Dell Alienware AW3423DW 34″ QD-OLED 175Hz (3440 x 1440)

I ordered on March 4th! Still no indication it will get delivered. The big lesson here is don't be Canadian.
 
I was telling folks to call Dell EPP/Business and order over the phone, anyone who placed their order that way already has it per reddit.
 
On a side note, for me atleast, changing the following settings work very well for SDR use and now almost match my NEC EA274Wmi including whitepoint :

Mode: TrueBlack400 (all other settings are default)

Windows HD color : On, SDR/HDR Brightness ratio: 19

NV panel Red Channel brightness boosted to 52 % from default 50 eliminates the native greenish white point.

1647020995020.png
 
On a side note, for me atleast, changing the following settings work very well for SDR use and now almost match my NEC EA274Wmi including whitepoint :

Mode: TrueBlack400 (all other settings are default)

Windows HD color : On, SDR/HDR Brightness ratio: 19

NV panel Red Channel brightness boosted to 52 % from default 50 eliminates the native greenish white point.

View attachment 452791
Can't you do this using OSD controls?
 
When it comes to text it looks a little off when compared to LCDs with a standard RGB pixel structure. It's more noticeable with certain text colors/fonts on certain colored backgrounds. One example is the Steam chat window. With black text on a white background it doesn't look too bad to me. With gaming and watching videos it looks fine.

Yeah, too bad about the non-standard subpixel layout. Text quality is very important if you use it for more than just gaming and watching videos. Also, too bad there's a fan.
 
When calibrated using cleartype, text quality is on par with my IPS panels. Also, you can control custom RGB values in custom mode but I'm choosing to keep the Nv CP adjustment above and the display on standard mode because I don't want HDR preset calibration impacted. It dynamically switches to DCI-P3 using HDR on in windows and adjusting the primaries via OSD is likely going to mess with HDR output. Still more testing to be done. If using custom color, lowering green to 95% seems to match (visually) sRGB 6500k whitepoint on my IPS screens.
 
Let me know of any tests request. If time permits I'll add them in the review on Sunday.

Going to do the usual measurements for luminance, accuracy, gamut, input lag, spd, and create an alternate white point.
 
Let me know of any tests request. If time permits I'll add them in the review on Sunday.

Going to do the usual measurements for luminance, accuracy, gamut, input lag, spd, and create an alternate white point.

Great ty, I personally just want to see it compared to a cx or c1, if you have one that is.
Like are the colors really that more vibrant, or should I feel comfortable getting the 42" c2 knowing there is not much of a difference.
 
Estimated to arrive on June 1st. that is almost 3 months. :0

Alienware-AW3423DW-Order-NoCharge.jpg
 
Zepher and l88bastard
Thank you guys for testing. I truly appreciate it. I'm not sure how much youtube is compressing or changing your original recording, but when I play it back on my Dell AW3418DW at full screen 1080P (max res) the banding PWM is clearly there on the hardforum background, and also in the dark scenes on the anime, but I don't see it on the motorcycle clip and it's hard to see on the Las Vegas clip. It does appear to use PWM to darken the screen, but interesting enough - unlike old monitors it's not the whole screen flickering. I guess the OLED's pixel by pixel addressing is allowing that to occur. Interesting. I have no idea if that would bother me or not, but I'm running through something similar on my new JVC NZ7 laser projector that is painful for me to use, and I guess I'll try to just stay clear of PWM all together.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/la...eye-fatigue-questions-and-discussion.3237865/

Thank you for taking the time to test and share your results. You've been very helpful.
I think I'll wait for the 42" C2 OLED, as LG claims to not have eye strain issues in their new displays.

At least in their commercials.


I preordered one of the 42", but it's not due in till end of April.
 
The 6700XT on my SFF rig seems to have less of the greenish whitepoint at RGB 100 for SDR content than the NV cards, something to keep in mind since like most gaming displays it does not store settings per input.
 
Well my order was supposed to ship yesterday but nothing yet from Dell Canada. Estimated ship date still shows as yesterday and no email about a delay yet.

Let me know of any tests request. If time permits I'll add them in the review on Sunday.

Going to do the usual measurements for luminance, accuracy, gamut, input lag, spd, and create an alternate white point.

Are you going for d65 white point? I’d be curious how close it is out of the box and whether using the custom preset at default settings really differs much from standard in HDR.
 
Woke up to a pleasant surprise this morning:

We have received your request as you were looking to apply the Coupon Code on your order.

I would like to inform you that I did check our records and I see that there was a price drop as well for this product.

The order was purchased for $1,307.49(Sub-total).
The price on the website is $1,295.49.
Price post applying the Coupon Code: $1,165.94.

The difference amount is $141.55.

Therefore, I have submitted a request with our Finance Team to Credit the amount worth $141.55 back to your Original Mode of Payment Method.
Please be advised that the Credit will be posted within 8 Business Days.

Was 120% not expecting them to do this.
 
Well my order was supposed to ship yesterday but nothing yet from Dell Canada. Estimated ship date still shows as yesterday and no email about a delay yet.



Are you going for d65 white point? I’d be curious how close it is out of the box and whether using the custom preset at default settings really differs much from standard in HDR.
Same here, really pisses me off that I ordered on March 4th and mine isn't coming but all these Americans that ordered on the 6th got theirs. Canada always gets shafted in product launches.
 
It does appear to use PWM to darken the screen, but interesting enough - unlike old monitors it's not the whole screen flickering. I guess the OLED's pixel by pixel addressing is allowing that to occur. Interesting. I have no idea if that would bother me or not, but I'm running through something similar on my new JVC NZ7 laser projector that is painful for me to use, and I guess I'll try to just stay clear of PWM all together.
Some Full Array Local Dimming TVs use PWM to dim the LEDs only in the darker area of the image, which does cause problems for sensitive individuals.
This dimming method might explain why TUV has certified this QD-OLED as "flicker free"... They may have tested only white/bright fields at varying brightness levels, while it looks like the flicker-based dimming becomes active only for darker shades.
 
Same here, really pisses me off that I ordered on March 4th and mine isn't coming but all these Americans that ordered on the 6th got theirs. Canada always gets shafted in product launches.
If it’s delayed significantly maybe we can pester the sales reps for a extra discount. They used to hand em out like candy dunno if they still do. Always got a chuckle out of dell trying to buy out RMAs with steep partial refunds to make you keep ‘em.
 
Same here, really pisses me off that I ordered on March 4th and mine isn't coming but all these Americans that ordered on the 6th got theirs. Canada always gets shafted in product launches.

I ordered on the 6th and didn't receive it.
 
add some info for anyone looking G8QNB as someone who had G9 Neo. I can tell they might add everything say dsc or HDMI 2.1 but their scaler let you down. let alone Their QC can almost promise you they getting AW rejects and just going ship you shit panels or other issues with firmware. after Tim from hardware unbox stop making videos to force them make firmware updates for Neo G9 they stop and even thought Broke SDR Fald again.
 
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Here’s a few picture of my AW3423DW. Been gaming and using YouTube HDR videos for break (can’t wait to Sunday when classy comes and calibrates).

sorry if pictures bad using my phone lol.
 

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Let me know of any tests request. If time permits I'll add them in the review on Sunday.

Going to do the usual measurements for luminance, accuracy, gamut, input lag, spd, and create an alternate white point.

One thing to keep an eye out for...Samsung's older OLED panels used in laptops were very unstable depending on what's on the screen and panel brightness setting. So you could get a perfect calibration with 10% windows, then change the pattern window size or adjust menu brightness setting and get completely different SDR results. Made calibration kind of futile. Hopefully this doesn't apply to QD-OLED.
 
add some info for anyone looking G8QNB as someone who had G9 Neo. I can tell they might add everything say dsc or HDMI 2.1 but their scaler let you down. let alone Their QC can almost promise you getting they getting AW rejects and just going ship you shit panels or other issues with firmware. after Tim from hardware unbox stop making videos to force them make firmware updates for Neo G9 they stop and even thought Broke SDR Fald again.
It's been eerily quiet about the G8 version but getting a Samsung gaming monitor is basically a gamble. Sad about the G9 Neo, ticks the checkmarks to be a great monitor. Is that you had mounted on the wall based on the pictures you just shared?
 
It's been eerily quiet about the G8 version but getting a Samsung gaming monitor is basically a gamble. Sad about the G9 Neo, ticks the checkmarks to be a great monitor. Is that you had mounted on the wall based on the pictures you just shared?
it was for 55in A90J that i tried to use but i ended up going back to normal monitors shortly after with G9 Neo and than my mine started having issues and just got refund. Now i am finally happy AW3423DW. only gripe is no DSC but its not worse deal anyway.
 
Well my order was supposed to ship yesterday but nothing yet from Dell Canada. Estimated ship date still shows as yesterday and no email about a delay yet.



Are you going for d65 white point? I’d be curious how close it is out of the box and whether using the custom preset at default settings really differs much from standard in HDR.
I'm going to check D65 but it's very likely to suffer metamerism and need an AWP.
Here’s a few picture of my AW3423DW. Been gaming and using YouTube HDR videos for break (can’t wait to Sunday when classy comes and calibrates).

sorry if pictures bad using my phone lol.
See you on Sunday.
One thing to keep an eye out for...Samsung's older OLED panels used in laptops were very unstable depending on what's on the screen and panel brightness setting. So you could get a perfect calibration with 10% windows, then change the pattern window size or adjust menu brightness setting and get completely different SDR results. Made calibration kind of futile. Hopefully this doesn't apply to QD-OLED.
Nice to see you here wizziwig.
Using 10% vs 100% windows definitely measure differently even on WRGB OLED, but it should maintain decent consistency through the grayscale. These appear to have less aggressive ABL so I'd expect them to perform a little better there.
 
I'm going to check D65 but it's very likely to suffer metamerism and need an AWP.

See you on Sunday.

Nice to see you here wizziwig.
Using 10% vs 100% windows definitely measure differently even on WRGB OLED, but it should maintain decent consistency through the grayscale. These appear to have less aggressive ABL so I'd expect them to perform a little better there.
My attempts to calibrate the CX 48 I had last year using my limited i1D Pro led me to the conclusion eyeballing is probably better for OLED SDR tuning, eyeballing against a well calibrated SDR display that is. Interested to see your findings though.
 
Yeah, too bad about the non-standard subpixel layout. Text quality is very important if you use it for more than just gaming and watching videos. Also, too bad there's a fan.

It never fails....every monitor release there is always one of these guys lol
close-door-the-office.gif
 
Zepher and l88bastard
Thank you guys for testing. I truly appreciate it. I'm not sure how much youtube is compressing or changing your original recording, but when I play it back on my Dell AW3418DW at full screen 1080P (max res) the banding PWM is clearly there on the hardforum background, and also in the dark scenes on the anime, but I don't see it on the motorcycle clip and it's hard to see on the Las Vegas clip. It does appear to use PWM to darken the screen, but interesting enough - unlike old monitors it's not the whole screen flickering. I guess the OLED's pixel by pixel addressing is allowing that to occur. Interesting. I have no idea if that would bother me or not, but I'm running through something similar on my new JVC NZ7 laser projector that is painful for me to use, and I guess I'll try to just stay clear of PWM all together.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/la...eye-fatigue-questions-and-discussion.3237865/

Thank you for taking the time to test and share your results. You've been very helpful.
I think I'll wait for the 42" C2 OLED, as LG claims to not have eye strain issues in their new displays.

At least in their commercials.


I preordered one of the 42", but it's not due in till end of April.

1647044684453.png
 
After playing around with this monitor with both SDR and HDR games I can safely say I am blown away with it. I tried both HDR400 and HDR1000 in Doom Eternal with it's in game HDR settings set to their default. In HDR1000 mode the ABL is too aggressive and to me negates the advantage of it being able to hit 1000nits in certain situations. In HDR400 mode Doom Eternal looks incredible. Colors are vibrant, brightness is excellent and of course the black levels are incredible. Shadow detail also looks great and doesn't have the level of black crush that you can get on LG OLEDs.

When the monitor is in HDR mode it locks the brightness settings but you can still control the contrast. Increasing the contrast from the default 75% up to 100% did make the picture appear brighter but I returned it to 75% since I'm not sure what setting is correct.

I tried increasing the brightness of the red value in the NV control panel as shown above but for me it gave the screen a red tint. I also noticed in my displays settings for the color profile it's using "DELL AW3423DW Color Profile,D6500" Not sure if this is the same for everyone.

Honestly, I haven't been this impressed with a screen in long time. It just looks so darn good!
 
l88bastard
I'm no PWM expert to be sure. I haven't even encountered anything PWM in like a decade. The last time I encountered it was a monitor I bought from Microcenter that I had to quickly return because it was painful for me.
I don't have any OLED stuff, but I do read online that people have had eyestrain with OLED and PWM. Do a websearch with those two terms and you'll get lots of results. People's iPhone 12's for instance with their OLED screens cause people eye pain. Is it the C1 and newer that have fixed that? I'm not clear? C2 should be good?
I have a suspicion this Alienware would cause me trouble based on those videos, because that banding movement recorded in the camera is the kind of stuff picked up on the JVC Laser projector I have now that makes my eyes feel like they are burning and after only 30 minutes or so of viewing my eyes hurt for days at this point. :(
 
l88bastard
I'm no PWM expert to be sure. I haven't even encountered anything PWM in like a decade. The last time I encountered it was a monitor I bought from Microcenter that I had to quickly return because it was painful for me.
I don't have any OLED stuff, but I do read online that people have had eyestrain with OLED and PWM. Do a websearch with those two terms and you'll get lots of results. People's iPhone 12's for instance with their OLED screens cause people eye pain. Is it the C1 and newer that have fixed that? I'm not clear? C2 should be good?
I have a suspicion this Alienware would cause me trouble based on those videos, because that banding movement recorded in the camera is the kind of stuff picked up on the JVC Laser projector I have now that makes my eyes feel like they are burning and after only 30 minutes or so of viewing my eyes hurt for days at this point. :(
The AMOLEDs used in iPhones use PWM. None of the LG OLEDs use PWM or certainly none of the recent models such as C1/CX and G1/GX.

Most likely what those users are experiencing is the stutter of low frame rate content such as 24p and 30p on OLEDs since the response time is so fast you don’t have any motion blur blending the transition between frames. I know I cannot stand looking at the C1 for film or tv for more than about 10 minutes before getting a splitting migraine unless I turn cinematic motion on under clarity for interpolation.
 
After playing around with this monitor with both SDR and HDR games I can safely say I am blown away with it. I tried both HDR400 and HDR1000 in Doom Eternal with it's in game HDR settings set to their default. In HDR1000 mode the ABL is too aggressive and to me negates the advantage of it being able to hit 1000nits in certain situations. In HDR400 mode Doom Eternal looks incredible. Colors are vibrant, brightness is excellent and of course the black levels are incredible. Shadow detail also looks great and doesn't have the level of black crush that you can get on LG OLEDs.

When the monitor is in HDR mode it locks the brightness settings but you can still control the contrast. Increasing the contrast from the default 75% up to 100% did make the picture appear brighter but I returned it to 75% since I'm not sure what setting is correct.

I tried increasing the brightness of the red value in the NV control panel as shown above but for me it gave the screen a red tint. I also noticed in my displays settings for the color profile it's using "DELL AW3423DW Color Profile,D6500" Not sure if this is the same for everyone.

Honestly, I haven't been this impressed with a screen in long time. It just looks so darn good!
1647048496890.png
 
l88bastard
I'm no PWM expert to be sure. I haven't even encountered anything PWM in like a decade. The last time I encountered it was a monitor I bought from Microcenter that I had to quickly return because it was painful for me.
I don't have any OLED stuff, but I do read online that people have had eyestrain with OLED and PWM. Do a websearch with those two terms and you'll get lots of results. People's iPhone 12's for instance with their OLED screens cause people eye pain. Is it the C1 and newer that have fixed that? I'm not clear? C2 should be good?
I have a suspicion this Alienware would cause me trouble based on those videos, because that banding movement recorded in the camera is the kind of stuff picked up on the JVC Laser projector I have now that makes my eyes feel like they are burning and after only 30 minutes or so of viewing my eyes hurt for days at this point. :(

I don't get any eyestrain from this freakishly amazing gaming display.

Also
Ufo test @ 960 pixels sec is a thing of beauty!
175hz top
88hz middle
44hz bottom


1920 pixels sec still clear
1920 too fast to capture with phone lol.....but you can follow with eyes....its fantabulous
starts to get a lil blurry at 2560 haha

1647048646622.png
 
After playing around with this monitor with both SDR and HDR games I can safely say I am blown away with it. I tried both HDR400 and HDR1000 in Doom Eternal with it's in game HDR settings set to their default. In HDR1000 mode the ABL is too aggressive and to me negates the advantage of it being able to hit 1000nits in certain situations. In HDR400 mode Doom Eternal looks incredible. Colors are vibrant, brightness is excellent and of course the black levels are incredible. Shadow detail also looks great and doesn't have the level of black crush that you can get on LG OLEDs.

When the monitor is in HDR mode it locks the brightness settings but you can still control the contrast. Increasing the contrast from the default 75% up to 100% did make the picture appear brighter but I returned it to 75% since I'm not sure what setting is correct.

I tried increasing the brightness of the red value in the NV control panel as shown above but for me it gave the screen a red tint. I also noticed in my displays settings for the color profile it's using "DELL AW3423DW Color Profile,D6500" Not sure if this is the same for everyone.

Honestly, I haven't been this impressed with a screen in long time. It just looks so darn good!
D65 appears red to the untrained eye, most folks would tend to prefer a bluer white point of 7-7500k as 'neutral'.
 
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