Philips Evnia 27M2N3800A monitor review: a fantastically priced 4K/FHD gaming display
Table of Contents
When the Philips Evnia 27M2N3800A was sent to us we were initially skeptical; often with dual-mode monitors, you'd be better off just buying two monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates, rather than combining the two in one and getting a slightly worse experience. However, we were pleasantly surprised with this display.
Philips has produced a few good monitors in its Evnia range this year that have made a splash in their respective niches, like the premium Philips Evnia 27M2N8500AM OLED and the budget friendly Evnia 27M2N3501PA. The display we’ll be testing today comes with a 16:9, 27-inch IPS panel, with stripped back I/O, that can switch between UHD resolution with a 160Hz max refresh rate and 1080p resolution with a 320Hz refresh rate. The idea is to offer flexibility for those who want to enjoy 4K gaming (including next-gen console gamers), plus natively view 4K media and do creative tasks or visual editing at this resolution, alongside fast-paced competitive gaming on the lower FHD resolution, where maximizing performance is the goal.
Read below to see how this Philips display performed in our testing and benchmarking, and see whether or not it is worthy of inclusion into our best gaming monitor guide for 2025.
- Panel type: IPS
- Resolution: 3840×2160 / 1920×1080
- Refresh rate: 160Hz/320Hz
- Response time: 1ms or 0.5ms with MPRT/MBR enabled
- Panel size: 27”
- I/O ports: 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x 3.5mm headphone jack
Dual-mode monitors often feel a bit gimmicky and not worth the asking price (which is typically expensive), however the Evnia 27M2N3800A is such good value for money that it's a great option for those looking for both a 4K and high-refresh rate FHD display. You'll have to do a bit of tinkering with the settings to get the most out of the image but the colors are certainly good for gaming and watching video media, even if the contrast is definitely lacking. For this price you shouldn't expect the chassis to be of a high quality, but it does the job and the stand is highly adjustable.
- Fantastic value for money
- 160Hz at 4K resolution
- 320Hz at 1080p resolution
- Decent brightness
- Decent color accuracy for the price
- Great adjustability (including portrait mode)
- Very poor contrast without HDR enabled
- Backlight bleed as with all IPS monitors
- High sRGB gamut coverage requires tinkering with the OSD
- Plastic chassis feels a bit flimsy
- No USB connectivity
Pricing & availability
With an MSRP of $299 / £279, the Philips Evnia 27M2N3800A prices in at least 15% cheaper than competing 4K IPS gaming monitors like the 144Hz LG UltraGear 27GR93U (which is itself not bad value for money), whilst having the additional benefit of the 320Hz FHD mode. For the feature set it provides, you won't find another monitor on the market as cheap as this one.
The monitor was released in the month of July, 2025, with some variance on the specific date depending on the region. We have struggled to find it on sale online for US retailers though. At the time of writing, the monitor could be picked up from Amazon UK for £219.95 in a limited-time deal – so expect prices to increase back to £279 at some stage.
Design & specifications
The 27-inch screen has your classic IPS LCD panel with a matte coating (though a fairly unobtrusive one). It comes with a high 163 PPI, which is the sort of pixel density you'd expect on a moderately sized 4K screen. 4K is then the true ‘native' resolution of the screen: as with many dual-mode screens (those that don't use integer scaling at least) the 1080p image you get when you switch over to that resolution isn't quite as sharp as you'd get on a native 1920×1080 panel, as it's being simulated ‘artificially', but it still looks almost as good as the real thing and many people wouldn't notice the difference.
The Evnia 27M2N3800A is HDR400 certified only (rather than the more impactful HDR1000), which means no local dimming and limited performance overall, although it can still decode HDR videos and images.
We were sent the black variant of the display to test (although a white color is also available) – both colors come with a slight speckling/dusting effect, in this case of lighter grey and darker black colors. The surface of the monitor has an interesting textured feel to it, which does make it slightly more grippable. Unsurprisingly for the price, the construction of the chassis and stand is very plasticky feeling and on the cheap side, although we didn't notice any loose fittings so wouldn't say the build quality is terrible. Ultimately, it doesn't feel like it could take much damage and there is a degree of screen wobble.
The adjustability of the stand is actually pretty great, with a height adjustment of 0-130mm, a full ±90° pivot either way, allowing you to switch between portrait and landscape, plus a -5° to +20 tilt, and a ±30° swivel. If you want to replace the stand, you can also swap it out for a 100x100mm VESA mount (though this is not included). All pretty standard.
One of the way Philips have saved money is by stripping back the I/O: you get a DisplayPort 1.4 socket, plus two HDMI 2.1 connections, which is all fine and dandy, but there are no USB ports to speak of (although given many people don't use these anyway, it's not that much of a loss). You do get a 3.5mm audio jack though, and interestingly a pair of 2W integrated speakers, which are of predictably terrible quality, though this is the case across most monitors. We would have assumed Philips would just remove the speakers entirely to save on cash, given they're rarely used by gamers; perhaps it was cheaper just to leave them in.
The control stick for the menu is located round the back on the right side of the monitor and doubles as the power button.
OSD, features, settings & warranty
This is the first time we've tested a Philips On Screen Display (OSD) in a while, but all the features you'd expect to see are present. It looks a bit old-school visually and navigating in and out of the menus with the joystick can be a bit of a pain at times but generally it's your standard fare. For those that use them, Picture in Picture and Picture by Picture modes are included, as are a variety of the standard ‘gaming features' that are typically pretty useless, including SmartImage Game mode, Stark ShadowBoost, Smart Crosshair, and Smart Sniper.
There are a number of different visual presets, including LowBlue Mode, EasyRead (black and white), and Economy, which are useful for general productivity. Most of the other presets we tested below. Within each preset you can customize them further – modifying the brightness, contrast, enabling ‘SmartContrast' (which seems to alter the brightness and contrast automatically – independently of whatever number shows on the brightness slider). We'll discuss these more in the next section.
The Dual Resolution section of the OSD menu actually had three settings, rather than the advertised two: both 160Hz and 120Hz at UHD resolution as well as 320Hz at FHD. VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) is supported by Adaptive Sync.
The warranty for this display, as with most Philips monitors, is 3 years. You can read more about the terms here.
Screen testing & performance
We conducted our usual series of tests on the monitor using DisplayCAL software.
Color gamut
Philips claims 130% sRGB / 95% DCI-P3 / 90% Adobe RGB gamut coverage but the 27M2N3800A fell short of this in our testing. Results using the Native and sRGB color space settings within the individual presets were lackluster. After some testing we found that the ‘Movie' preset with the DCI-P3 space enabled within it got us results of 94% sRGB / 77.2% DCI-P3 / 73.7% Adobe RGB. From this point, we then manually set the RGB values within the preset (R:100, G:98, B:94, Brightness: 54) and achieved the above results of 98.7% sRGB / 83.8% DCI-P3 / 78.9% Adobe RGB, which were the best we recorded with this monitor.
Based on these results, you could use the monitor for color-work in the sRGB space, provided you tweaked it as above or did your own calibration. We wouldn't recommend it for use across the other gamuts though.
Color accuracy, contrast, gamma & brightness
In the table below we have listed each of the presets we tested from the menu of the monitor. As ever, we took the white point, black point, contrast ratio, average deltaE*00 (a measure of color accuracy), gamma, and brightness data for each preset. The top row of the table shows the ideal values for each of these data points, though it should be noted that the ‘ideal' here is a technical standard, and might not represent which presets you personally prefer when viewing different content.
The majority of the presets were tested with Native Color Space enabled (as is standard). To see if we could achieve better results, we then also tested a few of them within the sRGB Color Space and DCI-P3 Color Space. Finally, we tested a couple of the presets that become available with HDR enabled, namely ‘DisplayHDR 400’ and ‘HDR Vivid’.
| Presets with Native Color Space | white | black | contrast | average deltaE*00 | max deltaE*00 | gamma | brightness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IDEAL | 6500K | 0/m² | infinity:1 | <2.00 | 2.2 | ||
| Standard | 6282K | 0.4522 cd/m2 | 344.2:1 | 2.63 | 6.51 | 2.04 | 155.64cd/m2 |
| Standard (SmartContrast) | 6512K | 1.0659 cd/m2 | 335.9:1 | 2.69 | 6.38 | 2 | 357.97cd/m2 |
| FPS | 9898K | 0.9721 cd/m2 | 291:1 | 2.63 | 6.12 | 2.02 | 282.72cd/m2 |
| RTS | 7343K | 1.0901 cd/m2 | 315.81:1 | 2.62 | 6.32 | 2.01 | 344.21cd/m2 |
| Movie | 6545K | 0.8835 cd/m2 | 420.3:1 | 1.57 | 6.58 | 2.2 | 371.33cd/m2 |
| SmartUniformity | 6466K | 0.9821 cd/m2 | 297.1:1 | 3.5 | 9.37 | 2 | 291.83cd/m2 |
| Game2 | 6808K | 1.0532 cd/m2 | 306:1 | 2.61 | 6 | 2 | 322.48cd/m2 |
| Presets with sRGB Color Space | white | black | contrast | average deltaE*00 | max deltaE*00 | gamma | brightness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 6902K | 1.9715 cd/m2 | 176:1 | 2.71 | 5.45 | 2.01 | 346.85cd/m2 |
| Movie | 6606K | 1.9938 cd/m2 | 182.3:1 | 2.5 | 5.42 | 2 | 363.5cd/m2 |
| SmartUniformity | 6554K | 1.6043 cd/m2 | 175.4:1 | 3.24 | 5.85 | 1.97 | 281.46cd/m2 |
| Presets with DCI-P3 Color Space | white | black | contrast | average deltaE*00 | max deltaE*00 | gamma | brightness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 6569K | 0.8205 cd/m2 | 436.8:1 | 2.22 | 7.18 | 2.01 | 358.18cd/m2 |
| Movie | 6582K | 0.804 cd/m2 | 435.7:1 | 2.21 | 7.19 | 2.34 | 350.39cd/m2 |
| SmartUniformity | 6535K | 0.7375 cd/m2 | 353.3:1 | 2.95 | 10.89 | 2.33 | 281.46cd/m2 |
| HDR presets | white | black | contrast | average deltaE*00 | max deltaE*00 | gamma | brightness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DisplayHDR 400 | 6658K | 0.4152 cd/m2 | 626.6:1 | 0.92 | 4.34 | 2.25 | 260.1cd/m2 |
| HDR Vivid | 6649K | 0.4167 cd/m2 | 580.5:1 | 4.52 | 10 | 1.94 | 281.46cd/m2 |
In SDR mode, the best result in terms of overall accuracy was from the ‘Movie' preset, which achieved a good white point result and gamma score, as well as deltaE*00 score (with anything below 2.00 being the threshold for professional color-accuracy). With HDR mode enabled, the ‘DisplayHDR 400’ preset achieved an exceptional deltaE*00 score though a worse white point.
Black point, and in particular, contrast ratio were poor across the board. Given this is an IPS panel we wouldn't have expected great performance in this area, but even by IPS standards these are pretty weak results Typically you'd expect a contrast of between 700:1 and 1200:1, which would match the claim by Philips of 1000:1, however as you can see the best we recorded was 436.8:1 in SDR mode. Turning on HDR mode will get you better contrast of up to 626.6:1, so you might want to consider this when gaming or movie watching.
The highest SDR brightness that we recorded was 385.32cd/m² when we set the brightness to 100% under the Standard preset, which is a solid result and actually higher that the 350 nits claimed by Philips.
Panel uniformity
The last test we carry out in DisplayCAL is the panel uniformity test, which looks at how evenly brightness and color are reproduced across the display. The test divides the screen into a 5×5 grid, with the centremost cell of the grid acting as the reference point for all the others.
Results with a degree of variance below 1.00 appear in green, indicating a difference so small it's effectively invisible to the human eye (the ideal for any professional-grade color work). Yellow marks a middling degree of variation between 1.00 – 3.00, though values near the low end of this range will still probably be unnoticeable in most cases and usually don't prevent the monitor from being suitable for color-accurate tasks. Variance scores above 3.00 are shown in red and present more of a significant issue for color-accurate work.
As we can see in the image of the results above, the majority of the screen scored reasonably well, with either green cells or yellow ones with variance scores below 2.00. The top edge of the screen performed less well however, with yellow cells scoring above 2.00 and a red cell in the top right with a variance of 3.04.
Taken as a whole, this monitor probably isn't the ideal choice for professionals who require precise color accuracy in their workflows, however, for casual productivity/creative use it could still perform well, and it's definitely more than adequate for gaming.
Finally, do keep in mind that results can vary between individual units of the same model of monitor due to the so-called ‘panel lottery'. The above does usually offer a loose idea of what you're likely to get, your own monitor could perform either better or worse than the example tested.
Viewing angles
Philips claims the classic 178° viewing angle for the Evnia 27M2N3800A which is typical for an IPS panel monitor. Though we'd put the angle closer to 170° personally before a significant drop of image quality, the monitor still performed fairly decently in this area.
Gaming performance
We ran the display through our standard set of games, including Cyberpunk 2077, The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered, Battlefield 6, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and CS2, and it delivered solid results. Images looked as crisp as you’d expect on the UHD 160Hz mode, and were very respectable when transitioned to FHD at 320Hz – with the image appearing very fluid at this resolution. Although the 0.5ms response time is well above what you’d get on an OLED panel, we didn’t notice much ghosting when gaming. Adaptive Sync also did a good job of keeping on top of screen tearing.
As you’d expect, the monitor performed worst in dark scenes with noticeable backlight bleed when the screen went fully black (the trade-off you pay with almost all IPS screens), and a lack of detail in darker environments when gaming due to the low contrast ratio. Still, those bright and vibrant images looked very nice indeed. The slight matte finish to the screen wasn’t really noticeable in any negative way, and did a reasonable job of reducing reflections.
General performance & productivity
As discussed, there are no USB ports on this display to aid in productivity, so obviously no power delivery for devices either. Other features are light – there is no KVM switch as you’d expect on a cheaper monitor. That being said, where it matters most for productivity, the display performs well, namely in text legibility (which is good and can be tweaked further with sharpness settings), plus a nice high brightness. As discussed, the color gamut coverage (plus panel uniformity in our particular monitor) isn’t quite good enough for true professional work in the sRGB space, although amateur work within this space could still be done to a good standard with some tweaking of the settings, thanks to the high color accuracy.
Final Word: is the Philips Evnia 27M2N3800A worth buying?
The Philips Evnia 27M2N3800A is most definitely worth the money if you’re interested in a 160Hz 4K gaming display that also has 320Hz 1080p functionality, primarily because it’s so damn reasonably priced. It doesn’t have the build quality or features of a more premium monitor, but that’s a worthy trade-off. The biggest weak point is the contrast, but it’s still capable of producing some very nice-looking images in brighter scenes. All-in-all, this is another very welcome addition to the Philips Evnia line for 2025.
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