£400 1440p 144Hz IPS ULTRAWIDE! Iiyama GB3461WQSU Review
How can a brand you probably haven’t heard of make a better monitor, and sell it for cheaper, than AOC and their insane value G2 line? An ultrawide no less! This is the iiyama.. Errrr… GB3461WQSU – I’m not saying that again – and it’s a 1440p 144Hz IPS Ultrawide that costs just £400. Let’s see what it’s like, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
Starting with the panel, like I said this is running at 3440×1440, is an IPS and runs at 144Hz. That means great viewing angles, nice colours and a decent gaming experience all in one. It’s reasonably fast, especially for an IPS panel, with a black to white response time of around 6ms, although a fairly slow 13ms white to black time. Enabling the very strangely designed overdrive – strange because the settings are; OFF, -2, -1, 0 (which isn’t off by the way), +1 and +2. Really it’s; OFF, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 but who needs functioning numbers anyway… anyway, with that enabled, there is literally no difference in response time.
It does help with ghosting a little though, with slightly less of a trail with it on it’s maximum mode. It still does have a visible trail, and to the eye the motion blur isn’t great but there isn’t too much ghosting in games. There is a backlight strobing mode with the same weird numbering system, and ends up making the display look really really dim at full strobe, and gave me an instant headache as usual so I kept it off for my testing.
Colours are a strong point here, testing with my datacolor spyderX, it reported over 100% coverage of the sRGB spectrum, 79% of AdobeRGB and 82% of DCI P3, but more importantly, AOC’s CU34G2X only covered 74% by comparison. It’s not a massive difference, but considering the iiyama one is a good bit cheaper, well it’s impressive for sure.
Now, it’s not amazing, gaming on it feels good but it’s a little sluggish, which is reflected in my input lag testing. With my Time Sleuth reporting around 20ms of input lag at the top of the display, that’s pretty abysmal, and by far the slowest I’ve tested. Now of course that’s standard 1080p 60hz running over HDMI, so maybe DisplayPort at full res and refresh rate is better, right? Nope. I recorded a total system input lag of around 45ms, again putting it in the really slow bracket. I did end up getting accustomed to it, but that solidly rules it out for anyone looking to play fast paced FPS games on this, pretty much at any level really.
Assuming I haven’t just turned you off it, it does have some other redeeming (and quirky) features. It’s pretty basic on the back, but does have a good selection of inputs with 2 HDMIs and 2 DisplayPorts, as well as a small USB 3 hub. It’s got a fully adjustable stand, complete with tilt, swivel, height adjust and rotat… oh. Yeah. It can’t rotate on it’s own stand, I literally had to take off a sticker that said “pivot function is not supported”. It even rotates both ways! It’s got 180° of unusable rotation! I think the reason for that is they use the same stand on regular sized monitors but to keep the cost down they’ve thrown it on their ultrawide and left it at that.
One other downside of having a hand-me-down stand is that it doesn’t seem well equipped to handle the extra weight of an ultrawide. Any level of movement and this thing wiggles like a tuning fork, shaking away for ages. It’s not unusable, but a good monitor arm would go a long way with it.
So, if you can get past the input lag, and quirky stand, this is a pretty impressive monitor. The IPS panel itself does a great job, and is remarkably fast with little issues like backlight bleed. It’s something I could see myself using for racing or flight sims, although I think I’d probably spend the extra £50-100 on the AOC model when it’s in stock and get a more responsive, if not quite as nice, display.
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TechteamGB Score
