Philips Evnia 27M2N3500NF review: A fast, affordable 144Hz QHD gaming display

With the price of memory, GPUs and storage going through the roof in recent times, it feels like bargains are few and far between when it comes to PC gaming. That’s why the Philips Evnia 27M2N3500NF gaming monitor is a breath of fresh air.

This 27in QHD monitor is aimed squarely at gamers with a shallow pocket who want a responsive monitor without spending a fortune. The really big surprise, though, is that he’s actually pretty good.

What do you get for the money?

At the time of writing, the Philips Evnia 27M2N3500NF retails for around £130. For that money, Philips offers a 27in IPS panel with a resolution of 2,560 × 1,440 and a refresh rate of 144Hz with both HDMI and DisplayPort inputs. You get official AMD Adaptive sync and unofficial support for Nvidia G-Sync. Best of all, the QHD resolution means that even modest graphics cards should be able to make the most of Philips’ refresh rates for modern games – at least at low scaling and reasonable detail settings.

Build and connect

As you’d expect for £130, the Evnia’s build quality is light and plasticky. That said, it doesn’t feel badly made, it’s just a far cry from the heavyweight 32in OLED monitors that have graced my desk in recent months. In fact, it was refreshing to be able to pick up the Evnia panel with one hand and click the base stand into place without worrying about dropping it.

The stand offers some flexibility fore and aft but shows little side-to-side wobble. Honestly, a cheap VESA monitor arm would be a really nice upgrade here. The light panel won’t need anything too expensive to support it, so you can spend around £20 and get a full range of repairs and great looks.

After all, communication is very basic. You get one HDMI input and one DisplayPort and a 3.5mm audio output for connecting headphones or speakers. You’ll definitely want to use it, too, since the internal speakers are terrible.

Usability and features

One pleasant surprise here is that the on-screen display is clear and usable. Some game monitors prefer flashy OSDs, sacrificing visual pizzazz — using red text on a black background, for example — but Evnia’s menus are simple and easy to understand. A single button on the back of the monitor doubles as a four-way clickable joystick for navigating menus, and this works well.

Depending on the specifics of the games, you get a hardware crosshair, which can be useful, and a Shadow Boost function, which raises the shadow details by three levels. And you can choose between enabling Adaptive Sync and Smart MBR, or Smart MBR Sync, which tries to combine the best of both worlds. MBR stands for motion blur reduction and this is a technology that uses backlighting – lighting the background light in sync with the refresh rate – to create smooth motion.

If your PC is powerful enough to handle frame rates at the panel’s 144Hz refresh rate, then turning off V-Sync and using Smart MBR provides the clearest picture quality. If the frame rates fluctuate a little, but are always above 60Hz, then MBR Sync will give you good consistency. This reduces the overall brightness at high settings, but not so much, and clever use of the feature can improve the clarity of motion.

How is the picture quality?

As I reluctantly lifted our previous monitor – a 4K 32in OLED – from my desk, I expected to find the appalling Evnia on display. In fact, it was the opposite. I fired up Arc Raiders and started playing, and it was almost two hours later that I remembered I was meant to write this review.

And that’s because, honestly, there’s very little to complain about. The combination of the 27in panel and the QHD resolution means the pixel density is noticeably lower than the 32in 4K monitor sitting on the floor next to me, but it’s still crisp enough to make games look sharp and detailed. This is accompanied by natural-looking colors, albeit a slightly warm tone, good contrast, and warm motion.

Color accuracy, brightness and contrast

In terms of color accuracy and image quality, the Evnia scores very well. The panel does not include the wide color gamut of more expensive models, but it delivers most of the sRGB range – a respectable 98% in my tests – and the color accuracy at default settings is good. A Delta E ratio of 1.42 is a strong result.

Combined with a contrast ratio of 1,143:1 and a maximum brightness of 327cd/m2, images on the screen look strong and vibrant and well balanced. And if you want better color accuracy, you can simply change the sRGB mode to any image set. Do that, and the average Delta E drops to 0.99.

One thing this does not do, however, is make the white point a perfect 6,500k. It averages around 6,280k in both modes, which explains the slightly warmer tone I noted in independent testing. There’s a slight flaw in the more saturated red and blue tones, partly because the panel produces some tones outside of the sRGB gamut, but the flaws aren’t too noticeable.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the panel has a tendency to crush dark shadow details too eagerly. Thankfully, this is easily remedied by turning on the Shadow Boost feature. Setting this to Level 1 is a good compromise as it enhances shadow detail and does so without making the image look washed out.

Clarity of movement and play

Motion clarity is very important for a game monitor, and here the Evnia is surprisingly good. SmartResponse settings for overdrive are left at default, but nudging this to Fast or Fast sees moving objects come into sharper focus. I would avoid using Fastest, however, as the reverse ghosting goes from noticeable to distracting. Depending on the game, and how much ghosting you get, I can choose between two slow settings.

In fact, it’s fair to say that I’m very impressed with Evnia’s work. With Arc Raiders graphics settings adjusted to prioritize three-rate frames, the display’s clarity with VRR enabled was excellent. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel like a big step down from that high-end OLED monitor – and enabling Smart MBR mode provided an even better view. The brightness goes down a notch, but even in our brightly lit office that was a sacrifice worth it for the subtle improvement in brightness. It’s not night and day, but it’s nice to have an option there if you want a very sharp movement.

Input, text clarity and HDR

Input lag is vanishingly low, too. I tested Evnia with the OSRTT tool, and the input value reached a maximum value of 8.5ms. The average was less than 6ms, which is impressive for a budget display. In fact, you have no excuse to lose – this monitor is not the weak link.

And unlike more expensive OLED panels, Philips’ IPS panel offers another advantage: text clarity is more than adequate for productivity purposes. The matte anti-glare finish does a good job of suppressing reflections, too, so you can use it under bright light or in sunny rooms without any hassle. In short, if you’re after a sub-£150 monitor for work and play, the Philips Evnia 27M2N3500NF should definitely be on your shortlist.

One final word: don’t bother with HDR on this monitor. Although it does support it, the extremely low brightness and static backlight means it just can’t get the benefit of HDR. In most cases, SDR content will look much better.

Should you buy the Philips Evnia 27M2N3500NF monitor?

If there’s one big reason not to buy the 27M2N3500NF, it’s not that it’s good on its own – it’s because some of its stablemates offer even better value. For example, the Philips Evnia 27M2N3501PA of the same name also packs a 27in QHD panel with a 260Hz refresh rate and a height-adjustable stand for a current price of around £185. At £55 more, that’s an even better deal.

But if you don’t want a high refresh rate, or your PC can’t deliver those frame rates, and you’re ready to put up with the lack of height adjustment, the Evnia 27M2N3500NF will deliver everything you need for very little money. Philips focuses on essentials, useful features and incredibly capable performance and this monitor more than delivers.