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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Excellent contrast and color performance Great motion clarity with refresh rate up to 240Hz Solid HDR performance Surprisingly good speakers Cons Generic design Stand is too large and feels inexpensive No USB connectivity Our Verdict The Acer Predator X27U X1 is focused on one thing: delivering OLED image quality for less. Pursuing that goal leads to a few trade-offs, but it’s hard to argue with the monitor’s image quality or pricing. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Acer Predator X27U X1 Retailer Price $449.99 View Deal $499.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket The OLED price wars are here. Acer’s Predator X27U X1 is a new monitor with a 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED display. Yet it carries an MSRP of $600, which is hundreds of dollars less than the MSRP similar monitors had in 2023 and 2024. Acer is forced to make a few compromises to hit a low price but, when it comes to image quality, the X27U X1 is a match for its peers. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best gaming monitors for comparison. Acer Predator X27U X1 (X1bmiiphx) specs and features The Acer Predator X27U X1’s specifications are typical for a 27-inch QD-OLED monitor. It has a 26.5-inch QD-OLED panel with 2560×1440 resolution and a refresh rate up to 240Hz. Adaptive sync is supported, though only AMD FreeSync Premium Pro is officially listed. Display size: 26.5-inch 16:9 widescreen Native resolution: 2560×1440 Panel type: 10-bit OLED Refresh rate: 240Hz Adaptive sync: AMD FreeSync Premium Pro HDR: HDR10, VESA DisplayHDR 400 certified Ports: 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 1.4 Audio: 2x 5-watt speakers Warranty: 3 years Price: $599.99 MSRP, as low as $449.99 retail (U.S.) Pricing is where the Predator X27U X1 stands out, as it lists an MSRP just one cent shy of $600. Most similar monitors list an MSRP of $799.99 or more. Newegg already lists this monitor at $450. Shoppers should be careful to write down the X27U X1’s full model name, which is X1bmiiphx (yes, really). Acer sells several monitors that are similar in name, design, and specifications. It’s confusing enough that, as of March 2025, Newegg has the wrong photos on its listing for this monitor.  Acer Predator X27U X1 design The Acer Predator X27U X1 is obviously designed, built, and priced with affordability in mind. That leads to fewer compromises than I expected, but its design reflects the price. Though it does have a tiny Predator badge on the bottom bezel, the monitor is otherwise incredibly generic. It’s built from sturdy but unremarkable black plastics and lacks flourishes like customizable RGB-LED accent lighting. I’m not a fan of the stand, either. While the monitor itself is generic, the stand feels a bit cheap. This is mostly due to the coarse texture of the materials used. The tiny plastic clip used for cable management, which feels like it’s sure to break after a couple of years, doesn’t help matters. I don’t like the design of the stand base, either. It’s wider than most yet doesn’t keep the monitor any more stable than its competition. Matthew Smith / Foundry With that said, though, Acer’s budget stand keeps most of the functionality you’d expect from a more expensive OLED monitor. It adjusts for height, tilt, and swivel, though it doesn’t pivot into portrait orientation. A 75x75mm VESA mount is available for use with third-party monitor stands and arms. Acer Predator X27U X1 connectivity Acer keeps the Predator X27U X1’s connectivity as simple as its design. The monitor has two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4. All video ports can handle the monitor’s full resolution and refresh rate. The monitor also has a 3.5mm audio-out. But that’s it for connectivity. It has no USB-A or USB-C ports, which also means it lacks a KVM switch function (an increasingly common feature on OLED monitors). The lack of USB is certainly a downside and makes the Predator X27U X1 less versatile than more expensive alternatives. Alternatives like the MSI MPG 272URX offer multiple USB ports and USB-C with Power Delivery. That monitor has an MSRP of $1099.99, however. Acer Predator X27U X1 menu and features The affordable Acer Predator X27U X1 makes cuts to design and connectivity, but that’s where the sacrifices end. Contrary to what the price suggests, the X27U X1 has an effective on-screen menu with many options. While I do take issue with the font size, which is a bit small and low contrast for my tastes, I was surprised by the plethora of options. In particular, the monitor has easy-to-find settings for color temperature, gamma, and six-axis color calibration. Matthew Smith / Foundry The monitor also includes gaming features, like a dark equalizer (which can elevate shadowy areas of a scene to make foes visible) and a frame rate counter. The monitor includes several screen space modes, too. For example, you can restrict the visible area to 24 or 22 inches if desired. Acer packs the display with a pair of 5-watt speakers (most OLED monitors have no speakers or stick to dinky 2-watt speakers). The speakers aren’t going to knock your socks off, but they’re loud and clear. I didn’t mind relying on them for watching YouTube or playing games that don’t focus on bombastic audio design (like Civilization), and they’re indisputably an upgrade over most competitive monitors. It’s incredible to see this level of color performance from a monitor sold online for as little as $449.99. Acer Predator X27U X1 SDR image quality The Acer Predator X27U X1’s affordability isn’t obvious from its image quality. It has a 26.5-inch QD-OLED panel with a native resolution of 2560×1440. It has all the benefits common to OLED panels and doesn’t suffer any significant flaw. Matthew Smith / Foundry Let’s get the bad news out of the way. The Acer Predator X27U X1, like other OLED monitors, has a relatively tame maximum SDR brightness of 263 nits. That’s typical for an OLED monitor but a long way from the brightest LCD-IPS monitors, which can exceed 400 nits. This won’t matter in most situations, as a brightness of 200 nits or more is adequate for a typical home office or gaming den. If you plan to use the monitor in a brightly lit room where you can’t turn off or block nearby light sources, however, you might find the brightness unimpressive. Matthew Smith / Foundry Contrast, as typical for OLED, is excellent. The QD-OLED panel can achieve a minimum brightness of zero nits, which lets the monitor deliver a convincing sense of depth and dimensionality. Brighter scenes will seem to have depth within the scene, while darker scenes will show shadow details and a true, deep black level that backlit LCD displays can’t provide. Matthew Smith / Foundry Color gamut is a strength of all OLED monitors, but the Acer Predator X27U X1 knocks it out of the park. It showed up to 100 percent of sRGB, 98 percent of DCI-P3, and 95 percent of AdobeRGB. That’s the widest color gamut of all the OLED monitors I’ve tested so far in 2025, though only by a hair. A wide color gamut translates to a vivid, saturated image that looks punchy straight out of the box. It’s also good news for creatives who want to work with photos, videos, or digital art that targets a specific color gamut. Despite its price, the X27U X1’s color gamut is on par with many displays pitched at creative professionals. Matthew Smith / Foundry The Acer Predator X27U X1 scores well in color accuracy, too. It’s not the best, but not the worst, and the level of color accuracy provided here is enough that even the most critical viewers should be happy with the results. Content looks realistic and true to its original creative intent. The monitor scored slightly off-target in gamma and color temperature. It hit a gamma curve of 2.3 (off a target of 2.2) and a color temperature of 6400K (off a target of 6500). I found the difference in gamma noticeable, as content often looked a little darker than ideal, but I struggled to notice the difference in color temperature. Also, most QD-OLED monitors have a similar gamma curve. In both cases the differences are minor. Sharpness is the Predator X27U X1’s only real image-quality flaw. A resolution of 2560×1440 is not that sharp in 2025, and it’s made worse by the sub-pixel issues QD-OLED displays can suffer. You may notice strong pixelation or color artifacts around small fonts and high-contrast edges. This isn’t often noticeable in games, but it’s easy to spot in Excel spreadsheets or an IDE like VSCode. Put simply, I wouldn’t recommend the X27U X1 if you often view small text on your monitor—a 4K OLED, or an IPS-LCD display, will be better for that task. The Acer Predator X27U X1’s SDR image quality is excellent and exactly in line with most OLED monitors, including many that are more expensive. It scores especially well in contrast, color gamut, and color accuracy, where the X27U X1 delivers results on par with the most expensive OLED displays available today. It’s incredible to see this level of color performance from a monitor sold online for as little as $449.99. Acer Predator X27U X1 HDR image quality Okay, so the affordable Acer Predator X27U X1 delivers SDR image quality on par with other 1440p QD-OLED monitors, no matter their price. So, surely, it must give up some HDR performance—right? Matthew Smith / Foundry Nope. It’s a solid HDR monitor. Yes, the Predator X27U X1 turned in results that are technically a bit dimmer than some other OLED monitors I’ve recently tested. But these are rather slim differences and, as I test more and more OLED monitors, I’ve become convinced that the kind of differences shown in the graph don’t translate to a meaningful real-world advantage. That’s not to say HDR brightness doesn’t matter, but I don’t think the benefit of a slightly brighter HDR monitor, like the Alienware AW2725Q, is easy to see. The test clips that I normally view, which include the “Into the Storm” scene from Mad Max Fury Road and the “Gargantua” scene from Interstellar, showed good luminance detail and impactful HDR highlights. HDR games like Forza Horizon 5 looked great, too, providing a vivid and punchy presentation.  Acer Predator X27U X1 motion performance You won’t see any compromise in the monitor’s motion clarity, either. The Acer Predator X27U X1, like most 1440p OLED monitors, has a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz and quotes gray-to-gray pixel response times as low as 0.03 milliseconds. This makes for excellent motion clarity with minimal ghosting. Test images from League of Legends, for example, showed that character names and hitpoint bars were usually easy to read while scrolling across the map, though low-contrast font can still be hard to make out. A quick camera pan in a 3D game, like Valorant, will show good detail even in small objects. The motion clarity is helpful in Word and in web browsers, too, as fonts are easier to read when scrolling down a page or document. Of course, the same is true of other OLED monitors with a 240Hz refresh rate. But it’s good to see the X27U X1’s lower price doesn’t compromise motion clarity. Adaptive sync is supported, but Acer only lists official support for AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. The monitor will generally work with G-Sync and other video sources that support adaptive sync, but it’s not guaranteed. This is one small compromise in the name of affordability, as more expensive monitors often list themselves as compatible with both FreeSync and G-Sync. Should you buy the Acer Predator X27U X1? The Acer Predator X27U X1 is proof that 2025 is the year OLED becomes affordable. At $600 MSRP, which is already discounted to as little as $450 online, the X27U X1’s pricing severely undercuts what was typical for OLED monitors in 2024. It also starts to compete with high-end IPS-LCD monitors which, though they still have a few perks (like sharpness), generally can’t compete with OLED on image quality. I expect that Acer’s competitors won’t hesitate to match the X27U X1 with their own price cuts. But, for now, the X27U X1 is a good choice if you want to enjoy OLED for less. Read...

Short of joining the 5am club (I’m really not a morning person), I’ve been looking for ways to streamline my workflow, and I’m happy to say I’ve finally found one: side-mounting my phone to my laptop. Before you use one of those dubious sideways glance emojis and click off onto the next story, please hear me out. It really does make a big difference to my workday, I swear. First and foremost, side-mounting my phone helps boost my productivity. With my phone side-mounted to my PC I can receive and make phone calls hands-free, read my incoming texts and notifications with just a flick, and more easily keep an eye on apps like X (formerly twitter) for news stories as they’re breaking, without the cumbersome process of finding and picking up my phone off my desk, or alternatively finding the right tabs on my laptop. Using my phone like this I can also more easily multi-task. For example, I can keep writing the stories I’m working on for PCWorld, while I’m simultaneously in a Teams call or product briefing where I’m not expected to contribute anything but just listen, so it’s a real time saver, too. Side-mounting my phone to my laptop also helps keep me on point. Since my phone remains at eye-level, I’m less prone to losing my train of thought like I previously was when I had to scramble around for my phone, then regain my attention, reposition my hands on my keyboard, and find the place where I left off in my work — now I simply have to look to the right side of my laptop screen for whatever I need my phone for. But the best thing about my new setup? I can now use my phone as a second screen. This comes in very handy when I need to compare and contrast hardware specs in stories. Plus, my second display isn’t limited to being with me just at my desk in the office — it can be used wherever I happen to be working from. There are a range of different phone side mounts available, for which you can expect to pay about $13 to $15. Some of the best are universally compatible with all cellphone types and magnetic. That makes them so easy to set up, you simply have to mount your phone on the end of a magnetic arm that you then attach to the back of your laptop. It’s worth noting, though, that with some iPhones older than iPhone 12 and all Android phones you will need a magnetic case, magnetic ring, or magnetic adapter if you want your phone to stick to the magnetic arm. The holder’s arm usually comes adjustable so that you can position your phone exactly where you want it for maximum efficiency — yes, those accessory suppliers have thought of everything. So, if you’re like me and don’t do early mornings well without at least a jug of coffee but you still want to kick-start your workflow, my advice is to ditch the 5am wakeups and get yourself a phone side-mount instead. Trust me, you won’t regret it. Read...

Framework has decided to “temporarily pause” sales of certain low-end Framework 13 Laptops due to the new tariffs implemented by the Trump administration, the company said. “Due to the new tariffs that came into effect on April 5th, we’re temporarily pausing U.S. sales on a few base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U),” Framework said on Twitter/X. “For now, these models will be removed from our U.S. site. We will continue to provide updates as we have them.” 404 Media reported that the models had in fact been removed from Framework’s web page, with models starting at $799. In a followup post, Framework explained: “We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0%. At a 10% tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss. Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it.” What wasn’t clear, however, was why Framework didn’t simply raise its prices to compensate. Economists and trade organizations have predicted since last year that manufacturers would simply raise prices by the tariffed percentage, simply passing along costs to the consumer. Potential customers responding to the Twitter post wondered the same thing, but the company didn’t respond. However, the full effects of the various Trump tariffs (up to 54 percent on imports from China, aluminum imports, and semiconductors) are slowly being understood and may vary depending upon company and product. Framework doesn’t seem to have raised its pre-order prices as a result of the tariff, however. When the Framework Desktop was first announced, the base price was $1,099. Though Framework sold out of its first few batches, at press time the company had moved on to “Batch 9” — which will ship in the third quarter, well after any tariffs have taken effect. However, Framework is still charging $1,099 for the base model, as before, as of press time. Framework has removed some of its low-end models, but hasn’t updated its pricing. Mark Hachman / Foundry Instead, Framework is apparently in the process of re-adjusting its prices for its existing PCs. For example, Framework’s DIY edition of the Laptop 13 indicates that the cheapest version available is priced at $749. In reality, a Framework 13 with a AMD Ryzen 7640U (at $899) is the cheapest option available. The company’s prebuilt page also indicates that Framework is selling a prebuilt Framework Laptop 13 for $899, when in fact only the “Professional” version for $1,499 appears to be in stock. Framework representatives declined to comment further. Read...

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