Disclosure: I received this monitor for free from LG for review purposes. LG gets to see my drafts before I post them so they can check for spec errors. All opinions here are my own, based on my own use.

HEADS UP: plugging a current LG monitor into Windows 11 can pull in LG software you didn't ask for.
Gamers Nexus documented it in July 2026 on an UltraGear 34GX900A-B, the 34 inch model in the same GX9 line as this monitor, and reproduced it on a three year old UltraFine 32UN880-B. Nobody has published a test of the 39GX950B specifically. On a fresh Windows 11 install, Windows' device metadata pipeline fetched the "LG Monitor App Installer" from the Store in the background. Microsoft's own documentation says that mechanism "does not provide a notification to the user". Across 32 consecutive boots, Gamers Nexus got a McAfee trial popup on 31 of them.

LG sent me their side of this when they reviewed my draft, and here it is in full: "Companion applications are never installed automatically and require user choice before installation. Based on customer feedback, we are updating the Installer experience so customers can decide whether they would like to install the LG Monitor App Installer and take advantage of its features." They also point out that the McAfee recommendation has been removed, which Microsoft confirmed at the end of July.

If you want that pipeline switched off before you connect anything, this works on every Windows edition: search "advanced system settings", then Hardware  Device Installation Settings  select "No". That's the switch I run myself. It hasn't shown up on my system so far.

Some of you might remember my MSI X36 post from March. I've been on OLED ultrawides for about four years now, and that review had a handful of complaints in it, but only one I couldn't shrug off: 110 PPI. I called it the elephant in the room for the whole 34" UWQHD class and I still think that's right. No amount of good HDR makes text look better.

The 39GX950B is the answer to that complaint. LG sent me one on July 6th and I've got about 250 hours on it now, roughly 70% gaming and 30% work.

Quick setup context because it matters: RTX 4080 Super, stock stand(my own printed Dell MSA20 adapter for VESA doesnt fit the cutouts), sitting about 70cm from the screen. Games so far are Hogwarts Legacy, World of Warcraft, The Finals and Mortal Shell. Work is a mix of coding, writing and video editing.

143 PPI only starts to mean something once you set the scaling
39", 5120x2160, which works out to be 143 PPI. Same vertical resolution as a 32" 4K screen, just in a 21:9 shape. It's also the first ultrawide with LGs 4th gen Tandem WOLED, with a much softer 1500R curve compared to the older 800R once, which I personally prefered.

But the interesting part shows up once you set Windows scaling. I run it at 125%, which gives me a desktop of 4096x1728 in logical pixels. The X36 gives me 3440x1440 at 100%.

So about 43% more usable desktop area, at a text size within about 4% of what I had before, and every character drawn from 1.56 times as many pixels. The text is the size I'm used to. There's just more room around it and the letters are sharper.

That's the whole upgrade in one sentence, and it's what I'd tell anyone still sitting on a 34" 1440p panel.

Text clarity, and the Windows checkbox nobody mentions
Out of the box I could see fringing. Black text on white had a very slight blue tint on the right side of the letters, white text on a dark background had a faint red one. I had my face about 10cm from the panel to find it. My X36 doesn't do this that much. What it does instead at that distance is look visibly rougher and more pixelated.

Then I turned ClearType off. On the LG the color edges are gone completely and the text stays exactly as sharp. On the X36 the same switch removes nothing, because there was close to none to be removed , but the text gets noticeably more pixelated.

That's what the density actually buys you. ClearType is subpixel antialiasing built for classic RGB stripe panels. This one is RGWB, so Windows color compensation lands in the wrong place and you get colored edges. Switch it off and Windows falls back to plain grayscale smoothing, which normally costs you sharpness. At 110 PPI I can see that cost. At 143 PPI I can't. So the density does two things at once, it makes text sharper and it makes the subpixel trick that caused the fringing unnecessary in the first place.

I checked in VS Code too, since Electron apps sometimes do their own text rendering. Same result.

The X36 is ahead on this one point and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Its V-Stripe layout is a true RGB stripe, so ClearType does exactly what Microsoft designed it to do, and I wrote in that review that no ClearType workarounds were needed at all. Here you do have to flip the switch. Difference is that flipping it costs you nothing on this panel.

And maybe some of you will remember it in that same post I wrote that W-OLED panels with an RWBG layout still produce noticeable fringing on text, because of the reversed subpixel order and the extra white subpixel. I was talking about 34" W-OLEDs at around 110 PPI, and at that density I stand by it. On this one the white subpixel is still in the layout and it's still not an RGB stripe, and with ClearType off I can't find the fringing at all. Density did that, not a new subpixel arrangement.

RTINGS is the only one of the big reviews that photographs ClearType on and off on this panel, and their lab macros show it far better than anything I could shoot with a phone. Their verdict says there's still fringing around letters because of the RGWB layout, which is correct for the state the monitor ships in. Their ClearType off shots tell the other half of the story, and the letter edges in those are neutral.

ClearType ON:

ClearType OFF:

TFTCentral and Monitors Unboxed both call text clarity solved on this panel and don't mention ClearType at all. Now you know which switch they were probably sitting on.

If you want to change it, just press Windows Button, type ClearType, open "Adjust ClearType text". The checkbox is system wide, the fine tuning is stored per monitor, so run it on all screens if you have multiple.

Where the resolution surprised me
I expected the win to be in code/screen space for writing/reading and it's there. What I didn't expect is how much the extra size matters in video editing and multi tasking with all kind of apps. That turned out to be the bigger jump of the two and it's the part of the upgrade I wouldn't want to give back.

The window/sunlight test, and the reason I wanted this panel
In my office, there is a huge window on the left and I get direct midday sun. In my X36 post I wrote that MSI's DarkArmor coating had mostly fixed the magenta shine compared to my older QD-OLED that one used to get those on dark areas in daylight, with one limitation I put in writing back then: with full sunshine on the panel, or at odd angles, the shine still comes through.

That is the condition I actually live in when I have my windows open. It happens on my desk every day around midday without roller blinds.

This panel doesn't do it. Sun coming straight in, no roller blinds, no brightness change, blacks stay black. The X36 sitting next to it goes slightly violet in the same light, exactly the way I described it back then. That's the W-OLED advantage in one example and for me it's the biggest day to day difference between the two panels. I also can't make out mirror reflections in the matte coating, only general diffusion.

Worth flagging that the labs disagree here. Monitors Unboxed says the matte coating eliminates defined reflections, RTINGS says mirror like reflections stay and get stretched by the curve. In my room, in the worst light I get, I'm with Monitors Unboxed.

165Hz after 360Hz
This is the spec everyone flags. Monitors Unboxed calls it their biggest problem with the monitor, and the precursos ran 240Hz, so on paper it's a step backwards.

Coming off 360Hz in The Finals, the difference is noticeable. It's also gone after a few minutes. 165Hz is still very smooth. In WoW and Hogwarts Legacy I never get near that frame rate anyway, so there's nothing there to miss.

The GPU question no review answers
5120x2160 is ~11 million pixels. The X36 is ~5 million. That's roughly 2,2 times the work, and the obvious worry is that this monitor needs a new graphics card.

Not for me. DLSS is necessary here, but DLSS was already necessary on the X36. With it, everything runs fine on the 4080 Super. The approach didn't change, only the target resolution. Monitors Unboxed closes their review saying you'll probably need a 5090 for this thing. That can be true if you want 165 fps and up in every kind of game. For me, single player games don't need anything above a stable 60 which I cap there to reduce VRR flicker anyways.

What I'd want improved

The warranty, by a distance: LG told the press in 2023 that burn-in is covered inside the two year warranty, in the US and in Germany. Three years later, LGs own warranty page lists 24 months for monitors and limits coverage to material and manufacturing defects at the time of sale. Burn-in isn't mentioned on it anywhere, go read it yourself, the link is at the bottom. Dell Alienware, MSI and Corsair each put three years of burn-in cover in writing, Asus puts two (source: TFTCentral). MSI's three years come with strings attached, you have to let OLED Care run and never postpone it. A promise with conditions is still more than a promise that only lives in a press statement. This is the one item on this list LG could fix with a paragraph of text instead of new hardware.

Every AI feature is on when you unbox it: AI Upscaling, AI Scene Optimization and AI Sound, all active, nobody tells you. AI Scene Optimization is dynamic image processing, which means the picture you judge in the first week isn't a fixed picture. I turned all of it off. AI Upscaling was the one feature I actually wanted, and on PC input it made no visible difference for me, which lines up with TFTCentral calling its practical use cases very limited and Monitors Unboxed calling it largely pointless on PC.

There's no firmware version in the OSD: The information page shows operating hours, resolution and refresh rate. To find out which firmware you're running you have to install LGs own PC software. On this manufacturer, in this year, that's an odd thing to ask people to do. I've got LGs auto install blocked and I'm not installing their software just to read a version number, so I can't tell you which firmware this review unit is running on.

The power brick is huge: 19,5 x 3,5 x 9,5 cm budget desk space for it.

There's a USB hub but no KVM: which is a real shame given the USB-C port sitting right there.

And the stand: Monitors Unboxed and RTINGS both mention wobble at the panel connection, and RTINGS softens it by saying it mostly matters on an unstable desk. Mine sits on a marble slab anchored to the building, which is about as stiff as a surface gets. Tap the top edge and it swings for three to four seconds, and harder than the X36 next to it, which settles in two to three. It doesn't feel cheap, and cable routing through the stand is better solved than on the MSI. But that wobble is coming out of the joint, not out of my desk.

Two things I haven't tested
USB-C charging. I don't own a laptop that charges over USB-C, so the 90W is LGs number and it stays LGs number until someone else confirms it.

Burn-in. Seven weeks and 250 hours is nothing. No image retention so far, including long WoW sessions with a static UI, and I run the pixel refresh manually in the evening after heavy days. I'm not going to pretend that says anything about year three.

Small things worth knowing
My panel has very little grey banding. Testing a dark grey full screen in a dark room, I can find it up to about RGB 20 at 165Hz and up to about RGB 28 in the 330Hz dual mode, and in both cases only because I was looking for it. TFTCentral measured the same direction, low at 165Hz and more noticeable at 330Hz. Banding is a panel lottery on this technology, so check your own. I vibe coded a little html test page for exactly that, DM me if you want it.

VRR flicker is there and it's the same as every other OLED I've used. Nothing serious. RTINGS calls it distracting, TFTCentral treats it as normal WOLED behaviour that shows up in very dark scenes. I'm with TFTCentral. They also measured why the dual mode is worse: a drop from 330Hz to 48fps shifts gamma more than a drop from 165Hz to 48fps. That's also why I'd tell anyone to cap their frame rate in game, so the swings stay small in the first place.

Dual mode switching takes about three seconds and feels like plugging in a new HDMI device. Reliable, but not instant. And 2560x1080 stretched across 39" is too pixelated to work in, at least in full screen mode, so treat it as a gaming mode and nothing else.

One afternoon my text suddenly looked smeared, as if everything had been shifted by a pixel, worst on the letter w. Restarting the monitor fixed it and it hasn't come back since, with AI Upscaling on or off. TFTCentral hit a rare bug of their own when leaving dual mode. If text ever looks wrong on this thing, power cycle the monitor before you go hunting through settings.

Last one, and I seem to be alone on this: I like the 1500R curve and I'd happily take more of it. Most reviews treat 1500R as the sensible correction to the predecessor's 800R.

Price
LG lists it at 1.799,99$ and, at the time I'm writing this, is selling it at 1.599,99$ on their own store. Monitors Unboxed calls that a flagship tax and recommends waiting, pointing at the 45" model that dropped 400$ within six months of launch.

Mine came as a review unit, so the honest question for me is a different one. Would I have bought this with my own money at 1,599$? Yes. The 39" are great and the resolution is right for the work I do, with video editing getting more out of it than I expected.

tl;dr
Coming from a 34" QD-OLED, this fixes the one thing I complained about and doesn't break anything I cared about. At 125% scaling I get 43% more desktop at the same text size, and turning ClearType off removes the RGWB fringing at no cost in sharpness, which isn't the case on my 110 PPI panel. Blacks stay black in direct sunlight where the QD-OLED goes purple. 165Hz stopped bothering me after a few minutes and DLSS was already part of my life before this monitor. Buy it if pixel density is your bottleneck and you can live with a two year warranty that doesn't put burn-in in writing.