£2000 GAMING MONITOR – AOC AG353UCG Review
Oh my… this thing is huge, and boy is it expensive. Just how expensive? Well if you read the title you’d know it’s freaking £2000! That’s pretty mad, so lets take a look, see what it’s like to game on, and see if it lives up to it’s price tag. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this on every monday, wednesday and friday!
So what makes this a £2000 monitor? Well first it’s a 1440p ultrawide – that in-and-of-itself doesn’t make it too expensive though, so lets start piling on the expensive bits. It’s a 200Hz capable monitor, yes, at 3440×1440, you get 200Hz, and boy is it sweet. Then there is the GSYNC ULTIMATE sticker, which indicates its V2 Gsync module, and the real kicker, this is HDR1000 certified, and that, ladies and gents, is why it costs that much.
Lets break this down then, first is the resolution. It’s great, just like AOCs much, much cheaper 1440p ultrawide, the CU34G2X, it’s a crisp image for anything from movies to games. Add to that the 200Hz refresh rate and you get one hell of a smooth and responsive gaming experience. Seriously, it’s brilliant having that level of speed available to you across that wide, and high res panel and makes the playing experience really immersive.
Then there is the HDR. Now I have to make it clear up front that I personally don’t care for HDR in games – in movies on my big 4K OLED, awesome, but for games, especially more competitive ones, I just can’t bring myself to care all that much. With that said, this is an impressive monitor. It’s 1000 nits peak brightness feels like enough to blind you, and in the right situations can be a rather nice to look at while playing.
On the topic of colours, the monitor’s OSD has a lot of options for the different modes. In non-HDR mode, it lets you set max brightness up to 500 nits, and also settings for sRGB colour space, alongside a fairly important setting, the variable backlight. This has full array local dimming, with 512 zones meaning you get a better HDR experience, at the cost of a bit of a weird experience when not using HDR, but with it enabled. See the white ghosting around the light parts on the dark background? That’s because those local dimming zones are still pretty massive, and so it can’t increase the brightness in just the bright pixels, instead a fairly large square. Again, you can just turn it off in the settings, but interesting to see!
Since we are talking about the panel, I want to mention its response time. AOC quote this as 2ms grey to grey, which actually seems to be fairly close. I was seeing a black to white response time, which is slightly different to GTG, of around 5ms, which is remarkably fast especially for a VA panel like this. There is overshoot though, as you can see on the high speed, it gets incredibly bright, then backs of 1 step before the next square starts getting lighter. That’s with overdrive set to medium.
When it comes to input lag, it’s actually not all that fast, on either HDMI not DisplayPort. It’s certainly not slow, but for comparison, it’s £500 little brother, the CU34G2X, is a couple milliseconds faster on my time sleuth, with this one getting around 16ms in the center, and using the total-system test, so from a mouse input to the gun moving on screen was around 40ms, again for comparison the AOC 24G2U got close to half that. Still, not slow, but not the fastest.
And finally on objective test results, we have the colours. Somewhat unsurprisingly for this kind of monitor, it’s not bad. It covers well above 100% of the sRGB spectrum, and my best fiddling in the settings got me 87% of the DCI P3 spectrum, and 82% of Adobe RGB, which definitely isn’t bad. It did need a calibration out of the box pretty badly so if you are going to use this for colour sensitive work, for whatever reason, then I’d grab a SpyderX and give it a pass on that.
So, objective tests over, all that’s left is subjective. For me, I’m not sold. The last time I sat down in front of a £2000 monitor was the Asus 4K 144Hz HDR1000 monster, and I was gobsmacked how beautiful, how smooth, how crisp it was to use. With this, I wasn’t really blown away. I mean I was blown away by its weight, despite the carrying handle on the stand, it’s monstrous thickness, seriously it’s thicker on the side than my thumb alone, and that there is a fan inside it that, as far as I’m aware, you can’t control and stays on long after the monitor has turned off and runs constantly.
And, while the stand does offer decent adjustability in tilt, height and swivel, the insane weight means it shakes badly at even the slightest jocle of the table. Don’t get my wrong, the gaming experience is good, but to me it wasn’t really much better than on the CU34G2X, which is basically 1/4th the price. This feels like a serious early adopter tax on a monitor that, to me anyway, doesn’t end up offering all that much extra over a more “mid tier” model – but hey maybe I’m just a plebeian and you know better. If so, let me know in the comments.
AG353UCG on Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/ag353ucg
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