1440p 270Hz IPS Gaming Monitor – AOC AG275QZ Review

This absolute beast is AOC’s confusingly named AG275QZ – not to be confused with the QX or QXN models I’ve reviewed recently. This bad boy is a 270 Hz 1440p IPS panel that absolutely rips. It’s obviously a premium monitor, but when you game on it you can see where your money went for sure. AOC claims this has a 1ms grey-to-grey response time, and, well, I built a tool to test that and call out the BS marketing. It’s open source, and if you want to test monitors yourself head to OSRTT.com where you can pick one of the hand-built units up yourself!

So, is this a 1ms monitor? No, not even close. With overdrive on the maximum mode, what I call “marketing BS mode”, or “strong” as you see it in the menu, the average sits at 7.2ms, with genuinely awful overshoot. If you ignore the overshoot and just look at how long it takes to initially get to the target shade – the initial response time – you’ll see that a number of results are close to 1ms – if not quite there exactly. Looking at it that way, the average is more like 3.4ms, but it’s pretty clear that 3.4 isn’t 1, and only 2/3rds of the transitions fit inside the refresh rate window there.

If you set it to a more sensible overdrive mode, like “Medium”, you’ll find the average does increase to 5.7ms which puts most of the transitions outside the tiny 3.7ms refresh rate window, but it’s a much better experience. Like, a lot better. There’s actually zero overshoot, which is quite surprising considering how bad it was on the next setting up. It really looks like AOC has room here to push the medium overdrive mode a little harder, as a tiny bit of overshoot is perfectly fine especially if it comes with more like 4.5ms average response times instead.

A quick peek at the UFO test shows the overshoot on the highest overdrive mode. What’s interesting is thanks to how fast the refresh rate is, the overshoot ends up not being quite as big a deal as the same level of overshoot on a slower refresh rate monitor. It’s still bad and I wouldn’t recommend using that mode, but it’s an interesting observation. On medium you’ll struggle to find much of a problem. While the response time does just about exceed the refresh rate, in practice it’s close enough that you won’t see much if any ghosting.

When it comes to input lag, of course OSRTT can test that too, and the on display latency results were pretty consistently less than one frame which is exactly what you want to see. I always test with my Time Sleuth too, but as with the AOC 25G3ZM I reviewed last week, for some reason when testing with the Time Sleuth over HDMI the monitor disables its low input lag mode in the menu. That means the results are pretty poor at something like 6ms, but that’s because the low input lag mode is off. With it on most AOC displays generally run at around 1ms which lines up with my OSRTT results.

Actually playing games on it was a phenomenal experience. Something about how fast the response times are to match the insanely fast 270 Hz panel made it an incredibly smooth and responsive experience. It felt like a properly premium panel, and while I’m still no pro, it definitely felt like I had an easier time lining up shots – even on moving targets – and catching enemies just a little faster than usual. While playing Rainbow 6 Siege I did find that I had a hard time spotting the dark clothed enemies against a darker background. The contrast isn’t quite good enough for that.

In fact, the contrast ratio is pretty abysmal. It’s just 620:1 – not the 1000:1 AOC claims. That means any sort of dark shade, especially black, all become the same visually. That makes enemies harder to spot, and it makes darker areas of films and TV blend into each other, losing a lot of detail. It’s such a shame, because otherwise the panel is fantastic. It beats AOC’s claimed 400 nits of peak brightness with 428 nits, it covers an astonishing 100% of the AdobeRGB colour space, and 96% of the DCI P3 spectrum, and even more impressively the accuracy is near-perfect. It reported an average DeltaE of just 0.66, well below the human-eye threshold of 2. In fact, the worst result was still only 1.44, and guess what shade that was… A dark grey!

You’ll be happy to know though that the viewing angles are fantastic from any direction – not that you need that since the stand has plenty of adjustment. Everything from height, tilt and a little swivel, to its real party piece – portrait mode. Most displays only turn in one direction for this, but the AG275QZ goes both ways! I guess this is so you can orient the fairly chunky chin bar away from the edge of your other monitors. I’d love to know who’s running a 270 Hz 1440p IPS monitor in portrait mode though – and while using the monitor’s own stand too. Still, it’s there if you want it. The stand itself is decent – it’s stable and doesn’t take up the entirety of your desk which is always good. The rear I/O is plentiful, with a 4 port USB 3 hub, including one yellow charging port, along with two HDMI 2.0 ports and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports.

When it comes to the on screen menu, that’s controlled with a joystick style switch on the back right which is great. The menu is the newer style from AOC, which while a bit finicky to navigate as the control scheme changes depending where you are in the menu, it’s well laid out in six sections. The most important section obviously is the gaming one, where you’ll find your controls for overdrive, low input lag, and game modes if you fancy using them. One thing that’s missing from the settings is any RGB control, since you don’t get any lights on the back! It’s a pretty subdued design overall, which I’m a fan of personally. The large chin bar on the front is a little obtrusive, but it’s hardly the end of the world.

The final catch, as always, is the price. This is definitely a premium monitor, and at current pricing it’s generally £100 more than the other 240Hz 1440p monitors already on the market from the likes of Gigabyte and MSI. That price premium does come with frankly astonishing colours, a great response time, and good brightness, although I can’t help but feel this really needs deeper blacks and better contrast to be the top shelf product it’s clearly trying to be. If it was at price parity with the existing 240 Hz models I don’t think I’d have a hard time recommending it, but as it stands it might be a touch rich for my tastes. That doesn’t change that it’s a phenomenal gaming experience, and I think only second to a 240 Hz 1440p OLED – something that is right around the corner with Asus’ ROG Endgame display. That is likely to be over a grand though, so it’s still a little while before this would be genuinely competing. All in all, this is a great display, if let down by the contrast ratio. At a slightly reduced price I could see it being a good choice, but at its current price I’d probably get something a little cheaper with a 240 Hz panel instead.