THE NEW BEST BUDGET GAMING MONITOR – AOC 24G4X Review

This is the new best budget gaming monitor, and this video is really just me explaining why. The biggest factor, by far, is the price tag. AOC have set this at £150. That is literally an inflation-busting price tag – while everything else in the world is getting more expensive, AOC is out here making gaming monitors CHEAPER! This is the 24G4X, a 1080p 24” 180Hz IPS gaming monitor, and while it isn’t perfect, it is very much worth your money. Let me explain why.

Starting with the gaming tests, AOC claims this has a 1ms response time. This is a fantastic joke I hope we are all in on by now, because no, this doesn’t have a 1 millisecond response time, it’s more like 7ms. On the “Medium” overdrive mode – the one I’d recommend – it takes around 6.5 milliseconds to change colour. There is very little in the way of visible overshoot, and while some results come out a little slower, I’m really pretty happy with this. Highspeed footage of Aperture Grille’s Frog Pursuit test shows there is next to no ghosting visible at all, and while it’s no OLED, it’s a pretty reasonable experience. Just to highlight how they get that 1 millisecond figure by the way, here’s what the “strong” overdrive mode reports as – around 3.6 milliseconds if you don’t include the horrendous overshoot time, or 8.6 milliseconds if you do. Oh, and just awful overshoot. Here’s that frog pursuit test so you can see just how bad that looks. Please don’t set overdrive to strong on this, it’s a bad time. 

Happily, input lag is pretty good too. It’s a touch higher than I’d like at around 4.5 millisecond on average – I’d prefer to see fewer results taking longer than one frame here, but on the whole it’s still pretty decent. And that means the playing experience is good too. It’s pretty smooth, responsive, and is easy enough to game somewhat competitively on. Of course this isn’t something esports pros should be picking up, but for your average gamer it’s more than good enough for pretty much any genre of game you fancy playing! The 180 hertz refresh rate is pretty great too – a nice little bump from the typical 144 and 165 hertz options. It isn’t quite as smooth as a 240 hertz panel, but the response times do a good job of matching this refresh rate, so I’m not too worried. 

On the brightness front, I measured around 300 nits here, which while on the lower end, is plenty for most environments, especially in darker rooms. It also beats its claimed contrast ratio of 1000:1, with over 1400:1 in my testing. That’s great for an IPS panel. One thing I want to add is it seems the backlight uniformity isn’t amazing – the centre is the brightest zone, with up to 17% less light on basically all of the edges. Now this isn’t overly visible to the eye so I wouldn’t be worried, and it’s remarkably consistent, but I thought it was worth mentioning. On the colour front, I’m really happy with this panel – it covers nearly 100% of the DCI P3 spectrum in my testing, making for a vibrant and rich viewing experience. Content looks great here – and while it could do with being a little brighter, it’s still more than good enough especially considering the price tag and the fact it’s a gaming monitor. Colour accuracy is great too, the SpyderX2 measured a DeltaE of just 0.93, making for an excellent result. 

On the physical side of things, AOC has changed up the design to a sleek, angular, and all dark grey design. Gone are the red accents – on the front or back – and in is the dark grey plastic. I actually quite like this – and even the back has an appealing design. The stand has plenty of adjustment, in tilt, swivel, height, and even rotation into portrait mode, plus a VESA mount is hidden under the stand mount. The stand’s foot isn’t overly deep, meaning adjustments can make it tilt forward, and the monitor is insanely light, meaning any swivel movements require two hands. Otherwise though, this is a nice little package. IO wise you get two HDMI 2.0 ports – it’s a shame they aren’t HDMI 2.1 for use with consoles – and one DisplayPort 1.4 port. No USB hub here.

One other shame is the on screen display – or at least the controls. You’ve still got the downward facing individual buttons, rather than the joystick style switch I think we all prefer. The OSD is a new design though, and is a good bit more responsive. You’ve got all the gaming settings you’d expect, even a backlight strobing mode that you can enable with adaptive sync on too – not that I’d recommend that personally. Strangely, the overdrive setting is on the second page of the gaming settings, which I’d have expected to be like, right at the top. It’s arguably the most important gaming related setting, so I’d want that front and centre. Still, the new UI looks good and is easy enough to work with. 

For £150, and I’m sure a very similar price in dollars and euros too, this is truly exceptional value. Any problems I have with this are eschewed with ease at that price tag. For me, if you’re just starting out and want to get a decent gaming monitor that doesn’t break the bank, this is a no-brainer purchase. It is a shame that you might not have VRR support with a console, but especially if you’re gaming on a PC, if you’re looking for a cheap 1080p high refresh rate monitor, buy this one.