The headline figures for the latest monitor from the Xiaomi family of displays certainly don’t slouch. The new Mi 2K Gaming Monitor dropped onto our desk earlier this month housing a QHD IPS display, 165Hz refresh rate, a stonking 95% DCI-P3 wide color gamut, and DisplayHDR 400 all in the box. This 27-inch display is clearly on course to take pride of place in any desktop that can’t afford the outlandish luxury of a Samsung Odyssey range, but we wanted to find out if the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor lives up to its potential.
Out The Box
If you want to get an idea of how heavily packed our Mi 2K Gaming Monitor was, then check out the video below. This sizeable screen comes well protected with a cardboard wrapper around a hefty polymer sandwich. While your device probably won’t be delivered in your very own crate, it will still remain clamped between two huge pieces of Polystyrene which you'll struggle to recycle. While this ensures that the main components of the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor are unlikely to end up damaged, Xiaomi can do far better than generating so much landfill when other options like Dell have long moved over to cardboard containers.
Inside the Box and Construction
Unboxing the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor isn’t particularly troublesome. Xiaomi provides the aforementioned 27-inch display, a stand, power cable, USB cabling, a display port cable, mounting screws, and the relevant documentation. Getting things together barely takes up more than five minutes. Like any decent display, the base of the stand screws together, and the display easily latches into the compatible hardware with a satisfying snap.
Fully constructed, the Mi 2k Gaming Monitor, like the Mi Curved Gaming Monitor 34" display, feels surprisingly polished. The stand is finished with gunmetal grey and minimalist lines. The uninterrupted facade and flush black back of the monitor effectively complement the thin bezels that line the front-facing portion of this device. Xiaomi has gone to some considerable effort to elevate the look and feel of the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor beyond being simply functional. The integrated magnetic backplates, sunken heat vents, and overall minimalistic approach, even down to the integrated screws, set an impressive precedent for what’s under the hood.
Further enhancing the same clean aesthetic, Xiaomi has also included a cable cover for the aforementioned ports and an integrated USB 3.0 hub to keep your cables correctly under wraps too.
Specifications
- Price: 449€ (Mi)
- Screen size: 27 inches
- Maximum resolution: 2560 × 1440
- Response time: 1ms (IMBC), 4ms (GTG)
- Refresh rate: 165Hz
- Color gamut 95% DCI-P3, 100% sRGB
- Number of colors 16.7 million
- HDR: VESA DisplayHDR™ 400
- Ports: DP 1.4 port - HDMI 2.0 port x 2 - USB IN port - USB 3.0 port × 2 - AUDIO port×1
- Viewing Angle: 178 degrees
Power On
Powering on the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor, it’s immediately obvious that this gaming display is a different class from traditionally budget-conscious screens. The IPS panel projects an immediate impression of quality and renders a crisp picture at 2560 × 1440. Viewing angles are just a smidge under 180 degrees, as you'd expect from an IPS panel and anybody else looking over your shoulder won't miss the solid 400 nit backlight. Set against the TN tech of yesteryear or even entry-level VA displays, the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor seems to immediately tick all the boxes with a good balance of real estate, impressive color reproduction, some solid illumination, and plenty of port options.
Setup and Configuration
Of course, out the box eyeballing is hardly representative of the real on-screen experience. Thankfully calibration doesn’t take too much effort with the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor’s inbuilt Smart Modes. Four buttons hidden at the bottom right of the monitor’s housing allow easy entry into the menu and basic on-screen calibration is simple enough to action. All the usual settings are accounted for and while basic, there’s nothing obviously problematic about the onboard UI for most users. Customization does not extend as far as individual color control, but factory defaults barely required any out the box tweaking and produced a good color range, while the six separate pre-installed smart menu settings provide an easy option for jumping between standard, Economic, Game, Movie, Low Blue Light, and sRGB modes.
The single Display Port 1.4 and dual HDMI 2.0 connections in the center section behind this screen provide easy access to connect a Display port cable and get going, with an RTX 3070 driving all the action and no more than a few minutes of configuration required.
HDR and Illumination
Illumination is equally solid in the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor, the HDR 400 display manages a consistent backlight with no obvious signs of light bleed or patchy coverage across the board. That is probably to be expected for a display that manages a peak of 400 nits and the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor manages a surprisingly proficient HDR performance too. To test out the overall experience when turning on this feature, I took to Alien Isolation and Death Stranding to really appreciate the difference it can make.
A few years ago deep blacks and vibrant colors in HDR mode in anything but top-end gear would have been unthinkable. Now, the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor delivers all of these. Blacks are deep and color appears generally accurate. While this can, at times, feels a little over-saturated until tweaked, turning HDR setting is absolutely worth your time and plunged the corridors of Alien Isolation into an abyss of terror and enhanced the gorgeous cinematic landscapes of Hideo Kojima’s unique walking simulator. Unlike other budget-conscious HDR displays, the Mi 2K Gaming Monitor does deliver an objectively good HDR experience.
Performance
Like any device that incorporates a gamer tag, the latest from Xiaomi is not just built for sitting back and admiring the landscape. The 165Hz refresh rate and adaptive sync support are all incorporated with the aim of achieving a flawless victory on the battlefield. The point of all this tech and these serious-sounding systems is to increase picture clarity, reduce tearing on images, and generally make for a smoother transition between frames. After all, it’s all just a bunch of pictures.
To find out if that is really the case, I jumped into Apex Legends, a game I’m still awful at but which provides a good mix of fast-paced gameplay and familiar expectations for this walking cannon fodder. While it’s somewhat difficult to show and tell here, moving on from a wallet-friendly display, like the electriQ eiQ-32Q75HDR that this replaced, could be world-changing for anybody who’s not pushed up past the 100Hz range yet.
While this won’t make me any better at popping heads, the difference when jumping up from a productivity device to something that can push past the limits of your in-game frame rate makes a massive difference. Buildings, characters, and even environmental text all remain free from tearing and blur, and this is replicated under further inspection.
While we’re not going to hook up a fully-fledged pursuit camera, just taking a cursory glance at some ghosting tests highlights very minimal ghosting at 165Hz, although image transitions do seem to be solid and well defined. This balance speaks a lot to the Mi 2k Gaming Monitor as a whole. While it has an impressive array of technologies, they are clearly targeted to perform in a particular space. The 27-inch display size provides a fantastic sharp image at QHD resolution and if Xiaomi prices this monitor correctly in local markets then the combination of a very solid HDR experience, a high refresh rate, and a decent real-world performance should make the Mi 2k Gaming Monitor an extremely appealing proposition for anybody who hasn’t had to make do with an RX 6600 XT of late.
Check out more about the Xiaomi Mi 2k Gaming Monitor on the official Xiaomi website now.
