Redragon Opal GM27X5QIPS Gaming Monitor Review

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Redragon has never been known for making the highest-performing products on the market, but the company does have a solid reputation for making budget gaming peripherals that offer surprisingly decent quality at very low prices. Redragon is most well known for its keyboards and mice, but now it seems it is branching out into monitors as well.

Redragon sent us its new, Opal GM27X5QIPS Gaming Monitor to review. This isn’t exactly an entry-level gaming monitor either. It’s a large, 1440p flat IPS screen (though they make a VA curved version as well.) We were curious to see what kind of monitor Redragon could produce to compete in this high-performance market. Here’s what we found.

Specs

• Panel: 27” flat IPS
• Resolution: 2560×1440
• Refresh Rate: 165Hz
• Response Time: 1ms
• Ports: 2x HDMI 2.0, 1x DisplayPort
• PCI P3 90% color space
• AMD FreeSync
• Price: $269.99

Build Quality

Inside the box, you will find a base stand, power cord, DisplayPort cable, and the monitor itself. The Opal GM27X5QIPS has a black plastic casing with the Redragon logon in the center bottom printed in silver. The casing is quite thin on the top and sides, but there is a ¼” bezel around the perimeter of the screen.

The I/O includes a power input, two HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and a headphone jack. The monitor is controlled with several red plastic buttons on the back of the monitor. There is a power button and a few which are designated for media controls. There don’t appear to be any built-in speakers, USB ports, or RGB. The included base stand only allows for vertical tilt and doesn’t allow the monitor to be lifted vertically or to swivel horizontally.

Everything about the build quality in the Opal is adequate. It has a minimalist design that gives the user all the basic components one would expect in a gaming monitor and nothing else.

Picture Quality

The display is a 1440p 27” flat IPS screen. Just going off raw specs, this places the monitor in the upper-mid tier in terms of size, resolution, and performance. This is ideal for gamers with powerful graphics cards who don’t want to sacrifice framerates or picture quality in their gaming.

The colors are pretty good too. The monitor uses PCI P3 90% color space, which Redragon claims, “offers a wider color gamut than most conventional monitors, giving deeper colors and defining features, make the gaming picture more vivid.” They also state that this “offers high color accuracy and no fading case. The colors of all angles are more realistic and detailed.”

I found during my testing that the monitor offers good out-of-the-box color accuracy and that it is both bright and vivid. I also didn’t notice any dead pixels or issues with glare.

Gaming Performance

I tested out the Redragon Opal by playing some Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty and found that it performed admirably. The picture was sharp and clear and the colors of Night City were as bright and vibrant as I could have hoped.

The monitor also had no issues keeping up with the high frame rates produced by my RTX 4070. Its 165Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time aren’t the fastest on the market, strictly speaking, but these speeds are still very fast and I would consider them more than sufficient for a vast majority of gamers. I didn’t notice any lag, ghosting, stuttering, screen tearing, or motion blur in my time with it.

Is the Opal Worth the Money?

The Redragon Opal MSRPs at $269.99 USD, but you can already find coupons and discounts for it from retailers like Amazon. There are cheaper VA monitors with similar specs from Acer and Gigabyte, but the only IPS panel from a name brand that matches the Opal is the ASUS TUF VG27AQ which is currently going for $283.99. This suggests that the Redragon monitor is competitively priced, but isn’t necessarily the bargain that one might expect from the brand.

The Redragon Opal’s ‘all thrills, no frills’ design is ideal for a budget monitor. It provides a solid upper-mid-tier gaming experience with limited options or extra features. The starting price is still a bit high for what you get though. It would certainly be a good buy on a sale or if Redragon were to drop the price.