AOC AG276QZD Review – 27” 1440p 240Hz OLED Gaming Monitor

While it’s taken longer than I was hoping for, we are finally seeing a bunch of stunning, high refresh rate OLED monitors like this one from AOC hitting the market. This is the AG276QZD, a 27 inch, 1440p, 240 hertz OLED gaming monitor with a supposedly pretty budget price tag. Naturally, being an OLED panel, it’s likely the same actual panel that the likes of LG, Asus, and Corsair are using, with a few tweaks by the good folks at AOC. So, let’s see what this can do and if it’s worth the still hefty price tag!

I’ll start with the physical, since that’s the thing that’s most likely to be different. AOC have gone for a rather interesting design here – the panel itself is in a ludicrously thin metal housing, which is then tacked onto what kind of looks like a 22” monitor body when viewed from the back. You’ve got a funky non-symmetric RGB ring – which yes you can disable fully in the menu if you want – and the usual downward facing IO. That being 2 HDMI 2.0 ports capable of 1440p at 144Hz, and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports which can do the full 1440p at 240Hz, plus a two port USB 3 hub with one yellow charging port. On the stand front you get all the adjustability you’d expect – height, tilt, swivel and rotation to portrait mode. The only thing that bugs me – and it bugs me way more than it should – is the foot of the stand. It’s not symmetrical. I noticed it and I can’t unsee it. Luckily it comes with a VESA mount adapter so you can just mount it to a monitor arm if it bothers you. 

The panel itself is a W-OLED with a somewhat unfortunate pixel layout. It’s a WRGB – or RWGB specifically – layout, meaning you have not only red, green and blue LEDs, but a white LED too. This, in theory, can offer better brightness and take the strain off the RGB LEDs, but it translates to a somewhat poor usage experience, especially with text. The smaller the text, the more pronounced and irritating it is. You get this smearing, blurry effect, and a level of pixelation to the text, and it’s something that is painfully obvious from the second you boot up the monitor. To be clear, this mostly affects text, not content consumption or gaming, but seeing as this is a monitor I thought I should mention it.  

The other thing you should know about W-OLEDs is they have a fairly strong adaptive brightness limiter. Basically, to try and make the LEDs last as long as possible, you can’t let them get too hot. The more light you push out of them, the hotter they get, and the less lifespan they have. So, these panels will flash you with as much light as they can, then they’ll quickly ramp back down to a more “comfortable” level. My open source response time tool shows this really well – you can see the final light level is nowhere near the peak – and it’s actually pretty quick to pull back. This actually makes it less obvious, compared to the older LG OLED panels that took seconds to dim, making it annoyingly obvious. The only thing that surprised me here was that the adaptive brightness limiter was active even down at 30% brightness – that’s at maybe 60 nits at most once it settles. That’s rather disappointing, as I’d expect it to only cut off the worst of the peaks, rather than a fixed dimming regardless of brightness. 

Since we’re here, I’ll mention that the response times are instant as you’d expect, and the input lag is spot on too. Functionally all the results were under one frame, so I’m happy in saying this is a great choice on the latency front. Which I suppose brings us onto the gaming experience. It’s hard to argue against this thing for gaming. While the brightness isn’t exactly perfect, for fast paced FPS games – where the 240Hz refresh rate and the instant response times really make a difference – this is excellent. It’s hard to get a better experience really, as long as you’re in a darker environment. It’s fast, responsive, and super low latency – what more could you ask for? If HDR gaming is what you’re after, you might be disappointed. The complete lack of brightness makes for a worse-than-average experience, so it’s best to leave that off. Still, even for other game genres, you should have a great time with this. I enjoyed a bit of poorly driven Assetto Corsa – my excuse is I was using the keyboard to drive.. Yeah, that’s it… Anyway, in short, it’s a great gaming experience.

Colours wise, visually it looks stunning, and it comes with a report in the box to show it’s been tested and calibrated. I measured pretty much spot on AOC’s claimed figures, that being 97% of the DCI P3 spectrum, although the Spyder X2 couldn’t handle the W-OLED for the accuracy measurements, reporting a wildly inaccurate DeltaE of 9.99 on average. I’m inclined to believe the calibration report in the box there. 

There is one last thing we need to talk about here, and that’s price and competition. At an MSRP of $999 it, in theory anyway, has a decent price advantage over its equally specced counterparts. The problem is that those counterparts, namely the LG 27GR95QE-B is – at least currently – on sale for just £750. That’s a full £100 cheaper than I can find the AG276QZD has ever been listed at, and £250 cheaper than its MSRP. Hell, the Asus PG27AQDM is currently on sale from Asus’ estore at £899. That one in particular is meant to be the best version of this panel, so you’d likely want to spend your cash there instead. If you can get a good deal on this, it sure is a great gaming experience, although if I’m being fully honest, the Philips EVNIA 8600 I’ve swapped to using as my primary display is arguably a better option than any of these. It’s a proper RGB panel, a QD-OLED specifically, and while it is slightly slower at 175Hz, it doesn’t have a harsh brightness limiter and so stays more consistent at the various brightness levels you set. Text looks crisp, and it games like a dream. It’s also around the same price – or you can get the same panel from people like Alienware for a little less too if you’d prefer. That’s my two cents anyway.