INSANELY CHEAP 240Hz VA Gaming Monitor?? AOC 25G3ZM Review

Yeah, you read that right. This is a 1080p 240Hz VA monitor. That sounds like a match made in Grimsby (for anyone not from the UK, that’s a bad thing). Seriously. You wouldn’t think to put those two together, and yet… I’m really not mad about it. Now AOC’s website makes a pretty bold claim that this panel offers a 1ms GTG response time, which if you’ve seen any of my reviews before you know I built a tool specifically to call out BS marketing like this, which of course you can get over on OSRTT.com.

Testing with my latest and greatest OSRTT Pro unit, the out of the box experience is pretty abysmal. You can expect an average response time of 8.5ms. That means only 6% of the 30 different colour change transitions I test with were below the refresh rate time. That’s really bad. Now that is with overdrive set to off – something I really wish they’d stop doing. Setting it to the “Medium” setting almost always offers the best experience, as you can see here. It only introduces a tiny amount of overshoot, but cuts the average response time down to just 6.6ms. That means 1/3rd of the transitions now fit inside the refresh rate window which is still a little naff, but much better. If you use the “marketing overdrive mode”, aka “Strong”, you’ll find the initial time does go down to just 4.7ms (take note that that’s still 3.7ms higher than the claimed 1ms response time), but it introduces so much overshoot that the perceived time actually goes back up to 8.86ms, worse than no overdrive at all. So in short, this is in no way a 1ms monitor, but on the “Medium” setting it’s not bad.

If you are wondering about input lag, OSRTT can test that too! The on display latency was consistently less than one frame, which is exactly what you are looking for in a gaming monitor like this. I did also test with my Time Sleuth which normally gives me pretty useful numbers especially at 1080p, but for some reason I couldn’t get the “Low input lag” mode in the on screen menu to switch on while using HDMI. It works fine with DisplayPort, but at least using the first HDMI port it wouldn’t let me switch it on. That meant some pretty terrible results, at around 10ms. A good display, and with the setting on this one too, should be around 1ms or lower. Their 24G2ZU IPS 240Hz model I reviewed last year worked fine for this and was around 1ms, so I’d expect this is the same.

As for actually gaming on it, I actually had a pretty good time. While it’s no 1ms monitor, and I really can’t wait for OLED monitors to be this sort of size, it is good enough for the sort of casual player I tend to be. I’m not sure it’s a pro esports display, although they’ll likely be using 360 hz monitors at this point anyway so for the more average gamer this is more than fine. It does still struggle with the dark to light transitions so if someone is hiding in a dark corner you are less likely to see them moving, but honestly it’s not that bad. One nice thing about it being a VA panel is that it’s a rather colourful panel with genuinely deep blacks. It’s no OLED obviously, but compared to the grey-blacks from an IPS, this looks really nice.

That brings us nicely onto the brightness, contrast and colour space specs. AOC claims this offers 300 nits of peak brightness, but in my testing it seems like AOC are underselling themselves here as I clocked more like 317 nits. AOC also claims a 3000:1 contrast ratio, but I measured a lot closer to 4000:1, which is fantastic and a lot better than the usual 1000:1 you’d get from an IPS panel. They also claim it covers 92% of the DCI P3 spectrum – and on this one they are spot on. Exactly 92% coverage is what I measured with my Datacolor SpyderX. What’s even more impressive for me is the colour accuracy! That came in with an average DeltaE of 1 – well below the human eye threshold of 2. In fact, none of the test patches reported higher than 2, so that’s excellent.

To the eye this looks like a pretty beautiful panel. It’s vibrant and offers properly deep blacks which always makes for a good viewing experience. If you happen to need to adjust the panel, it has plenty of motion. The usual height, tilt and swivel, along with rotation to portrait mode if you really want a 240Hz portrait monitor… The stand is pretty basic, with a wide but slim foot, a rather cheap feel to it, but plenty of stability. I/O wise is pretty lacking with just on DisplayPort 1.2 port and 2 HDMI 2.0 ports, with no USB hubs to be found. The on screen menu is controlled by separate underslung buttons on the right side of the chinbar, and the menu is their fairly old design with the basic settings you’d expect, including AMD Freesync Premium support and of course the all important overdrive modes.

But honestly, the real party piece of the 25G3ZM is its absolutely insane price tag. This is for sale on Amazon right now for just £190. Under £200 for a 240Hz monitor! It wasn’t all that long ago that we were praising the 24G2U for being a very affordable 144Hz IPS 1080p monitor at this sort of price, so to see an equally good 240Hz model available for this kind of price.. Well let’s just say I’m blown away. For that kind of price, any flaws I may have with this are so insignificant that it seems frivolous to complain about them. All I can say is, if you want a 1080p gaming monitor, this is the new one to buy.