Alienware AW3926QW Review: The Ultimate 39-Inch 5K OLED Gaming Monitor

Dell Alienware AW3926QW Color And Uniformity Benchmarks

Before I get to my subjective impressions, let me throw some data at you. I used DisplayCal to capture the monitor's color gamut and accuracy as well as to test its brightness uniformity. The results are pretty interesting; let's take a look.


This first image is the summary of the data collected by DisplayCal during the profiling process. Using the Dell SDR profile installed by Windows Update, we found that the "Cool" preset gave the best balance of colors, at least according to the calibraiton tool. The app measured a ΔE76 (that's "Delta-E") average of just 0.09, with an RMS weighted average of 0.19. That's insanely low and means that this monitor's colors, at least in SDR mode, are incredibly accurate (well, maybe.). Even the worst-case is well under the 2.0 value that is considered the cutoff for accurate color.

"Gamut coverage," which is capped at 100%, refers to how much of a given colorspace the monitor can reproduce, while "gamut volume" is a measure of how much the monitor's color saturation extends beyond the bounds of the listed colorspace. The AW3926QW came in with essentially full sRGB coverage and 96.7% DCI-P3, which is actually slightly below the 99% that Dell claims, but we're willing to chalk that up to the margin of measurement error. In terms of volume, the AW3926QW produces 143.2% of sRGB and 101.4% of DCI-P3, which means that in SDR mode the colors probably tend to be oversaturated, but most people prefer this, so it's fine.


Backlight uniformity isn't exactly a thing on OLEDs because they don't really use a backlight; the pixels themselves are emissive. However, there have been complaints of "gray stripes" on some tandem OLED screens when they are supposed to be showing pure black. There's nothing like that here; when the monitor is showing black, it is properly black, which is to say that it looks like the whole monitor is turned off.


But the actual measured light uniformity results were surprising, and I did the metering multiple times because I wasn't believing what I was seeing. The short version is that the brightness is inconsistent on this display, with the edges being as much as 34% darker than the center. I was surprised by this because it's not visible to the naked eye, as the display is so bright. Check this out:


That looks really clean, right? It's so bright that my camera couldn't even capture anything besides the monitor despite that the room had daylight spilling in from a poorly blocked-out window. But if you put the image into and editor and mess with the levels...


You can clearly see the pattern indicated in the DisplayCal uniformity results.

So is this a problem? I don't think so. This is a gaming monitor, not a professional display, and it's entirely possible that this is an intentional design considering the sharply curved shape of the monitor--closer parts of the display would need to be dimmed to be perceived with similar brightness. It could also simply be a consequence of that curve. But the truth is that you simply can't notice this with the naked eye in almost every scenario in the real world, especially not while playing advanced games in HDR with rapidly shifting brightness levels. Personally, and as a seasoned technology reviewer, I don't consider this to be a flaw at all. It's good to be aware of it, though.

Dell Alienware AW3926QW Subjective Gaming Experience

Before we talk about anything to do with gaming on this monitor, we have to bring up the resolution once gain. This is a 5120×2160 display. That is fully 11 megapixels, and exactly 33% more pixels than 4K UHD. To put it another way, 4K UHD is only 3/4 of the pixels of this screen. That is an enormous number of pixels to be shading and rasterizing every single frame, and DLSS isn't necessarily going to save you, because you still have to run DLSS at the output resolution. That means that the AI upscaling part of your render budget matters.

In my testing, a GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile wasn't really enough GPU to make full use of this monitor. I had to step up to a different system with a GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile, although both share the same 175W power limit, so it didn't make a whole world of difference. But still, the fastest laptop GPU in the world struggles to game on this monitor, even with DLSS. Given that, this is really a monitor ideally suited for desktop PC gamers, or those who don't mind enabling the 2560×1080 330Hz mode, which both laptop GPUs were much more comfortable with. My desktop's GeForce RTX 5070 Ti was able to handle the AW3926QW in native resolution well enough, although I definitely noticed the performance hit both from the higher resolution (vs. my 4K display) and also the move to HDR.


In the HDR1300 modes, as long as you have the profile configured correctly, I was stuck between being blown away by the ultra-bright highlights and the incredible detail visible in dark areas, and then being annoyed when I would notice the full-screen brightness drop. It doesn't happen a lot in games, but it does happen. If you're sensitive to that kind of thing, the DisplayHDR True Black setting gives you gorgeous colors and deep blacks with a consistent brightness level, but you do miss out on those piercing bright highlights.

In games that don't have native support for HDR output, you can use Microsoft's Auto HDR or NVIDIA's RTX HDR to map the SDR game to your HDR display. In my time with this monitor, I found that Auto HDR provided a satisfactory result for most games. NVIDIA's RTX HDR is often stated (by users on Reddit, Steam, and other forums) to offer superior visuals, but in my experience I found that it had a tendency to over-emphasize things that weren't really meant to be highlights. Auto HDR seemed to do a better job for me.


Whatever method you use, though, including native HDR implementations, expect video and screenshot captures to be a mess. Windows' Game Bar wasn't reliable for me, and while NVIDIA's overlay worked well for screenshots, video captures still came out wrong. Steam can supposedly capture HDR screenshots in AVIF format, but it never worked for me.


Thus, HDR on Windows is still kind of a mess even in late 2026, and that's a shame because I honestly feel HDR on a display like this is more transformative for gaming than even high refresh rates. A display like the AW3926QW does so much to make virtual spaces feel real. Your eyes have a wider dynamic range than an SDR display can reproduce, so with a proper HDR display, suddenly places in games start to feel more immersive than ever before, and it's brilliant—even when it's a place (like Night City) I wouldn't necessarily want to actually be.

If you're new to the HDR experience, you're going to love it, but you're also probably going to have to get used to fiddling with the settings pretty often. Fortunately, the Alienware AW3926QW makes it very easy and intuitive to swap between Smart HDR profiles, so it's not a major frustration.

Dell Alienware AW3926QW Gaming Monitor: Our Thoughts

If you've actually read this entire review up to this point, then you already know how I feel about the Alienware AW3926QW: it's just plain awesome. Thanks to the pure RGB stripe layout with no white subpixel, you get perfect, LCD-like clarity, yet you don't give up peak brightness for it. The 165-Hz refresh rate is plenty high for virtually any gaming case (especially given the resolution), although you can crank it up to 330 Hz if you really want to. There's no motion blur reduction mode, like black frame insertion or image strobing, but a lot of people don't like the brightness cut from using those features, so it's easy to understand why Dell didn't implement it.

This monitor does have some contentious features, too. I haven't talked much about the curve, but it is the most-curved display I've ever used and it's definitely noticeable. It made photographing the thing a bit tricky, too. Games don't do perspective warping for curved displays so it's always a little weird using one, but it doesn't take long to get used to. And, of course, despite their incredible visual fidelity, OLEDs themselves remain a matter of debate, as they all wear out eventually. The lack of speakers is a minor potential pain point as well, particularly for console gamers, although personally I'm glad to be without the tinny drivers most monitors integrate.


Before we talk about the value proposition of any product we have to talk about the price. Dell asks $1,099 for this monitor. That is not a small amount of money for a gaming monitor, but when you compare it to other displays with similar feature sets, like the LG 39GX950B, it's a downright fantastic deal. That display costs $1,800, and while it features a different subpixel layout that offers superior brightness, it also has issues with text fringing and worse color saturation than the AW3926QW.

Once you get into quadruple digits, "value" starts to become even more subjective than it already as. Still, it's an objective fact that this monitor presents an awesome feature set at a highly aggressive price point compared to its competitors. Many of its closest competition are in fact other Alienware displays, mostly based on QD-OLED panels. They have great image quality, but so does the AW3926QW. Given the fantastic display, the fair pricing, my excellent experience and the three-year burn-in/dead pixel warranty, I'm awarding this monitor a coveted HotHardware Editor's Choice award. Anything less would simply be inappropriate.