YOU ASKED FOR THIS

This is the AOC C32G2AE, a 1080p 165Hz 32” VA gaming monitor that has been hotly requested. Let’s give it the run down and see what it is we’ve got here, starting with the specs. 1080p at 32” is… rough. At a normal viewing distance, the pixels are visible to my eyes, and anything from content to games looks pixelated and blocky. It’s really at the point where if you sit far enough away to not be bothered, it’s arguably too small in your vision – 1440p would definitely be my preference here. As for the refresh rate, that’s fine, running at 165Hz, although as we’ll see in a second thanks to the slow VA panel, that refresh rate doesn’t mean much.

It’s also worth noting that physically the stand is pretty limited. You get tilt adjustment and that’s about it. No height adjust here, and a decent bit of wobble to it too – although there is a VESA mount on the back so it’s not that big a deal. Also on the back are all your inputs, comprising of two HDMI 2.0 ports, a DisplayPort 1.2 port, and even a VGA port for.. Backwards compatibility, I guess? It’s there if you need it. The on screen display is controlled with separated bottom-facing buttons – I’d definitely prefer a joystick style control instead but seeing as you likely will enable overdrive, set brightness to 100% then never touch it again that’s not so important. You do get a backlight strobing mode if you’d like to use it, although you’ll have to disable Adaptive Sync to switch that on.

Let’s talk about the big one, gaming. On first impressions it isn’t too bad. It definitely feels a touch on the sluggish side, but it’s not absolutely dreadful – at least, on the right settings. Swapping to the overdrive off mode is a completely different experience. You can practically follow the smeared trails of movement with your eyes – it’s not pretty and makes the gaming experience a tad on the slow side for sure. While you can get by, I can’t see this as anything more than a casual gaming monitor.

That’s backed up by the response times, where with overdrive off you can expect an average response time of around 27ms. Yeah, you heard that right, 27ms. That’s just under 5 frames at 165Hz, all on screen at the same time. Wonderful, isn’t it? When you push overdrive to its maximum it doesn’t actually drive the panel that much faster, only cutting 10ms off the average. Actually when I say it like that it sounds like an insane drop, but that’s only ⅓ of the time! It STILL takes an average of nearly 18ms to complete a transition, and weirdly with next to no overshoot – save for literally 4 out of 30 that do miss their target.

This lends itself to the slow, smeared transitions you can see in the UFO test, where motion clarity is just nowhere to be found. You get between 4 and 7 still visible old frames on screen at once. That’s not great, although happily with overdrive on its maximum that does improve a little to more like 2 clearly visible frames and a further 2 that are partially visible. Not perfect, but not the absolute worst. I should also note my Time Sleuth reported a pretty standard around 7ms of on-display latency. That is a touch higher than I’ve seen on other 1440p displays but that’s likely down to the slow panel response.

Ok, so it’s somewhat average for gaming, what about content consumption? Well there are some good points there – it’ll cover around 91% of the DCI P3 spectrum which is great, and do so remarkably accurately with a measured deltaE of under 1 – a fantastic result for sure. The downside is that it will only hit around 275 nits, which makes everything look pretty flat and bland. Look at this clip, it should be a vibrant river valley, but instead it’s a muted, unimpressive scene. It’s especially obvious in the darker shots where despite the black levels being pretty good, the bright highlights don’t show up as they should, making for a desaturated look. It is worth noting that thanks to the low black levels, I measured just shy of a 2000:1 contrast ratio – albeit a pretty uneven one across the display.

For content creation, while it is technically accurate I’m not sure that I’d trust its ability to visually recreate colours correctly which could lead you to colour grade your work badly. In some scenes it’s fine, but I can’t say this would be what I recommend for content creation for sure.

So, did you make a good purchase? Well personally I can’t say this is a model I’d spend my own money on. The mix of the low pixel density, slow response times and low brightness makes for a fairly lacklustre experience – at least for me anyway. Considering you could have spent £30 more and got the CQ32G2SE, a 1440p 165Hz curved VA monitor instead I’d personally have opted for that, or actually spent about the same and got something like the LG 27GN800 instead, a flat 1440p 144Hz IPS monitor which should net you a much more responsive experience, albeit with much more grey-blacks.