varied than you might expect, however. In SDR mode, its typical brightness is only rated at 250 nits, and my Datacolor SpyderX Elite only measured 230 nits of consistent, sustained luminance at maximum brightness. On this setting, the display actually looks a little drab, but comes right back to life when either HDR400 True Black or HDR1000 is enabled with Windows HDR. While neither measurably improves brightness, the screen certainly seems to pop more and is much more vibrant. Between the two, HDR400 True Black actually offered the brightest, best looking image when not gaming.
The typical brightness in SDR was actually an early cause for concern. 250 nits is dim for a premium gaming HDR monitor. On top of that, Windows HDR is notoriously… well, bad. On Windows 11, the opposite is true: enabling HDR allows this monitor to come to life. Strangely enough, HDR400 True Black looks noticeably better outside of games. If you’re gaming in direct sunlight, the brightness could potentially be an issue, but the dynamic range on the QD-OLED panel allows it to look great without needing an exceptionally bright backlight to compensate.
One of the major concerns that comes with an OLED panel is burn-in, and Dell is addressing that in several ways. Like other OLED displays, pixel shifting will occur from time to time, causing what you’re looking at to move very slightly and prevent the image from remaining static and damaging the display. The OSD also includes two options for OLED Panel Maintenance: Pixel Refresh and Panel Refresh. Both will cycle the monitor through a process to counteract the effect of holding a static image for an extended period of time.
The display is expensive, but is well-made and feature rich – with one glaring omission, which we’ll get to in a moment. It features an 1800R curve, which pairs well with its exceptionally thin bezels to create a wider sense of space, and doesn’t lead to distortion around the edges. It’s great for immersive gaming and even better for creative work, like editing videos in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Around the rear of the monitor, we have the I/O panel. There are two HDMI inputs and one DisplayPort. There’s also two USB 3.2 SuperSpeed ports, and a USB Type-B to handle upstream communication with the computer. Along the bottom edge of the display are two more USB 3.2 ports and a headphone jack (there are no built-in speakers), all to the left of the joystick used to navigate the OSD. On the opposite side of the rear panel is the jack for connecting the power cable, and it’s the sturdy three-prong sort instead of the flimsy single-pole connector found on many cheaper 1440p ultrawides. Once everything is connected, the cables route behind a pair of hooks and through the stand for easy cable management. A plastic panel snaps in place to keep the back of the monitor looking tidy.
All of this is well and good, except that the AW3423DW only supports HDMI 2.0. That means current-gen consoles will be limited to 60 FPS. It’s an odd omission for a $1300 monitor, even if the 21:9 ratio isn’t ideal for console play. On PC, you’ll likely want to stick with DisplayPort as using HDMI will limit you to 100Hz instead of the native 144Hz or overclocked 175Hz.
The stand here is quite good. It features a large base that keeps the panel sturdy and avoids too much annoying shaking while gaming and typing. It offers four inches of height adjustment, 20 degrees of rotation, and -5 to +21 degrees of tilt. There’s no pivot action here but using a curved ultrawide in portrait mode isn’t ideal compared to a flat panel, so it’s not a big loss. Making these movements and adjustments is easy, quiet, and fluid.
Since this is a premium gaming display, you can count on customizable RGB lighting. There are four zones available to customize with your own color or one of eleven preset lighting effects. A ring around the center of the back and an alien logo both illuminate, as well as the power button and a small “downlight” in front of the joystick. Like most gaming monitors, these effects are pretty simple due to the limited number of LEDs and mostly won’t be visible (even the downlight; you’ll really only see the power LED when sitting in front of it), but it’s nice they’re there.
Taken as a whole, the AW3423DW does a good job of living up to the high expectations that come with a flagship gaming monitor tipping the scales above a thousand dollars. It would have been nice to see HDMI 2.1 support and a higher peak brightness in SDR mode, but the QD-enhanced OLED and the much higher bandwidth DisplayPort swoop in to save the day on both.
Controlling the monitor is mostly done through the on-screen display, but there is a software suite that comes in handy for adjusting the different lighting zones. There’s full RGB control compared to the limited color choices available in the OSD. It also allows you to choose your system’s power profile and doubles as a software launcher. To be honest, it feels a little barebones in functions for the monitor, especially as Gigabyte and MSI are shifting core OSD functions into their software suites and allowing you to make adjustments with hotkeys.
The actual OSD offers plenty of options. Under the Gaming tab, you’ll choose your picture mode. There are the expected options for FPS, MOBA/RTS, RPG, and Sports genres, as well as three customizable game presets with six-axis color sliders. There’s Warm and Cool color temperature presets, and a Custom Color mode with basic RGB sliders. These are important options, as they’ll allow you to calibrate its color, even without a colorimeter like our Datacolor SpyderX. The final mode available is Creator Mode, which allows you to choose your color space between DCI-P3 and sRGB.
The Gaming tab offers a few other important options. Surprisingly, there’s no on-screen reticle or magnifier option under the Game Enhance Mode menu. Instead, you can set a timer or the frame rate to appear in the corner of your screen, or cause a series of red lines to appear to help you align multiple monitors. Below this menu, you can enable the Dark Stabilizer, which increases detail in the shadows, and select your HDR mode.
When you’re not in HDR, the Brightness/Contrast menu allows you to make those adjustments. With HDR on, only contrast is unlocked. Elsewhere, you can adjust the lighting across 20 colors and three presets, control headset volume, and assign shortcuts to appear when you press the joystick right or left. Notably absent is any kind of overdrive or motion blur reduction setting, but that’s because it doesn’t need them, as I’ll explain in the next section.
The AW3423DW is tremendous when it comes to gaming. It is, without question, the best gaming monitor I’ve ever used. The Quantum Dot enhanced OLED panel feels like nothing short of a peek into the future of where gaming monitors are going, and is an absolute joy to use. Its nearest competitor, the Acer X35, pales in comparison, as does any other LCD monitor I’ve tested. OLED is game-changing for PC gaming in HDR.
Before getting into the actual gaming experience, it’s worth looking into some of the response time claims Dell made with this display. OLED is by nature much faster than LCD, and that works to great effect here, offering excellent responsiveness.
Starting with the Blur Busters UFO Test, the display delivers extremely impressive results. Without the need for an overdrive setting, the bottom two rows are ghost free. Slight ghosting appears on the top row only, but this is completely imperceptible without capturing an image with a high speed camera.
Moving over to Lagom’s LCD Tests, the results were much the same. Usually, we would see one bar or more halfway through transition, but across more than 20 high-speed snaps, only three caught a slight difference between the bars, while the remaining 17 were exactly as pictured here. These are the best results of any gaming monitor I’ve tested, and make it clear why there’s no overdrive or motion blur reduction setting in the OSD: it just doesn’t need it.
Moving over to colorimeter tests, the results are equally impressive. Dell rates it as covering 99.3% of the DCI-P3 color spectrum, while not including sRGB on its product page. The SpyderX Elite caps out at 100% and the AW3423DW topped it out for sRGB and hit 98% for DCI-P3. Color accuracy was also excellent, having come calibrated from the factory (a calibration read-out is included in the box). It’s worth noting here that there does seem to be some variance between units, so while ours was very well calibrated, double-check if you have the tools.
Gaming on the Alienware AW3423DW is an absolute pleasure. Even on the HDR400 True Black setting, the dynamic range that’s possible on this OLED display is next-level. Since the blacks can reach so deep and so much detail can be retained within the shadows, it doesn’t need to have the same level of brightness to achieve the same range as an LCD panel. Deciding whether to use the HDR400 True Black or HDR1000 setting is really a matter of personal taste.
This technology also completely sidesteps the need for local dimming zones. Where LCD monitors of equivalent brightness rely on edge-lit local dimming or multiple zones across the entire panel, here every pixel is its own dimming zone. There are no halos around bright points on the screen, no glow around your mouse pointer. This is precision dimming and is immeasurably better for local contrast and overall image quality.
The one thing to know, however, is that this display is designed to achieve 1000 nits only in very small areas to stay within power limits. It is, in fact, very conscious of power usage and will warn you that you’re exceeding recommended levels when turning up the brightness too high in Creator mode. In practice, using 1000-nit brightness for highlights is perfectly fine and works well to add sparkle to an already rich image.
The responsiveness of the panel also means that ghosting is never a problem. Whatever minor ghosting I picked up in the UFO test just isn’t visible here. In fact, it’s the opposite: motion clarity is visibly improved, which is helpful in high-level first-person shooters. This effect is only enhanced if you enable Nvidia G-Sync, and if you’re running an Nvidia graphics card, you certainly should be for the enhanced smoothness.
Even if you choose to run at 144Hz for the added color depth, the OLED panel is much more competitive against 240Hz and 360Hz LCD monitors than others at 144Hz.
The Alienware AW3423DW is currently available directly from Dell for $1,299.
The Alienware AW3423DW isn’t perfect, but it’s still incredibly impressive. At $1299, it’s expensive, but considering this may just be the best gaming monitor on the market today, it still winds up feeling like a good value. The future is coming, and Alienware is giving us our first look at what it might hold.