AOC Q24B36X Review – CHEAP 24” 1440p 144Hz Gaming Monitor!

This is AOC’s Q24B36X, an ultra-budget 24 inch 1440p 144Hz IPS gaming monitor, and this video is all about if it’s worth your hard earned cash, so let’s dive straight in. When I say ‘ultra-budget’, that isn’t derogatory, it’s kind of just a fact. Both its price tag, and its physicality, scream budget. Seriously, I mean the second you get it out the box you get that impression. The panel is slim and almost disturbingly featureless. You do have a VESA mount on the back, and a whole TWO INPUTS! That being HDMI 2.0 (not 2.1, so console support is mixed), and DisplayPort. You have an external power brick, and an audio out jack, and that’s it. The stand is tilt-only, and almost entirely plastic, so not exactly the finest quality. Although for this price I expect nothing less. There is plenty of tilt adjustment though, so there’s that! 

From the front you have incredibly slim bezels, and a flush bottom bezel too. The on screen menu is controlled by separate bottom-facing buttons, and the menu itself is basic, although easy enough to navigate with all the usual features, including MBR Sync and four overdrive modes. As always we will be coming back to those overdrive modes later – for now though let’s have a look at the panel itself. That is, as I said, a 24 inch 1440p 144 hertz IPS panel, with a claimed 300 nits of brightness, and that’s about it for claims. On the face of it, it looks nice enough, although I’m definitely spoiled by OLEDs because this looks washed out and flat by comparison. Still, it looks nice enough, and 1440p at 24 inches is definitely a bonus in the sharpness department. Generally though, and to the eye, I’d say this looks good enough. It isn’t winning any competitions, but it’s more than serviceable for watching your favourite YouTube channels, movies and TV shows – and gaming of course. 

To put some numbers to those words, this thing covers just 85 percent of the DCI P3 spectrum, or 61 percent of Rec2020. That isn’t terrible or anything – it’s perfectly serviceable – it just isn’t anything to write home about. It’s fine. Accuracy for those colours is actually really good on average – just 1.03 DeltaE on average – although weirdly one blue result was way off at 5.9. Still, despite this one not coming with a colour calibration report in the box, this is spot on, at least straight out the box anyway. Brightness is actually well above the claimed 300 though at 383 nits, and an impressive-for-an-IPS-display contrast ratio of around 1500:1. That’s still dreadful compared to even a VA panel, but it’s great for an IPS. Uniformity was a little off down the lower right side, but on the whole it’s pretty decent. 

When it comes to response times, well that’s where it gets interesting. This is where the whole ‘ultra-budget’ part comes back in properly. Testing, as always, with my very own open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com, by the way), with overdrive off you get really very abysmal results. An average of 16 milliseconds makes this a 60 hertz native panel, not 144Hz, so yeah this ain’t it chief. With overdrive on weak there is a decent reduction to 14 milliseconds – but since the refresh rate window is 7 milliseconds, 14 still doesn’t cut it. Medium gives you a little better again at 11 milliseconds on average, but that’s still a far cry from a smooth experience, so strong it must be. Strong does have some noticeable overshoot, enough to add over half a millisecond to the average perceived response time, but at least this brings the average initial time down to ALMOST one frame (8.1 milliseconds, versus 6.9 milliseconds for the frame time). To see this in high speed, this is strong. It’s ok, serviceable enough, but hardly crisp on the motion front. The image never quite finishes drawing, which is a shame considering just how relatively slow the panel is in the grand scheme of things, especially these days. Happily the latency is spot on at almost exactly half the refresh rate, so at least there’s that.

For gaming this is fine. It’s fine. It’s serviceable, it’s usable, it’s ok. This isn’t your next competitive esports pro display, obviously, but for most people playing most games it’s fine. At this price point it’s pretty damn hard to argue against this. Sure, there are flaws. The colours are average and pretty washed out, it isn’t the brightest thing, the response times and average refresh rate make it mediocre, but for £110 or £115? I cannot fault it. This is an exceptional display for that money. That is basic office monitor money, so to get not only a high refresh rate and adaptive sync display, but a 1440p one for that price? Hot damn that’s good. This is not an amazing display, but it’s more than good enough to start out on, and considering this comes seemingly pretty colour accurate out the box, that’s a really nice little sprinkle of value added on top. I would genuinely buy this thing as a kid’s first gaming monitor, and be more than happy with the result. Great job AOC!