AOC AG274QXM Review – 1440p 170Hz MiniLED IPS GAMING MONITOR!
This is an actual, real life, ready-to-buy, Mini LED gaming monitor! It’s honestly incredible, it’s vibrant and blindingly bright, remarkably fast and responsive, but it’s unusable for me. This is the AOC AG274QXM, a 1440p 170Hz IPS gaming monitor with a Mini LED backlight, adaptive sync, HDR1000, 10 bit colour, and a £1000 price tag – and a few key flaws that I just cannot understand why they are here. Let me explain.
On paper, this thing looks like the absolute best thing around for gaming. Sure it’s “only” 170Hz and not 240Hz, but personally that’s a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make for everything else it’s rocking. It’s a 27” 1440p panel, my personal preference, and is an IPS LCD layer overtop of the 576 zones of Mini LED backlighting. It sports not only 10 bit colour, but is quoted as covering 155% of the sRGB colour space, 116% DCI-P3, and 125% of the AdobeRGB spectrum which is no mean feat. They report an SDR brightness of 600 nits, and HDR1000 support meaning up to 1000 nits of peak brightness when using HDR, and even a 1 ms GTG response time!
Even the I/O is packed, with 2 HDMI 2.0 – sorry 2.1, apparently HDMI 2.0 doesn’t exist anymore… – anyway, 2 HDMI ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, and a USB C port that works in conjunction with the USB 3.2 Gen 1 hub to offer a KVM switch built in so you can hook one machine, say a laptop, up via USB C, then your gaming PC or console over HDMI or DisplayPort, then you can switch your peripherals and display between the machines easily. The Type C port even offers up to 65W of power delivery to charge your laptop while in use. That does mean that the power brick is rather massive – it’s rated for 330W which is rather strange as the monitor itself is only rated for 65W of typical power consumption, and even adding the 65W of USB C charging, and reasonable headroom over both… Well a much smaller 200W unit would already be overkill. With that said I measured more like 90W power draw from the wall in SDR at 100% brightness, so perhaps it is warranted.
Unfortunately, those on-paper highlights are somewhat overshadowed by some glaring issues – anyone sensitive to flashing lights should stop watching now, because one of the biggest issues for me is this. What you are seeing is the Mini LED backlight being switched on and off 2000 times per second. It’s illustrated nicely by my response time tool measurements, where you can see just how insane the light output is from that. For reference, here’s what a normal graph should look like. See a nice smooth line? Now back to the madness. Yeah, big deal.
This alone is enough to make this monitor unusable for me. This is basically the same thing as ULMB (ultra low motion blur), where they are effectively inserting a black frame every 0.5ms, and it’s effectively ‘flicker’. That gives me eye strain and a headache almost immediately, and if I’m being honest I’ve struggled to use the display for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. Sadly this isn’t something you can disable, at least for now, as apparently AOC is working on a firmware update that may allow for that, but it’s not here yet.
Strangely, their product manager blamed the backlight strobing on the local dimming – the exact quote I got was “His initial reply was that it is not possible to turn off local dimming. Therefore, the monitor backlight will be constantly strobing to display the image.” Here’s the thing though, this monitor doesn’t do local dimming unless you use the HDR mode in the Windows display settings. All of this footage has been in SDR. That means that, as far as I can tell, the statement I was given is incorrect as local dimming literally isn’t enabled. I honestly have no idea why the monitor is doing this – but please AOC make it stop.
Now, your ears might have pricked up at the sound of no local dimming in SDR mode, and yes, that’s true. Here is a perfectly black screen in SDR mode – with a bit of backlight bleed no less, and here is the same image but with HDR enabled. Big difference, huh? Luckily, it’s not something I’m too worried about as with 576 local dimming zones, each zone is around 2cm x 2cm, and if something is on the border between zones you can have a 4cm x 4cm halo around something small like your cursor. The haloing isn’t something you notice so much in normal content, although strangely when enabling HDR the image gained a strange sort of oversharpened look, further driving me away from using it.
One of the monitor’s strong suits has to be colours and brightness, as even my SpyderX which is woefully underprepared for this level of gamut coverage still reports the widest range I think I’ve ever tested. It also reported a maximum for 650 nits in any of the gaming modes, or 750 nits in the “standard” mode with the gaming profiles off – that’s in SDR too. That is actually higher than AOC’s 600 nit claim, and certainly bright enough to burn your retinas off. Contrast ratio is pretty lackluster though, with between 900:1 and 1000:1 in it’s SDR mode, and it’s only that high thanks to the impressive peak brightness level, not the deep blacks. Of course when local dimming is enabled you get effectively an infinite contrast ratio, but since that’s locked to HDR only you won’t always see that benefit.
If you do end up with one of these, you should know about the gamma settings. You have three options: Gamma 1; Gamma 2; or Gamma 3. Descriptive, I know, but it gets worse! When in a “Gamer Mode”, the ‘Gamma 1’ option provides roughly Gamma 2.2, but with “Gamer Mode” set to off, it provides Gamma 2.0 instead. Gamma 2 provides roughly Gamma 1.8, and Gamma 3 is roughly Gamma 2.2. To my eyes, Gamma 1 or 3 (depending on if you are in a gamer mode or not) is the best visually.
When it comes to response times, AOC’s claim this is a “1 ms monitor” is actually really hard to prove. Looking at 1000 FPS footage of the UFO test, it sure doesn’t seem like it, as even with the brightness changes, with overdrive off, it looks like it takes more like 4 ms from the first part showing of a new frame to the UFO being fully rendered and crisp. Using my response time tool, trying to pick where this transition starts and ends is basically impossible. Using an insane 120 point moving average gives you a somewhat usable line to look at, so with overdrive off this rising mid grey transition is right around 4 ms, this brighter falling transition is more like 5 ms, and white to black is 3.7 ms – although full black to white is right on 1 ms. So technically, sure it’s a 1 ms monitor, but you won’t be feeling that.
Of course, that’s with the overdrive modes turned off, is it any better with it on it’s maximum “Strong” setting? Well, yes. 0-255 takes just 0.7 ms! Strangely though, 255-0 is actually slower at more like 4.5 ms, and you get pretty bad overshoot in anything that isn’t the extremes – 51-102 spikes to 25% higher than the end light level (averaged anyway), and 153-102, well that visits the Laurentian Abyss with an averaged 62% undershoot. Yikes. That also means that it takes almost 12 ms for the pixel to stop transitioning, or well almost exactly 2 frames at 170 Hz. Medium overdrive is a little less aggressive but still doesn’t speed things up much – actually on average it ends up longer thanks to the over and understood, so only the “Weak” setting is worth enabling if any, although of the measurements I calculated “Off” ended up being the most consistently fast, so it’s up to you really.
Input lag wise, every tool I used struggled with this. My time sleuth reported anywhere from 1.8 to 2.8 ms, which to be clear is still a good result, but that variability is unusual to see. NVIDIA’s LDAT actually refused to run on a number of runs, again getting wildly inconsistent data ranging from 86 ms of total system input lag to just 11 ms, but in general it seems to average out to around 30 ms which isn’t too bad. And OSRTT reported around 10 ms of total system input lag when using it’s UE4 test program rather than an actual game where animation delays may play a role in delaying the input.
So that’s the data, but what is it actually like to use and to game on? If I can manage to forget the strobing, it’s pretty great, at least in a bright room anyway. It’s incredibly vibrant and rather stunning to look at. Content looks exceptional and even in a bright room you’ll have no trouble seeing everything. In a darker room especially in SDR you’ll notice the glow and the limited contrast ratio, but it’ll still be a great view.
For gaming, even more frustratingly, it was excellent. It felt smooth and responsive, the panel was fast enough to give a crisp gaming experience and I was able to feel confident with it incredibly quickly which isn’t something I can say for all monitors. Despite my usual lack of skills, I think I was a little more accurate especially in the fast paced action where often I’m let down by a slow, smeary display. And that’s the most annoying thing, because it only took a few minutes for my eyes to feel strained and sore, and a few minutes more to get a blinding headache. Even if you don’t get the headaches, this level of flicker is something monitor manufacturers have been promoting their monitors are free from for a full decade, and for good reason. And it’s not even just black frame insertion, at RGB 102 it pulses to FULL WHITE every 2 ms, then immediately to full black. This isn’t good for you, and it’s such a shame.
For it’s £1000 price tag, hell for a £300 price tag, I cannot recommend this. The flicker alone is enough to rule that out, but on top of that, the fact it doesn’t do local dimming in SDR, the IPS glow and backlight bleed is far from ideal and the local dimming zones still being pretty large would make this a less-than-ideal choice even if the strobing wasn’t present. Personally if you have this kind of money to spend on a monitor, the Aorus FI27Q-X was a much better experience for me, offers an increased 240Hz refresh rate too, and is a fair bit cheaper – or I’m sure there are some other high end options I’m yet to check out that might be just as good or better. I really wanted this monitor to be great. Mini LED monitors are currently few and far between, but the technology seems like a great stepping stone between OLED and regular LCD displays, which is why it’s such a shame this one isn’t great. This is a first generation product though, and AOC have shown over the years they are committed to improving their products, so I’m excited to see what a second generation version of this can do.
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TechteamGB Score
