Porsche Design is an industrial-design subsidiary of Porsche AG, the Stuttgart builders of legendary sports and racing cars. As its name implies, it brings Porsche-inspired aesthetics to non-automotive products like clothes, glasses, and watches. It keeps a hand in electronics, too, which is why you see its name on the AOC Agon PD27 gaming monitor. The PD27 is a high-end 1440p AOC gaming monitor in a Porsche chassis, and it looks fantastic for more reasons than its aesthetics. Its screen is top-notch, with excellent contrast and color, a 240Hz refresh rate, and incredibly low input lag. At $799.99 list from various US resellers (or 649 Euros on the Porsche Design site), it’s pricey for a 27-inch screen, but its performance justifies the expense even more than its design pedigree, which is why it earns our Editors’ Choice award for high-end, midsize gaming panels. (And though not a gaming laptop, we can’t help but imagine a slick pairing of this panel with the Porsche Design Acer Book RS we tested late last year.)
The Design: Showroom Ready
The Porsche aspect of the Agon 27 comes through as soon as you take it out of the box. The various accessories like power adapter, cables, and remote (more on that below) come neatly packed in a Porsche Design-branded box that’s nice enough to reuse, along with a sleek, metallic 16GB USB drive containing the monitor’s manual and drivers. The monitor itself slides out of its packing materials completely preassembled, mounted on its striking stand. Instead of a chunky plastic base, the display sits on a solid metal skeleton of a table stand, inspired by the roll cage of the Porsche 911 RSR. It’s heavy and solid, and it has a wider footprint than similar-size monitors. The stand lets the monitor tilt up and down and turn slightly left and right, as well as adjust in height.
The screen itself is curved, with a narrow black band around the top and sides and an inch-wide bezel on the bottom edge with a Porsche Design logo. On the back of the panel, a four-way joystick sits on the lower-right corner. A connector for the chunky power brick, a USB upstream connector, four USB Type-A ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 3.5mm microphone jack face down to the right of where the monitor connects to the stand. Two DisplayPorts, two HDMI ports, and, oddly, a second 3.5mm microphone jack face downward to the left side of the stand.
The monitor is clearly designed to work exclusively connected to the stand, rather than mounted on a wall or to a VESA arm. The connection between the two parts appears to be permanent, a message hammered home by the RGB light block built into the top of the stand, where a short arm connects to the back of the monitor. The block can get quite bright, bouncing colored lighting around the back of the monitor and off the shiny metal of the stand.
The light block is complemented by a strip of RGB LEDs built into the bottom edge of the display. The onscreen display (OSD) lets you dim or turn off the lights, set them to a desired color, or shift among colors with different effects. If the color options aren’t enough, the light block also features a tiny projector that beams a Porsche Design logo onto the desk below the monitor. You can adjust this projection (or turn it off), too.
You can control the OSD with the joystick on the back of the panel, but it’s much easier to use the included remote, a trapezoidal, metal-backed cluster of buttons that wirelessly controls the monitor. A small black band of rubber on the bottom side keeps the remote in place anywhere on your desk, though the band had already started to peel off the metal when we started testing the monitor. The remote features four directional buttons, a central confirm button, a back button, and three mode buttons that let you jump between presets.
Unfortunately, the buttons on the remote are very flat, which makes it easy to press the wrong one if you aren’t looking directly at it. This is made even more frustrating by the OSD’s complicated design, which opens up to a series of irregular rectangles that provide access to confusingly arranged menus. Color Setup, Image Setup, Luminance, and Game Setting are all separate entries on the OSD, instead of just one or two picture mode menus that provide access to all of the brightness and color controls. Light FX controls the RGB lighting on the back and bottom edge of the monitor, but the logo projector’s controls are located in a completely separate menu under Extra. Add some inconsistencies between whether the right arrow or the center button advances the menu, and it’s a frustrating experience.
A pair of 5-watt speakers provides stereo sound straight out of the monitor. It isn’t a particularly powerful sound system, but it lets you listen to anything on your PC with ease. Unfortunately, controlling those speakers requires diving into the OSD to even adjust the volume. Neither the remote nor the on-monitor controls have a volume control for the speakers, forcing you to go into the Audio menu to make adjustments or rely on your computer’s volume controls. The menu also provides a five-band equalizer, but without presets we don’t recommend playing with it too much.
Tested Performance
As for the basics: The Porsche Design AOC Agon PD27 is a 27-inch curved monitor with QHD (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) resolution and a 240Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) with VESA DisplayHDR 400 and HDR10 compatibility, and it features AMD FreeSync Premium Pro adaptive refresh rate support.
We test monitors with a Klein K-80 colorimeter, a Datacolor SpyderX Elite colorimeter, a Murideo Six-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. Out of the box, with a standard dynamic range (SDR) signal, the Agon 27 showed a pretty underwhelming peak brightness of 175.795 nits (candelas per square meter) and an impressive black level of 0.078 nit for a contrast ratio of 2,266:1. This was in the “Standard” Eco mode, which keeps the monitor at about half brightness, however.
Switching the monitor to a gaming mode (in this case the Gamer1 preset) bumped up peak brightness considerably, to 382.195 nits. It also boosted black level to 0.195 nit, yielding a slightly lower contrast ratio of 1,964:1. With an HDR10 signal, brightness increased even further to 504.412 nits, with a black level of 0.232 nit for a 2,177:1 contrast ratio. Either way, that’s very strong contrast for a gaming monitor. Most comparable models we’ve seen don’t get quite as bright and feature contrast ratios around 1,000:1. (See more about how we test monitors.)
Out of the box, the Gamer2 picture mode offered the most accurate colors. The below chart shows the monitor’s performance against the sRGB color space, which it readily covered with no significant tinting…
The monitor covers most of the DCI-P3 color space, as well, at 89.4% of the gamut…
You’ll see quite accurate colors in the right picture mode, too, again with nothing skewed in a given direction. The MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD (another, more budget-minded Editors’ Choice award winner at this size that we just reviewed) offers wider color than the PD27, but its reds and greens are notably oversaturated, and magentas pull very warm on that monitor.
Non-gaming content looked quite nice on the Agon PD27. Colors in our 4K Costa Rica test footage looked a bit oversaturated, particularly in the reds, when viewed in the Gamer2 picture mode with an SDR signal through a PC. However, setting Windows 10 to output in HDR significantly tempered the reds, creating a picture that was still vivid and bright but much more natural-looking. The video was smooth and detailed in HDR, and not nearly as blown-out.
The Gaming Experience
We test input lag using an HDFury Diva HDMI matrix. With a 60Hz signal, the PD27 showed an input lag of 1.4 milliseconds. This is extremely low, matching the lag of the excellent MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD (whose refresh rate is only 165Hz).
The Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition benchmark looked excellent on the PD27. The picture was bright, and colors were vivid without appearing oversaturated. The motion in the benchmark looked smooth, with no noticeable choppiness or judder. Fine details like the textures and cuts of the characters’ clothes showed clearly in shadows.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive showed off the PD27’s excellent motion performance. The 240Hz refresh rate delivered exceptionally smooth motion, and I didn’t notice any choppiness or screen tearing even when spinning around next to walls. The FreeSync Premium adaptive refresh rate seemed to work very well, combining with the low input lag to make gameplay feel very fluid and responsive.
Verdict: Much More Than Just a Brand
The Porsche Design AOC Agon PD27 might sound ostentatious with its luxury-car branding, but it’s a fantastic gaming monitor under the gloss. Its 240Hz refresh rate offers smooth gameplay, and its input lag is among the lowest we’ve tested. Its picture quality is first-rate, too, with excellent contrast and color. Our only real complaints are a clunky OSD and the fact that the monitor is permanently attached to the stand. Otherwise, it packs everything you could want in a 27-inch QHD gaming monitor. (And really, the stand is nice enough that you likely wouldn’t want to put it aside.)
If you want to spend less, the MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD is our pick among gaming monitors under $500. It’s the same size and resolution as the PD27, but it has lower contrast and its colors, while wider, are less accurate. It’s also a 165Hz panel versus the AOC’s 240Hz, but it offers similar fluid motion with variable refresh rate and very low input lag, as well.
