AOC AG456UCZD Review – 800R Ultrawide 45” 240Hz OLED Gaming Monitor

This absolute monster is AOC’s AG456UCZD, a 45 inch 3440 by 1440 240Hz W-OLED gaming monitor with a frankly insane 800R curve to it. Despite the spec sheet looking rather promising, I must admit that I’m a little underwhelmed by the UCZD, and the primary reason is all to do with the pixel density. At 3440 by 1440, it’s the same resolution basically every other 21:9 display offers – except the majority of the other ultrawides are 34 inches, not 45. The pixel density here is just 83 pixels per inch, which to give you some context, the EVNIA 8600 QD-OLED I’ve been using as my daily driver for a little while now (and love) is 109 pixels per inch, and even more shockingly a 24 inch 1080p panel is 92 pixels per inch. This has a worse pixel density than a 24 inch 1080p display! It’s effectively the same as a 27 inch 1080p panel, and that’s not great for a high end gaming monitor like this. 

Somewhat ironically, this being a tightly curved gaming monitor means you can’t sit all that far from it either, meaning you are painfully aware of the pixel density, or lack thereof. When you couple that with the fact this is a W-OLED panel – with a WBGR subpixel layout – makes text look rather crunchy. It doesn’t look overly sharp, and that’s quite a shame. Speaking of this being a W-OLED, that does mean you get the interesting backlight behaviour – specifically the adaptive brightness limiter. You can see that taking effect in this response time graph from my open source response time tool, where it spikes to the “correct” value, then it cuts back to a more stable brightness. That’s actually pretty good though – it’s pretty fast at ramping back, so unlike the older W-OLED panels I’ve seen, this isn’t quite as intrusive. It does mean that the 1000 nits claimed peak brightness is only available both in small window sizes and for but fleeting moments. The SpyderX2 reckons with 50% of the screen white you’ll get around 270 nits, or with 1/9th of the display lit it’s more like 400 nits, so with something like a 5% window size, in HDR mode, you should get 1000 nits for a few milliseconds. Realistically you’re looking at between 250 and 400 nits of “usable” brightness. 

While we’re talking about the SpyderX2 results, you should know the colour gamut coverage is pretty great at 97% of the DCI P3 spectrum, or 73% of Rec2020. Accuracy came back as really pretty bad with a DeltaE of 4.38 on average, although I suspect that’s more down to the SpyderX2 not being fit for OLED displays – especially W-OLEDs – as AOC includes a calibration report in the box that shows a sub two DeltaE in the box and I’ll believe their twenty grand sensor over this two hundred pound one. To the eye, colours look fantastic. It’s vibrant and rich, although it isn’t sharp. From a distance it looks a little better, although the curve means it’s best experienced up close.

Speaking of that curve, this has to be one of the tightest gaming monitors on the market, with a shocking 800R curve. That means this is a 800 millimetre radius circle – for context most curved displays are 1500 or 1800R – with my EVNIA being 1800R. This truly wraps around your head, and my god it’s immersive. It’s arguably more immersive than the 49 inch super ultrawide EVNIA 8900 I reviewed somewhat recently too, as the extra vertical height really helps fill more of your vision – plus the fact this is an even tighter curve just helps it fill your peripheral vision even more. Naturally, being an OLED, it is ridiculously smooth. The 240 hertz refresh rate definitely helps, and of course the instant response times mean you get remarkably crisp motion – even if the image itself isn’t all that sharp. Honestly, that really is the biggest downside here. You really do notice it, even while gaming. Enemies are only a few pixels wide, text is noticeably jagged, and it just doesn’t look as sharp or crisp as a monitor of this size and price really should. It’s such a shame because I can imagine at 4K this would be a phenomenal experience. Sure you’d need a 4090 to run it well, but you’re buying a £1,000 monitor, I assume you can afford a £1,000 GPU. Naturally I did test response times which are exactly what you’d expect with green across the board, and latency was spot on too with an average of around 2.2 milliseconds and basically no results taking longer than one frame, so it’s perfectly fast on that front. Really the only thing that lets this down is the resolution. 

Taking a step back, literally, to take this bad boy in, you’ll notice that it does take up an awful lot of space on a desk. While you can VESA mount it with the included adapter, it’s hard to imagine an arm that can support not only the fairly hefty weight, but the weight so far away from the mount point, literally projecting forward. Luckily the stand does a decent job, and even has height, tilt, swivel and a tiny bit of rotation adjustment available too. It is a touch wobbly though with only a single hinge in the centre. IO wise you’ve got one DisplayPort, one USB C, and two HDMI ports, along with a four port USB 3 hub with charging. On the back you’ll find some fairly subtle RGB lighting – which you can fully disable if you’d prefer – alongside the joystick for controlling the on screen menu. The menu is AOC’s newer style which is pretty easy to navigate, although with this being an OLED I doubt you’ll spend much time in here. They do include a remote though which I found interesting – clearly they expect you to use this as more of a TV (ie from a distance), but with that tight of a curve I’m not sure you would want to. Either way it works fine, as does the joystick style switch. 

The one lot of settings you might use more often is the OLED care settings – things like pixel orbiting which is set to weak by default, and the panel refresh modes. With this being a W-OLED, I’d be slightly more concerned about burn in than I would be on a QD-OLED panel, although with regular refreshes I expect it’d be just fine. One thing AOC is keen to make you aware of is the 3 year OLED warranty – so I guess that means they are pretty confident you’ll get at least three years out of it. For an OLED that’s actually fairly confidence inspiring as they normally don’t like to get the warranty period too close to the average failure time, so I’d expect this to last a fair bit more than that. 

As for price, this is listed as £1,130 as of filming. That’s an awful lot of money, and puts it up against some very stiff competition. The size does make it unique compared to most of the QD-OLED panels I’d recommend, although those tend to be more like £700 instead. If I’m honest, I can’t say I’m a fan of the UCZD. I really wanted to like it – something this size and this smooth ought to be one of the most immersive and enjoyable gaming experiences on the market, and it gets really close, but it just isn’t sharp enough, especially at that price too. With such a fundamental issue like that I can’t really say that, well maybe at the right price it’s worth buying, because even if it was price matched to the EVNIA 8600 I use daily, I’d still rather have the 8600 over this. Of course, those are my thoughts, and I’d love to hear yours in the comments down below. Is this something you’d consider buying, or is the pixel density enough to put you off? Let me know in the comments below!