Asus has announced it will be bringing its ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM to South Africa soon, making it the first and only (so far) high-refresh-rate OLED gaming monitor available here.

We often miss out on high-ticket items here in SA so it’s great to finally see some of them making it to our shelves. Especially seeing as this is one of the best gaming monitors available on the global market. Keep that in mind while we go through the specs and when we get to the price.

The PG27AQDM hits all the sweet spots

For many budget-conscious gamers, 1440p is the sweet spot between the easy-to-push 1080p and the GPU-straining 2160p. So the 27in 1440p OLED panel of the PG27AQDM makes a whole lot of sense. Fantastic colours, near-instant response time, and infinite contrast aside, the panel is also capable of a 240Hz refresh rate. That’s supported by adaptive sync certificates for variable refresh rates from AMD with FreeSync Premium and is classed as “G-SYNC Compatible” with Nvidia builds.

OLED displays generally struggle with brightness but with an advertised 1,000 nits peak HDR brightness, that might not be a concern with the PG27AQDM. That could be thanks to the custom heatsink Asus has stuck on the back or the intelligent voltage optimisation algorithm it uses to make sure every pixel maintains its brightness.

Asus has gone for a heavy gamer aesthetic with the PG27AQDM’s design, complete with an RGB ROG logo projected onto your desk from the stand. We’d expect nothing less from an ROG product.

There are two HDMI 2.0 ports on the back which was a little disappointing as those don’t have enough bandwidth to support maxing out the display. Luckily, they’re joined by one of the superior connectors, a DisplayPort 1.4 port with support for display stream compression (DSC). There’s also a 3.5mm audio jack and two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports.

If you’re itching to get your hands on the ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM, you can get one from Incredible Connection Sandton on 30 September or from Incredible Connection Canal Walk on 7 October for an eye-watering R35,000.

Asus has tried to take the sting out of that price with a cash-back promo. If you order a PG27AQDM (or one of the other listed things) between now and 29 September from Incredible Connection’s Sandton or Canal Walk branches, you’ll be eligible for R3,000 cash-back. Whoop-dee-doo.