Today's the day when Nvidia's new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards, sporting Blackwell GPUs and all the latest AI wizardry, finally hit retailers' shelves. Should be you lucky enough to grab one, you might want to consider treating it to a lovely new monitor, to show off its gaming chops in a pixel-perfect display.
Both graphics cards are fully 4K-capable so it only makes sense to pair them with a high-resolution screen and I've two great examples for you. One's an enormous 49-inch ultrawide whereas the other is a blindingly fast 240 Hz 32-incher, but they're both toting a QD-OLED panel.
Do you want the best? Well, here they are:
- MSI MPG 491CQP | $850 @ Amazon
- MSI MPG 321URX | $920 @ Amazon
OLED gaming monitors for an RTX 5090 and 5080
Okay, so it's 'only' a 144 Hz gaming monitor that costs $850 but despite that minor niggle, everything else here is sublime. First of all, you've got a Samsung QD-OLED panel with a pixel response time rated to 0.03 milliseconds. That's so quick that you're never going to notice and it'll just seem instantaneous.
As with all such displays, it's not super bright (250 nits on average in SDR) but it's meant to be used in HDR mode for gaming and until you've experienced just what such a display can do for certain games, it's hard to put into words just how amazing OLED HDR really is.
Naturally, a 5120 x 1440 curved display isn't ideal for doing office work but it's super immersive for gaming, though it does depend on how good a game's support for ultrawide resolutions is.
In terms of connectivity, you get one DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1 sockets for PCs and consoles, plus a USB KVM hub to allow you to control two computers with the same mouse and keyboard.
This MSI MPG 321URX is currently our top pick for the best overall gaming monitor and given that our highly experienced display specialist Jeremy has tested more screens than I've had hot meals, you know it has to be special to stand out.
It has a fantastic glossy QD-OLED screen with a 240 Hz refresh rate but so do numerous other top-end gaming monitors. What gives the MSI the edge here is that it's notably cheaper than the competition, without cutting any noticeable corners.
And because it's one of the latest OLED panels around, it's just as good in office and content creation scenarios as it is in gaming. Sure, it's not super bright but that's par for the course.
It doesn't have all-purpose perfect HDR (but no monitor does right now) and its automatic brightness limiting system isn't the best either; one could argue that the design is a little dull, too.
But in the grand scheme of things, none of that really matters, as everything else is so good that we heartily recommend this monitor for anyone who manages to run off with an RTX 5090 today.
