Acer X32 FP 4K 160Hz MiniLED Gaming Monitor Review

This absolute beast is Acer’s X32 FP – a 4K 160Hz IPS gaming monitor that offers pretty incredible top shelf specs. I mean, we’re talking a MiniLED backlight, 1200 nits of peak brightness in HDR content, a claimed 0.7ms minimum response time, AMD Freesync Premium Pro, massive colour gamut coverage and a Delta E of less than one from factory. And all of that can be yours for, at least at the time of filming, around £1,200. £1 per nit! Amazing! Of course, just reading from the spec sheet doesn’t tell you the whole story, so let’s dive into it and see if it’s actually worth that hefty price tag…

I’ll start with the physical – this is one chunky monitor. It’s thick, or deep I should say, with a wide – yet stable – stand. You’ve got plenty of adjustment, in the form of an impressively large amount of tilt, reasonable height adjust, and decent swivel room too. Styling wise this is clearly a gaming display, with the sharp angled lines streaking across the back of the panel. I think it looks pretty good, if a little imposing due to its size. You’ve got a pretty crazy number of inputs too – four HDMI ports, one DisplayPort and one USB C port for both USB and DisplayPort ALT mode. Add to that a four port USB 3 hub – two of the ports are on the left hand side of the monitor – and you’ve got a whole lot of I/O to play with. Surprisingly, despite its heft, this doesn’t have a power supply built in, it has to use an external power brick. And lastly on the physical, the OSD controls are on the right, including a joystick style switch and a couple buttons above that. 

Let’s move onto my favourite topic, response times. Acer is quite proud of its response time claims – you’ll find “1ms G2G” plastered everywhere, and like I mentioned they even boast “0.7ms G2G minimum”. Naturally I fired up my open source response time tool – available at OSRTT.com for all your monitor testing needs – and ran it through its paces. Starting with no overdrive, you wouldn’t expect this to be all that fast and yeah, it isn’t. The panel averaged 8.7ms – a full 2.5ms slower than the refresh rate window. Now that isn’t actually that bad – nearly 9ms isn’t exactly fast, but anything that is close to the refresh rate window means there shouldn’t be absolutely heinous ghosting, and a quick look at the UFO test confirms that. There’s one ghosted frame on screen, but the current frame does get most of the way rendered before the next one starts being drawn. 

So, that’s a bit slow and nowhere near our magic 0.7ms minimum, so lets crank up the overdrive. There’s only two settings here, “Normal” and “Extreme”. Normal introduces a remarkable amount of overshoot in the mid range, with some errors being as high as 42 RGB values off – that’s really quite bad, and that means the response times aren’t actually that much faster when you include how long it takes to actually come to rest. If you ignore the overshoot time the average drops to just 4.6ms or about half the “Off” setting, but that isn’t exactly ideal either. Here’s what that looks like on the UFO test – the new frame does get rendered a little faster for sure, but the inverted ghosting is often more distracting and is pretty obvious here. 

So if that’s “normal”, what does “Extreme” look like? Bad. Really bad. The overshoot is so extreme that all bar the min and max transitions are affected. The worst is 77 RGB values too high – as in it was going for this mid grey, but actually hit basically full white like this. Yeah that’s awful. If you include the overshoot time – as I think you should – the average response time actually goes UP to 9.26ms. If you decide the overshoot shouldn’t be included, the average is still only 3.6ms, with the minimum not even reaching their quoted average of 1ms, let alone a minimum of 0.7ms. The thing is, this panel isn’t all that bad. I think the “normal” OD mode could be tuned down a little bit and you’d have a perfectly reasonable experience, but for Acer to claim this is anywhere near a 1ms – or 0.7ms minimum – panel is just false advertising. Acer isn’t alone here, but that doesn’t make them any less culpable. If you’re wondering, this is what the UFO test looks like on “Extreme”. You get TWO INVERTED GHOSTING FRAMES. TWO! I have no idea how Acer could be happy with this. 

Ok, let’s talk about something a little more positive. The input latency is pretty good – OSRTT reckons around 3ms of on display latency with no results taking longer than one frame, so that’s spot on. The Time Sleuth reckons more like 2ms, but either of those results are pretty good and well within one frame so that’s fine. Both of those factors translate into a decent gaming experience. The larger panel at 32 inches, the 4K resolution, the 160 Hz refresh rate, all that adds up to an immersive and pretty enjoyable time. I had no trouble enjoying anything from Rainbow Six Siege and other FPS games, to more scenic racing games like Dirt 5. It’s a pretty good all rounder – it isn’t exactly for esports pros, but you wouldn’t expect it to be!

I think colours might be the strong suit here, with well over 100% coverage of the AdobeRGB spectrum, and almost 100% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum too – that’s no mean feat, but this’ll do it without a sweat. Brightness is actually better than quoted – Acer says 400 nits in SDR, I measured more like 500 nits. That’s excellent and plenty bright enough for use even in a bright room. The HDR brightness isn’t something I’m equipped to measure, but Simon from TFT Central who’s had this in already (and whose article I’ll link in the description) says it can hit those figures. Contrast is sadly lacking for me though, with just 770:1 due to pretty high black levels. That’s something I noticed while using it too – content with black areas is still very much grey, and the darker shades can be very difficult to make out. Colour accuracy is pretty good too with an average DeltaE of 1.57, although the darker shades of grey struggle to be accurate with DeltaE’s over two which isn’t ideal. Still, especially for a gaming display this is pretty spot on.

Now I mentioned this has a MiniLED backlight – and it does. The problem is the zone count. You have just 576 zones, which means the haloing on such a large panel is pretty obvious. Here’s a somewhat extreme example, you can clearly see a considerable amount of light around the box. I tried using the local dimming mode while watching content, but it was just too distracting for me personally. I mean you essentially have a grid of what I’d guess is 32×18 zones, so each zone is about 2cm x 2cm. Compared to the 8.3 million pixels that are 0.02cm wide… Yeah there’s a bit of a disparity there.

I think that brings me quite nicely onto my main sticking point with this thing – why not just buy an OLED? Ok a 32” OLED in particular isn’t in the same price bracket at more like £3,000, but 27” 1440p OLEDs are around £1,000, and 42” 4K OLEDs are about the same. You might be worried about burn in, sure, but for the average user it isn’t a massive problem. The upside though is perfect blacks, often very similar colour performance, an infinitely better HDR experience, and of course literally instant response times. The X32 FP isn’t bad, but if it was an OLED panel instead of this still very impressive IPS one, I can’t help but feel it’d be a much better experience. Still, if you are dead set on 4K at 32 inches, this seems like a decent option. I do hope they offer a firmware update to calm the “Normal” overdrive mode down to something actually usable, but I wouldn’t hold my hopes up for that. Everything else, save for black levels, is pretty good, and I can’t deny it’s a great experience to actually game on it. It’s still a pretty penny though – but of course those are my thoughts, but I’d love to know yours in the comments down below!