The Best Monitors for Xbox Series X|S

The BenQ Mobiuz EX321UX is a fantastic monitor for gaming on Xbox. Not only is it incredibly responsive, but it features outstanding brightness and full-array local dimming with mini-LED technology to enable next-level HDR gaming. Add in a suite of gaming features, reactive image quality settings, and HDMI eARC, and you have a recipe for the best gaming monitor for Xbox available today.

The EX321UX uses an IPS panel enhanced with quantum dots to deliver outstanding colors and viewing angles when it's time to share your screen. Unlike the legions of competing flagship monitors which use OLED panels, there's no risk of burn-in here. And thanks to its mini-LED backlight, it's able to get exceptionally bright, making colors more vibrant and highlighting just how great its picture is. At its highest, it can reach upwards of 1,300 nits, but even in SDR it can maintain more than 700 nits of brightness, lending it headroom to spare to dial in your preferred settings.

Those local dimming zones also allow it to offer great contrast that exceeds what a standard IPS panel is able to. In my review, I remarked that I felt this was the gateway to the best picture and puts it alongside OLED panels in how good it's able to look. The monitor also comes with an intelligent contrast setting that monitors black levels to ensure you can always pick out details even in dark settings.

This monitor also takes a unique approach to picture settings and tunes the colors based on the genre of game you're playing. For example, the Fantasy setting comes with very vibrant bright colors, while the Sci-Fi setting is still vibrant but a bit more muted and adjusts the contrast to view the shady corridors of spaceships and interplanetary cave systems.

It offers plentiful connectivity options with an extensive USB hub and support for both HDMI and DisplayPort 2.1. One of its HDMI ports even supports eARC to easily connect a soundbar or speakers. If you also plan to use it to play games at your PC, you'll appreciate its one-click KVM functionality. This allows you to quickly swap your peripherals between systems and to reduce downtime when you're ready to swap platforms.

It doesn't offer per-pixel dimming like competing OLED panels. It's still susceptible to blooming when you have light objects on dark backgrounds. This is especially noticeable with white text on a dark background. It's not terrible since each zone is relatively small, but it's noticeable and takes some getting used to. Still, as a whole package, it's pretty great and is clearly designed to cater to console gamers just as much as PC players.

If you're looking for a monitor for your Xbox that won't break the bank but that will still deliver a great gaming experience, then Lenovo Legion R25F-30 is worth your attention. This 24-inch display retails for less than $170 and offers a great balance of image quality, responsiveness, and versatility. It's not the absolute brightest, but it does still manage to be brighter than a lot of the competition around its price. For the money, it's a great value.

This monitor has a number of features that make it stand out, so let's break it down. First off, it uses a VA, or vertical alignment, panel. This panel technology doesn't suffer from low contrast and backlight bleed like IPS panels do, which means that blacks and shadows are deeper and more lifelike. A monitor with full array local dimming will surpass it, but you'll need to pay a whole lot more to get there.

Lenovo has also worked its magic to make this monitor exceptionally responsive. It comes with a 280Hz refresh rate for improved input latency, even though your Xbox will be capped out at 120Hz. This is also a benefit if you happen to be a PC gamer and can push higher frame rates. Whether you're gaming on the Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X, you'll have no trouble turning on the 120Hz mode for fluid gameplay. And because the monitor supports AMD FreeSync Premium, screen tearing also won't be a concern.

Finally, if you don't want to use a headset, it also comes with two 3 watt speakers. These aren't going to blow you away with their quality, but I appreciate that the option is there for quick audio when you need it. My review of this monitor is forthcoming, but so far I've been impressed with its value proposition and am comfortable recommending it to any Xbox gamer considering a switch to a fast but affordable monitor.

Alienware, owned by Dell, has been one of the leaders in gaming monitors for years, and its latest release, the Alienware AW2725Q, is a great example of why. Coming in at less than $1,000, it offers a fantastically crisp 4K picture at an easily managable 27-inch screen size. It uses a quantum dot enhanced OLED panel that offers deep blacks and beautiful colors with a peak brightness of a thousand nits to deliver great HDR performance to help you get lost in your favorite games.

When I reviewed the monitor earlier this year, I was impressed by its picture and feature set. This release seems to be part of a strategy from the manufacturer to drive down QD-OLED prices, but you don't sacrifice much at all for the hundreds in savings it offers compared to some competing OLED gaming monitors. Its colors are rich and vibrant, its dynamic range is expansive, and once you're adjusted its settings to your preference, offers a picture that easily competes with its more expensive counterparts.

It's easy to use with your Xbox thanks to its support for HDMI 2.1, so you'll have no trouble gaming at 4K 120Hz (though on PC, you can push the refresh rate all the way to 240Hz). It also supports Dolby Vision HDR, which most gaming monitors still lack. One of its HDMI ports supports eARC to easily connect a soundbar and – surprise – it also supports Dolby Atmos, so you can enjoy surround sound gaming without resorting to a gaming headset.

The biggest thing this display lacks is a KVM to quickly swap accessories between gaming platforms. This should be an issue if you play with a controller, though. You'll also need to bear in mind the usual OLED caveats: SDR brightness isn't suited to gaming in direct sunlight and you'll want to take care to avoid burn-in. The monitor comes with a suite of protection features to ward that off, so it's less of an issue than it's ever been.

For 4K gaming, this monitor is tops.

Xiaomi knocked it out of the park with this monitor. For less than $400, it delivers picture quality on par with displays twice its price. Whether you're gaming on the Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X, It's an excellent pick that punches well above its class for 1440p and gaming in HDR.

The ace up the G Pro 27i's sleeve is its mini-LED backlight. The monitor uses a quantum dot enhanced IPS panel to deliver rich and vibrant colors that are surprisingly accurate out of the box. The mini-LED backlight allows it to achieve full-array local dimming with tight precision compared to other monitors even remotely close to its price. It features 1,152 local dimming zones, a lot for its 27-inch size, so blooming (the halo effect around light objects on dark backgrounds) is minimal. In my review of this monitor, I mentioned that it was most visible on dark gray backgrounds, like in Adobe Photoshop, but was so easily ignored the rest of the time that I left local dimming on all the time.

Its deep contrast isn't the only thing it has going for it. It's also able to offer a peak brightness of 1,000 nits (slightly higher in fact), so highlights pop. It's standard brightness is also much higher than the pricier OLEDs it best competes with. HDR gaming is great with this monitor.

It's genuinely surprising that Xiaomi was able to get the price so low, but there are some trade-offs. Turning it around to the back, you'll find that there are no USB ports whatsoever. If you want to bring your mouse and keyboard with you to your console, you'll need to unplug them and physically move them over. That's not great. There's also no real gaming features outside of its picture presets to speak of. But, it supports AMD FreeSync, HDR, and can play games at 1440p, 120Hz.

Still, for its price and performance, this monitor is truly hard to beat, and impressed me so much that I've been raving about it ever since I first tested it.

This year is shaping up to be the year that smart monitors finally became a thing, bringing together TVs and gaming monitors in a way that we've been waiting far too long to see. The Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80SD) was one of the first monitors I've tested and reviewed that brings these two categories together. As a PC gamer, I felt like its Tizen OS was a bit too intrusive. For Xbox, however, it's a great and lets the G8 completely replace a TV if you want it to.

The G80SD is part smart TV and part gaming monitor. When you first turn it on, you'll need to go through a setup process similar to that of a television where you'll connect it to Wi-Fi, log into accounts, choose apps, and so forth so that it can prepare apps and recommendations based on your answers. Once that's done, you'll enter into the TV half of the monitor, complete with live broadcasts, streaming apps, and premium channels. It even includes game streaming apps like Xbox Cloud and Nvidia GeForce Now so you can play games without connecting anything at all.

Plug in your Xbox and you'll find that it's also a great gaming monitor. It features a QD-OLED panel with all the benefits other QD-OLEDs offer (infinite contrast, amazing colors, high peak brightness) while offering picture settings that hew closer to a TV. You won't be left guessing about which setting does what, and even if you're already familiar with typical gaming monitor options, you'll find that the way it presents options is accessible and easy to use.

Its gaming performance is excellent. Once it's dialed in with your picture preferences, you'll be able to enjoy rich colors, inky blacks, and realistic highlights – exactly what you would expect from a high-performance Samsung display. For content creation such as photo and video editing, its out-of-the-box color accuracy isn't amazing, but perfect accuracy isn't likely to matter, because with a little time tweaking color settings, I was able to get it looking great nonetheless.

If you're in a space-constrained environment and need one screen for all of your entertainment needs, the Samsung Odyssey G8 (G80SD) is a great choice.