Very much appearing more like a TV than a monitor, the 43-inch 4K HDR Philips Momentum 436M6VBPAB is almost cumbersome, but still very much worth a look. Being such a size may present a challenge in making sure it can fit on your desk safely and well enough for practical use, but it is also weighty enough to give you no worries about its stability.

A little more expensive than a regular 4K HDR TV of the same size, but it seems to put gaming—and PCs—first. It has a good haul of ports covering HDMI 2.0, USB-C, DisplayPort, and Mini DisplayPort, it has a backlight that glows according to what's shown on the front of the screen (called Ambiglow), and it's an MVA-type panel that boasts a 4ms response time. Still, its 4K and HDR qualities are undeniable and, teamed with its TV-size, the accessible price tag will be very appealing. And with that 43-inch screen size you really get a feeling for the actual fidelity improvements of 4K gaming.


The LG 27UL650 is another killer 4K gaming monitor you can find for under $500. This IPS panel display has improved color and contrast over its previous model means you can get low input lag for gaming.

If you do more than gaming, this LG display sports wildly accurate color accuracy and HDR 10, which makes watching movies and editing a worthwhile endeavor. The only real downside is standard 60Hz refresh rate and the fact monitor has no speakers, so you'll have to invest in a good pair of headphones or speakers. But generally we'd recommend that over pretty much any tinny display speaker anyway.

How we test: gaming monitors

There are two main ways to test out our screens to determine the best gaming monitor. The first is by playing games on it. Subjectively testing the gaming performance of each panel isn’t necessarily going to give you the lowdown on the specifics of a particular screen. Still, it will let you test the functioning aspect ratio, native resolution, and any specific gamer-centric technologies they’re sporting.

Side-by-side comparative testing in this manner is also incredibly valuable for keying into the sometimes subtle differences between each panel. When you use a screen in isolation, it’s easy to become blind to its comparative faults as you simply get used to them. Testing screens back-to-back allows us to discover and highlight specific issues between them.

We also use a heap of standardised tests produced by Lagom in order to ensure levels and saturation are visually up to our standards.

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