THE TRUE ULTIMATE MONITOR – AOC AG276QKD2 Review

This is the final boss of monitors. Seriously. If you buy this thing, you don’t need anything else. This is AOC’s latest hit, the AG276QKD2, a 1440p, 500Hz, QD-OLED, and an insane 1000 nits of peak brightness. This is it. This is the ultimate gaming monitor. So let’s see just how amazing this absolute beast truly is, starting with a brief tour.

This thing follows AOC’s recent design language, with a sleek and thin panel enclosed in a metal shell, and a plastic backing that looks pretty nice. That has an RGB ring built in, which can be fully controlled (including off) from the menu. From the front you get the same sleek look, with a decently sized irregular shaped foot, and nothing but a thin (slightly protruding) chinbar with AOC’s logo up front. Otherwise it’s very clean. Stand wise you’ve got all the adjustments. Tilt, height, swivel as standard, and even rotation into portrait mode if you are insane. IO is just two HDMI ports, one DisplayPort, and a two port USB 3 hub with one yellow charging port. It’s worth noting that while you absolutely can use those two HDMI ports to run the display, they won’t be able to run at the full 500Hz. At least on my machine with an RX 6900 XT I can only get a pretty abysmal 120Hz, although with newer GPUs it should be possible to hit a more reasonable 240Hz. Basically, you really want to use DisplayPort with this thing.

When it comes to that on-screen menu, that’s controlled with a joystick style switch on the back – definitely my preferred option – and the menu itself is AOC’s most recent design. It’s fine enough, easy to navigate, and has plenty of options. You’ve got a few game modes, controls for the gaming related settings like a crosshair, obviously controls for things like brightness and colours – man there’s a lot of colour controls, everything from colour space to six axis hue control – and of course the OLED care settings. These boil down to dimming either the whole panel (screen saver) or parts (taskbar dimmer, boundary dimmer) or protective measures like thermal protection and pixel orbiting which shifts the whole image a couple pixels left/right/up/down since the panel is purposefully oversized for the image, or the pixel refresh options. For those worrying about burn in by the way, don’t. I’ve been using a QD-OLED panel a lot like this one in my Philips EVNIA 8600 for two and a half years full-time now, and there is still absolutely no burn in at all. Even full screen on a mid-grey, there’s nothing. I use this for literally 12 hours a day, for two and a half years, and it’s still immaculate. You really don’t need to worry about burn-in. 

So, if the physical design is pretty sleek and stylish, and you don’t need to worry about burn-in, what is the panel actually like? Well, pretty damn jaw-dropping. Turning this on for the first time you’ll be blown away by the vibrance – even on the desktop. Stick something with pretty colours on, and damn, it’s beautiful. It’s vibrant, rich, and just gorgeous. I’m in love. Then you start moving stuff on screen, and you’re blown away again. I genuinely can’t describe just how great an experience this gives. Even for just watching stuff, it looks so damn good. It’s brilliantly bright, even in a bright environment like my studio. It’s just great. Interestingly, despite quoting 1000 nits of peak brightness, and sure looking bright, this is actually outputting around 300 nits! Happily, unlike most W-OLED panels, this doesn’t have an adaptive brightness limiter, so you get 300 nits regardless of how much of the screen is lit up. That 1000 nits is the peak brightness in HDR mode, which actually isn’t that unusual for a QD-OLED like this. Still, this punches well above its weight on the brightness front. 

Colours wise, I should start off by saying you actually get a colour calibration report included in the box. The fact that AOC (and no one else that I know of, except their sister company Philips) do this is just great. Anyway, the report shows a stellar accuracy result, the colour gamut coverage for your specific panel, and uniformity too. I can confirm that the gamut coverage is excellent – 99% of DCI P3 and 83% of Rec2020 – as is the accuracy at an average DeltaE of just 0.63, with no results above 2. Amazing. As for response times, it feels almost pointless to even measure them on an OLED like this, because the answer is they are functionally instant. OSRTT can’t quite keep up with just how fast this thing is, but suffice it to say it is perfect in this regard. Latency is also amazing at around one millisecond on average, exactly what you want to see. 

All of that, and the insanely fast refresh rate, means that this is the single best gaming experience you can have, at least on a 16:9 flat-panel display. The ludicrously fast refresh rate, coupled with the instant response times, give you the sharpest, smoothest, and just butteriest gaming experience you can imagine. It is… It feels like it defies physics. It’s just… so, so smooth. It’s crisp, and genuinely gives the best competitive advantage you could imagine. I checked out AOC’s 640Hz TN panel recently, and I would take this thing over that any day. The colours, the viewing angles, and the instant response times make this noticeably better, and it’s only like £70 more too. When I say this gives you a competitive advantage, that isn’t just the smoothness, or even the latency, it’s the fact that, thanks to the 500 frames all being perfectly rendered in an instant per second, you can aim better, track targets better, and hit those headies. Even a layman like me saw a benefit, so if I can, you can too. 

To say that I love this thing is an understatement. This panel is just perfect. And amazingly, this thing doesn’t cost two grand. It doesn’t even cost one grand! It’s – at least currently anyway – around £680. Obviously that’s a lot of money – that is often what people pay for their entire system – but for what you’re getting? Damn that’s good value. A 500Hz 1440p QD-OLED, for under £700? I can’t even compute that. OLEDs in general were all more than this until very recently, and now you can get the ultimate OLED for that? What progress. Obviously if you don’t fancy the absolute ultimate with the ludicrous refresh rate, there are some other cheaper options, the AG276QZD2 is a very similar QD-OLED 1440p panel, just 240Hz instead, and that’s an astonishing £450 now, so maybe consider that one instead if you don’t want the insane refresh rate, or the ultrawide option, the AG346UCD (or the Porsche Designs version that’s actually 240Hz instead of 175Hz and is at least currently actually cheaper, the PD34). Still, this QKD2 is absolutely insane in the best way possible, and if you’ve got the money, this is hands-down the ultimate gaming monitor. Amazing work AOC.