The one major weak point of Alienware’s AW3926QW, namely luminance uniformity, may soon disappear altogether through a firmware update. The culprit, called Convex Power Control (CPC), has been active on the monitor since release with no user controls, but Dell is actively testing a means to turn the feature off entirely.
We spoke to Vincent Seajun Kim, Alienware monitor lead planner, about this issue at IFA 2026. In our initial assessment of the AW3926QW, I suspected CPC was to blame for the curiously poor uniformity we measured on our sample, with deviances in brightness of up to 21% from the centre of the panel. Vincent Seajun Kim confirmed this was the likely cause and told us Alienware was considering making this a toggleable feature.
Since then, the firm has provided a recent statement to TFTCentral on the issue. In short, Dell is continuing to test a CPC toggle, but wants to “understand the full customer experience implications before we enable anything.” Sadly, the company doesn’t say when it expects to deploy an update that would unlock this feature beyond a broad “soon”.
For those who are still wondering what CPC actually is, allow me to provide a brief explainer. The feature essentially acts as burn-in protection for the AW3926QW, dimming the screen’s edges while leaving the panel’s centre-most portion untouched. Theoretically, this should mitigate any image retention from surrounding static HUD elements, which are usually on the edges, while the natural dynamism of content in the centre of the display takes care of such concerns in that area.
Alienware isn’t the only company to use CPC on its OLED monitors, but this is usually a controllable option via OSD controls, such as ‘corner dim’ on the Gigabyte MO27Q28G. Once the firm deploys such an update, the AW3926QW should easily make the rare Club386 cut of a five-star product, receiving our coveted Editor’s Choice award. We’d need to retest the display once the update is available, but I’m relatively confident this change shouldn’t come with any unexpected deal breakers.
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