AOC CU34G2XP Review – INSANELY CHEAP 34” 180Hz Ultrawide Gaming Monitor

This is AOC’s latest ultrawide gaming monitor, the CU34G2XP – not to be confused with the CU34G2X from 2020. This new “P” model sports a higher refresh rate at 180Hz, while still offering a 34” 1500R curved VA 3440×1440 panel. AOC claims a 1 millisecond response time – we’re gonna test that! As well as up to 400 nits of peak brightness, a 4000:1 contrast ratio, and impressive colour gamut coverage to boot. So, let’s test all those claims and see how true they are, and come to a decision on whether or not this is worth your money.

Seeing as this is a gaming focused monitor, let’s start with the gaming focused results. Using my open source response time tool – available at OSRTT.com by the way – you can see that with no overdrive, the VA panel here shows its weakness. Especially in dark to light transitions, it’s incredibly slow. I’ve definitely seen worse, but with only 33 percent of transitions falling inside the refresh rate window, that isn’t great. Happily, we have a great little feature called “overdrive”. That pushes the monitor harder so it responds quicker. On the strongest setting, aptly named “Strong”, if we only look at the initial response times, then that’s excellent! The average drops to 2.9 milliseconds – still three times slower than the claimed 1 millisecond figure, but is pretty great. 90% of the transitions are inside the refresh rate window, so that’s excellent. Just.. just maybe don’t look at that middle table. Ignore all that red there… Yeah, that’s one of the worst heatmaps I’ve seen for overshoot in quite a while. Just to emphasise this, here is highspeed footage of that overshoot. It looks awful – although because the panel is so slow on darker shades, the overdrive ends up being quite different depending on what shades it’s transitioning between. To swap back to the response time charts, looking at the perceived response time – as in including that overshoot time – the average actually exceeds the no-overdrive time at 8.11 milliseconds. That’s not great. 

Happily, the “Medium” setting is much better. It still isn’t perfect, averaging around 5.6 milliseconds, but it removes functionally all overshoot. Looking at the highspeed footage, you can see that on lighter backgrounds there’s around one frame of ghosting, versus the dark background which has more like 4 frames. That’s how big a performance difference there is across this panel – and almost all VA panels in fact. If I’m being honest, I wish AOC toned down the “Strong” OD mode, or made the “Medium” mode a touch more aggressive, because the “Strong” mode is just pointless, but there’s a significant visual difference between the two modes. Flicking between the modes with Aperture Grille’s Frog Pursuit test on screen, to my eye I can see a significant amount of sharpness with the “Strong” OD mode, versus a soupy blur on “Medium”, but “Strong” is just as visually uncomfortable thanks to the overshoot. A more middleground option would have been nice.

On the input lag front, I’m happy to report that the CU34G2XP is spot on. OSRTT measured an on display latency average of around half the refresh rate, with very few results taking less than one frame to display, so that’s spot on. That should mean gaming is pretty responsive, and I’m happy to report that, yeah, it is! While the response times can sometimes be a hindrance, this isn’t an esports display, and so for the vast majority of games it’s a perfectly playable experience. The ultrawide nature really helps immerse you in your game, and while I would prefer a flat IPS, or a curved OLED like the EVNIA 8600 I use full time, the 1500R curve here does help surround you and make you feel more involved in what you’re playing. The only downside I had from that was that with all my studio lights on, the curve helped them glare into my eyes from almost any angle and make it hard to see what was going on. 

Actually, part of that might have been the brightness – see while AOC claims this can do up to 400 nits of peak brightness, my SpyderX2 could only measure around 350 nits at peak. That’s fine for most usage, although for brighter environments it might struggle. It did beat the claimed 4000:1 contrast ratio though, with a maximum of 6830:1 in my testing at 50% brightness. Even at 100% brightness it still beat the claimed figure, at 4930:1. Interestingly, the backlight isn’t overly uniform. My testing showed it’s much brighter at the top of the display, and gets progressively dimmer towards the bottom – to the tune of 18% no less. That’s under 300 nits, versus 364 nits at the top left. I can’t say for sure if this is an issue with my monitor or a wider issue with this type of panel, but I thought it was worth mentioning. To the eye that difference isn’t obvious though. Lastly, there is colour accuracy. This is actually pretty good, with an average DeltaE of 1.73, with only a couple of the darker greys being outside the DeltaE of 2 target. Not bad!

As for inputs, you get two HDMI 2.0 ports, 2 DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and a four port USB 3 hub, with the yellow port being a charging port. While it’s a shame this doesn’t come with the higher specced HDMI 2.1 ports, I’m not all too worried. Because this is an ultrawide, console support isn’t a concern, so DisplayPort shouldn’t be a big problem to use instead. As for the on screen menu, this is AOC’s older, more basic design. It’s controlled with downward facing buttons that are painfully slow to respond, so it really isn’t all that convenient to use. Luckily after the initial setup you’re unlikely to be digging into the menu much, so it’s no big deal. You can also use AOC’s G-Menu software to control most settings from Windows. 

Physically, this is pretty typical for AOC. It’s got some red accents both on the front and back, and otherwise a dark grey plastic. The stand is decently stable, and offers a bit of height adjust, tilt, and swivel. Personally I’d say the monitor is pretty short, being below my comfortable eye level even with a raised desk. Luckily you can just VESA mount it if that’s a big problem for you. 

The final thing to talk about is the price tag. While I got this monitor pretty early and so it isn’t widely available as of filming, the MSRP makes this the cheapest high refresh rate ultrawide on the market. AOC have set this at £339, making it cheaper than almost every single 144Hz ultrawide, let alone 180Hz. While this isn’t the fastest panel on the planet, it is exceptional for that price. Not having HDMI 2.1, or the clunky menu system, those things really don’t matter at that sort of price tag. Naturally, this gets a solid recommendation from me.