So I’ve had a couple of MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD panels on my gaming setup for a long time now. They’re 1440p, 165Hz, got some lovely colour reproduction and I’ve been pretty happy with them all this time. I even made a video about them back around this time in 2022. God it’s been that long? Anyway, MSI has reached out and asked me if I wanted to check out their new G274QPF E2. These model numbers are getting ridiculous now. I’m probably not going to say that model number again throughout this video because it would just sound horrific, but I’ve had the panel on my desk for a little while and wanted to talk about it.
So MSI’s new IPS display, well, rapid IPS they’re calling it but more on that in a moment, can produce a resolution of 2560x1440p, it is slightly faster than my last screens at 180Hz which isn’t hugely noticeable I suppose, but if you’re coming from a 120 or below you’re probably going to see a difference. It’s HDR 400 and it has adaptive sync technology which activates within a range of 48-180Hz. It’s got some small bezels, and around the back it is rather plain. There’s no RGB like on my last one which is fine because its at the back. The VESA mount is a little frustrating though at 75×75 so it’s not compatible with my current wall mount which is why it’s currently sitting on its stand. Underneath you’ve got a DisplayPort 1.4a, two HDMI 2.0bs which unfortunately can only hit a max refresh rate of 144Hz. There’s a USB Type-C port that’s capable of displaying and charging at 15 watts for you laptop users. There’s also a headphone out. The stand is pretty much plastic and the baseplate is just an ugly black slab which is a bit of a shame. But it does keep the cost down. You’ve got some basic cable management hole too in the arm. There’s a joystick for navigating the menu which is lovely and everything here is where you’d expect with an MSI panel including your Gaming options which house your Game Mode, shadow control, overdrive settings and all of that kind of thing. Your Professional controls is there for your image mode, your low blue light settings, MPRT activation and HDR activation. And finally, most importantly your Image Settings which house your brightness, contrast, sharpness and colour temperature of which I stuck to Normal by the way in this test.
Kicking things off with the monitors Colour Gamut, in its sRGB mode it achieved a 100% sRGB gamut, 76% AdobeRGB, 78% P3 a nd 71% NTSC gamuts. Switching this to its Office mode it pushed to 87% AdobeRGB, 91% P3 and 84% NTSC. So you do get a better gamut when switching picture modes here. However, looking at the Colour Accuracy, in sRGB mode it hit an average Delta-E of 0.72 and a maximum of 5.28. In Office mode though colour accuracy fared terribly with an average Delta-E of 8.67 and a maximum of 12.8. It seems like the panel is favouring brightness in this mode over colours, because yes while the screen if brighter, assuming to combat harsher lighting in office environments, things do look a little washed out. User mode in either case for colour gamut or colour accuracy fared no better. So I stuck to the sRGB Mode for the majority of my testing.
Moving onto Brightness & Contrast, it achieved a max brightness of 484 nits with a contrast ratio of 1,340:1 and a white point of 6700 which is nice and close to that 6500 point, which can actually be achieved if you drop the monitor brightness down to 25%, though you do lose out on contrast ratio to be expected. Colour Uniformity at 100% brightness also unfortunately performed horrifically, with issues running down the left-hand side of the panel, and it not getting much better towards the top right-hand side either. Dropping this to 50% saw a more even spread across the panel, but still had a hotspot in the centre. In reality though this didn’t prove to be a problem while playing games, and things like Overwatch 2 looked quite saturated and sharp so maybe an anomaly, or something the human eye can’t pick up, I’m unsure. Liminance uniformity at 100% brightness again saw issues down that left-hand side, and even at 50% there was still problems being had. Again, not something that was noticeable in real-world scenarios.
Moving on to testing the panel with the OSRTT tool you’ll easily see from these results which Overdrive setting, or Response Time setting as MSI call it in their menu, is best. Starting with Normal at 180Hz, its grey-to-grey response time fared, not great as the initial time sat at 8.34 with a 13.33 percent in window. However, in this setting, it claimed that there was zero overshoot whatsoever, which I find slightly hard to believe. Moving onto Fast, things looked slightly better with a G2G response time of 5.06 and a 53.33 percent in window. However, I did see some RGB Overshoot come into play, with an average error of 3.1, but this is a negligible amount and not worth worrying about in this mode. When it got to the Fastest Response Time, we saw an average initial response time of 3.17 which was good,, but only spent 3.33 percent in window. This also was the same kind of story with the RGB Overshoot which saw an average error of 33.33. This was a bit of a shame to see, as MSI is claiming their Rapid IPS panel technology is supposed to have a super-fast 1ms response time, but it’s not the answer I got here.
One thing I did find strange with my OSRTT tool however is because the MPRT mode dims the backlight quite considerably, I wasn’t able to gain a reading due to backlight strobing.
But this translated rather well on a UFO Ghosting Test where the Fast Mode at 180Hz performed best out of the three Overdrive settings, and the Fastest produced a severe amount of ghosting, even though its grey-to-grey response time was technically the best. I would, after seeing these results together, trade for the ever so slightly slower G2G response time in favour of a clearer image when it came to ghosting. However, I must say that if you ran the monitor on MPRT Mode, which stands for Moving Picture Response Time, it gave quite a sharp result. But unfortunately, the darker the image got the more noticeable the blur and even overshoot got which can be seen in the images on screen now.
This though translated into gaming and I must say I feel like the MSI panel performed pretty well. I was not really left wanting more, and to be honest with you, coming from my slightly slower, though much older 165Hz MSI panels, it felt like a brighter and welcome upgrade. And playing some Overwatch 2 looked really nice and I must say to the naked eye, well, someone with my eyesight and perception anyway, it was really a bad experience. Playing slower story-driven games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 which I’ve just downloaded looked really vivid and colourful. Maybe I’m just a bit biased for MSI monitors, as I’ve had two on my desk now for the best part of five years and they’ve done me an absolute turn, but I’ve got to say that I’ve been pretty impressed with the presentation of games I’ve seen so far on this panel. And what I must say I have noticed between this and my older MSI monitor sitting here, which you probably have too throughout this video, maybe is the fact that it’s just so much brighter to the eye. Maybe not as saturated in colour, though but its definitely more vivid. Bleed however as explained earlier does come into play here, especially in darker scenes, and yes, I know this photo has been taken with my phone so is vastly exaggerated compared to viewing this screen with the naked eye, but it gives you an idea of why I got the results I did before.
All in all not a bad panel, and I just want to say now that not all these results really mirror the experience I’ve had with this panel. Yes the test results look like a bit of a red flag but playing through the games I have and seen what I have with this panel it does look really nice for gaming and for media. The colours looked really nice and though the bleed looked bad and the colour uniformity looked off in my Datacolor tests, it just didn’t translate, well, I didn’t think it did anyway. When you’re zipping around a game of Overwatch it looks great. It’s a £230 monitor, or that’s what I saw on Amazon at the time of making this video, so take that into consideration too. It’s vastly cheaper than what I paid three years ago for my current MSI panels, so there’s that too.
