Alienware AW3926QW Review: The Ultimate 39-Inch 5K OLED Gaming Monitor
Alienware AW3926QW Gaming Monitor OSD
When you first open the OSD you'll be greeted with this quick menu. You can customize this quick menu and change what's present here; I can imagine this being useful if you're someone to twiddle the functions of the monitor frequently. I'm more of a "set it and forget it" kind of guy, so I wish there was an option to just bypass this, personally. You can press up to go to the full options menu, which is extensive.
The first option, "Game", has various settings useful for gamers. Under "Preset Modes" you can find the usual assortment of modes like "FPS", "RPG", "MOBA", and so on, but you'll probably never touch these because all of them are disabled when in Smart HDR mode. You probably want to be in Smart HDR mode too, so there's little use for this.
"Game Enhance Mode" lets you enable some features that can be handy, like timers, a live "frame rate" counter, or manual display alignment when gaming in a non-full-screen resolution. There is a surprising emphasis on this in the monitor's feature set, so I'll come back to it in a bit. The "frame rate" counter is really a refresh rate counter, which isn't particularly useful unless VRR is enabled. It updates very quickly, which is a bit of a shame as it's hard to actually see the value, particularly when LFC is engaged. I wish it had a little histogram too.
Below Game Enhance Mode, there's "Dark Stabilizer" and "Console Mode". Neither are available in the photo; when HDR is engaged, Dark Stabilizer can't be used, while Console Mode requires HDMI. Dark Stabilizer artificially raises the brightness level of dark areas to help with visibility in competitive games. "Console Mode" lets you choose preset resolution modes and play with the tonemapping while connected to a game console.
Alienvision is one of the stranger features of the monitor. The first mode is simply a configurable crosshairs for games that don't give you one, but the other modes are odder; you can define a custom region on the screen (by default, in a thin box on top of the crosshairs) to use radically altered color presentation sort of like "Predator vision" from those classic action films.
Below Alienvision you have eSports Mode and "Other Modes". The eSports mode is a strange one too; you can manually select a 25" 1520x855 resolution with a 330-Hz refresh rate, or a 27" 1680x945 resolution at the same refresh rate. These are obviously, presented in the middle of the monitor, as if you were really using a 25" or 27" monitor, although you can move them to the top or bottom of the screen if you want. Dell says it's to "minimize distractions". I guess?
The options under "Other Modes" are actually more useful; there's a 32" 3840x2160 165Hz mode that essentially makes this display act like a 16:9 display with otherwise identical specifications. This could be useful primarily for consoles and it is indeed one of the options offered under the Console Mode setting. The other option is a 39" (full screen) 2560x1080 mode with a 330-Hz refresh rate. This slashes the screen resolution by exactly 3/4, which allows perfect 4:1 integer scaling to the full screen. It's clearly drastically less sharp than the full 5K output, but I have to say, the doubled refresh rate is more noticeable than I expected. This is probably the best mode for competitive gamers, as long as your game supports ultrawide monitors.
The brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation controls are not available when HDR is enabled, but their functions are self-explanatory, as should be most of the options on the Input Source menu here. You can manually force-disable DisplayPort DSC, which is nice. And that's about all that needs to be said about this screen.
On the AlienFX lighting page you can manually customize the color of the alien head logo on the back and the power button, or enable an Aurora effect that causes it to pulse and subtly shift color. If you hook up a USB cable to the monitor (including the USB-C for video), you can control this with much more granularity using the Alienware Control Center application, so I wouldn't bother managing on it on the display itself.
The Display page is probably the most important one for the majority of users, as it's here where you will configure Smart HDR. Before we get to that, though, the other options; Aspect Ratio lets you manually set the Aspect Ratio, Input Color Format lets you pick RGB or YCbCr, Sharpness lets you apply a sharpening or blurring filter, and that "USB-C Prioritization" option down there lets you select whether you want the USB-C port to emphasize data speed or resolution. This doesn't matter at all if your device supports UHBR10 (you can get full 5Gbps data speed and full video performance), but if your device only supports HBR3, you'll want to set "High Resolution" for full video performance at the cost of reduced USB speed.
now for the Smart HDR, Dolby Vision, and Anti-Flicker settings. Smart HDR is only enabled when Dolby Vision is off, and Dolby Vision is enabled by default, but Dell itself actually recommends turning it off when using the monitor with a desktop PC. Why? Well, because the tonemapping is all wrong when you're not displaying content that is specifically mastered for Dolby Vision, which is the vast majority of all content.
In theory, the monitor can switch out of Dolby Vision mode into a standard HDR10 mode when it detects HDR10 content, but in my testing that did not seem to happen. Dell has it on by default for console gamers, primarily; it's useful if you're watching HDR videos, but there are extremely few games on PC that support Dolby Vision, so you'll want to turn this off to make use of the Smart HDR modes.
As far as I could tell, with Smart HDR, Desktop, Movie, and Game were identical to the DisplayHDR True Black setting. This limits max brightness to around ~520 cd/m², far short of the monitor's capabilities, but still enough to give a nice HDR experience while black levels stay inky. This is the mode I recommend for general use, including gaming. (By the way, Dolby Vision is also capped at around the same brightness level.)
However, toggling over to HDR Peak 1300 or HDR Peak 1300 Bright gets you the full range of the monitor, and let me tell you, it is spectacular, with some caveats. You'll have to recalibrate the monitor profile using the Windows HDR Calibration Tool, but once you do that, you're in for a world of brilliant HDR highlights rarely seen on a WOLED screen (usually, you need a QD-OLED for this kind of look.) So what's up with the "Bright" setting?
HDR Peak 1300 Bright uses largely the same tonemapping but biases it toward a brighter appearance in the midtones and shadows. Why would you want this? Well, because when HDR Peak 1300 is enabled (either setting), there's a very clear automatic panel dimming feature. This is obvious on the desktop, but you can actually notice it in games too. HDR Peak 1300 Bright seems to be an attempt to compensate for the panel dimming by raising brightness levels, but it does hurt your black levels.
It's a trade-off, then, between gorgeous inky blacks with piercing highlights or a consistent brightness level. That's why I say that most users should probably use Display HDR True Black most of the time; you still get gorgeous HDR colors without the distracting automatic brightness. It honestly looks great either way, though, and not many games have a lot of scenarios where the scene is dark enough on average to really let those 1300-nit peaks come out.
Regarding the anti-flicker setting, it's well known that OLEDs flicker at lower refresh rates when using VRR. This is something endemic to the display type and you can even see it on some LCDs as well; it has to do with the way the voltage required to drive the display changes as the refresh rate drops. Dell has included an anti-flicker feature here that works differently from other anti-flicker features I've seen; rather than raising the VRR floor, it appears to do something with the way panel refresh happens. It totally resolves flicker, but motion clarity is slightly impacted. I feel like the effect may have to do with the screen response time. I didn't find it to be too distracting personally, but you'll have to try it for yourself to see if you like it.
The PIP/PBP options let you display one or two inputs beside or on top of the output from a different input, which could be useful for folks who like that kind of feature. There are a ton of options to configure this mode, including 14 different PIP/PBP layouts and the option to use any combination of display inputs. Meanwhile, the USB menu lets you set up the KVM feature, which allows you to use the USB-C upstream port along with another display input for the KVM feature.
Below that is the Audio menu where you can set the headphone volume and select which source to pull the audio stream from when using PIP/PBP. I found that the headphone output sounded just fine, but I wasn't blown away by the volume. I have some hearing damage, so my opinion may not match yours, but I found that even at max volume the headphone output was slightly quieter than I would like.
On the Menu screen you can adjust basic settings related to the OSD itself, like the language, the transparency value, and the timeout (to a maximum of one minute.) Meanwhile, on the Personalize screen you can customize the quick menu that I mentioned earlier, although there's no way to turn it off, sadly. You can also customize the "direct key" functions, which are what happens when you press the control stick in a direction without pressing it in first. This is very good, although there's no option to select "OLED Pixel Refresh" here, which disappointed me.
Indeed, like most OLED screens, you'll need to run a pixel refresh cycle on the AW3926QW every four hours. Strictly speaking the monitor doesn't seem to pull you out of what you're doing to nag you about it, which is good, but when you open the quick menu you get this little bar across the top that shows the monitor's current settings as well as a "Panel Health" dot:
I had a heck of a time photographing this, but the Panel Health dot up there is in fact yellow, indicating that the monitor needs a pixel refresh. The refresh only takes a few minutes; you can easily take a break and get a cup of coffee to wait it out. Frankly, you should probably be getting up from your PC more than once every four hours anyway. The display will automatically perform the Pixel Refresh function when the screen goes into standby, too, so you probably don't even have to worry about it. The power LED flashes green while the monitor is performing a refresh, so don't wake it up in the middle or you will get a nag screen about it.
You can manually trigger the Pixel Refresh in the "Others" menu, which is also where you can set the DDC/CI function and the HDMI CEC functions. This screen also has the usual reset options as well.
There are nine pages to the report and we're not going to show them all here because it's irrelevant, but the data is ridiculously detailed, with multiple graphs showing the results of hundreds of tests. It really makes you grateful that all of that was done from the factory.
Skip over to the next page for some quick benchmarks, my subjective gaming experiences, and our conclusions...
