ProArt PA27UCGE vs Dell U2725QE: A Designer's Pick

Buy the ASUS ProArt PA27UCGE if the deciding factor is color accuracy that maintains itself over time and a panel that feels faster under a mouse in Figma and Photoshop. Reach for the Dell UltraSharp U2725QE instead only if what you actually need from “Mac connectivity” is a real Thunderbolt 4 dock — single-cable 140W charging, a daisy-chained second display, and wired Ethernet — because that is the one thing the ASUS genuinely does not do.

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Both are 27-inch 4K panels aimed at the same desk, and both will run Adobe apps and Figma without complaint. The differences that actually matter for a graphic designer are narrower than the marketing pages suggest, and one of them — how each monitor talks to a Mac — is worth more attention than the color-gamut percentages on the box.

The comparison at a glance

Why the built-in colorimeter matters more than the DCI-P3 number

ASUS advertises 98% DCI-P3 on the PA27UCGE’s spec sheet. Independent measurement from Photo Review came in lower — 86% DCI-P3 and 87% Adobe RGB, against a claimed 100% sRGB that measured at 99%. That gap is real and worth knowing before you assume the panel matches a reference-grade wide-gamut display. Dell’s U2725QE, measured by IT Pro at roughly 97% DCI-P3 against a 99% factory claim, tracks its own spec sheet more closely.

What the gamut numbers don’t tell you is color accuracy, which is a separate measurement. Photo Review’s testing put the PA27UCGE’s average Delta E at around 1.2 in DCI-P3, and ASUS’s own calibration report for the unit measured a sRGB average of 0.78. That accuracy holds up because the PA27UCGE has something the Dell doesn’t: a built-in motorized colorimeter that swings over the panel and re-profiles it automatically on a schedule, without you plugging in an external device. 9to5Mac’s hands-on testing found the panel running brighter than spec — over 700 nits against a 600-nit rating — while color accuracy stayed close to the calibration report.

The Dell’s Delta E <1.5 average is a factory number, not a maintained one. IPS panels drift as backlights age, and without an onboard sensor the U2725QE relies on you owning a separate colorimeter (an X-Rite or Calibrite puck) and re-profiling it yourself if you want to catch that drift. For a designer doing client-facing color work over a multi-year monitor life, that’s the practical trade-off: pay once for a panel that watches itself, or buy the panel that costs less up front and maintain it yourself.

USB-C DP Alt Mode vs true Thunderbolt 4: what changes for a Mac

This is the part of the comparison that the spec sheets bury and that matters most for a “future MacBook Pro.” The PA27UCGE’s single USB-C port runs DisplayPort Alt Mode with 96W power delivery — it is not a Thunderbolt port. That’s still fully compatible with any MacBook Pro: Apple’s Thunderbolt/USB-C ports accept plain DP Alt Mode devices, and 96W is enough to charge a 14-inch MacBook Pro at full speed (a 16-inch model will charge, just not at its full 140W rate). What you don’t get is Thunderbolt-specific behavior: no daisy-chaining a second monitor off the ASUS, and no Thunderbolt networking tunneling.

The U2725QE’s upstream port is genuine Thunderbolt 4, with 140W EPR power delivery — enough to fast-charge a 16-inch MacBook Pro from the monitor alone — plus a downstream Thunderbolt 4 port that supports daisy-chaining a second 4K display, and a built-in 2.5GbE Ethernet jack that a MacBook Pro can use without a separate dongle. If the plan is to replace a laptop dock entirely with the monitor, the Dell is built for that job and the ASUS isn’t.

That said, Thunderbolt on a Mac isn’t trouble-free on this model. A thread on Dell’s own community forum describes a U2725QE connected to an M1 MacBook Pro over Thunderbolt where the monitor’s USB hub intermittently dropped to USB 2.0 speeds — degrading the built-in Ethernet adapter along with it — and was resolved only by unplugging and reconnecting the cable. It’s not a universal fault, but it’s a real, reported one worth checking against your specific Mac and macOS version before you count on the dock features working flawlessly out of the box. If you’re also weighing a Dell display against an older Mac’s connector limits, Dell S2722DC and the M2 MacBook Air: What Actually Works covers a related generation of that same DP Alt Mode vs Thunderbolt question.

The contrast gap: IPS Black versus standard IPS

The PA27UCGE uses a standard IPS panel rated at 1,000:1 contrast. The U2725QE uses Dell’s IPS Black technology, which RTINGS measured at roughly 2,050:1 native contrast — about double. For UI and vector work in Figma that difference is largely invisible, since interface design rarely relies on deep shadow separation. It becomes noticeable the moment you’re retouching photography with dark backgrounds or grading video stills: the Dell’s blacks will look measurably less gray under the same room lighting. Neither panel is a MiniLED or OLED with true per-zone or per-pixel contrast, so don’t expect either one to compete with those technologies — this is a difference of degree between two IPS variants, not a different category of panel.

Figma renders sRGB, so the wide-gamut difference won’t show up there

Both monitors’ DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB numbers matter less for Figma specifically than they will for Photoshop or Illustrator. Figma running in a browser renders in sRGB only, regardless of what your monitor can display — a wider gamut on either panel simply isn’t used by browser-based Figma. The desktop Figma app added a Display P3 color-profile option, but users on Figma’s own forum have reported it behaving inconsistently: canvas colors read correctly in P3 mode while image previews in panels and other UI elements clip or convert incorrectly. In practice, treat both monitors as sRGB displays for Figma work and don’t expect the extra DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB headroom to change anything on your canvas.

That headroom becomes real once you round-trip assets through Photoshop for print-referred or Display P3-tagged export work, where a color-managed application will actually use the wider gamut and where the PA27UCGE’s Adobe RGB preset and the U2725QE’s DCI-P3 coverage both come into play. If most of your day is spent in Figma with occasional trips to Photoshop for asset polish, the gamut argument for either monitor is weaker than the spec sheets imply — the calibration accuracy and the Mac connectivity model are the parts that will actually affect your daily work.

What your future MacBook Pro’s chip changes about daisy-chaining

The Dell’s Thunderbolt 4 daisy-chain port only helps if the Mac driving it can actually support a second external display. Apple’s base M-series chips (the plain M1 through M4) drive one external display natively; the Pro and Max variants support two or more, and the Ultra chips support more still. If the future MacBook Pro purchase lands on a base-tier chip, the U2725QE’s daisy-chain output won’t get you a second monitor — you’d need a DisplayLink-based adapter for that regardless of which of these two monitors you buy. Check the exact chip’s display-output limit on Apple’s tech specs page for the model you’re actually buying before treating daisy-chaining as a given.

Which one to buy

For Adobe and Figma work headed toward a MacBook Pro, the ASUS ProArt PA27UCGE is the stronger buy: it holds tighter measured color accuracy without you doing anything to maintain it, runs at a higher refresh rate that makes canvas panning and scrolling noticeably smoother, and connects to any Mac over plain USB-C without needing a Thunderbolt-certified cable. Its DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB coverage measure below the spec sheet, but that gap matters far less than the self-calibration does for day-to-day accuracy.

Consider the Dell UltraSharp U2725QE instead if your real requirement is consolidating a laptop dock into the monitor cable: genuine Thunderbolt 4 with 140W charging for a 16-inch MacBook Pro, a daisy-chained second display (chip permitting), and built-in 2.5GbE Ethernet are things the ASUS simply cannot do. Its deeper native contrast is also a legitimate win for photo-heavy work. Just weigh that against the reported USB-hub quirk on Thunderbolt with Apple Silicon and the absence of any onboard color-maintenance hardware — on the U2725QE, keeping calibration accurate over the years is a job you’ll have to do yourself.