Asus XG32UQ 4K 160Hz IPS Gaming Monitor Review

If you already bought an RTX 4090 and are looking for the perfect display pairing, then look no further: this is your new monitor. For the rest of us, I guess it’s time to dream. This is Asus’ XG32UQ, a 4K 160Hz IPS G-Sync Compatible “1ms” gaming monitor that costs right around £1000. Weirdly, you can view this as the “budget” version of the PG32UQX, their nearly £3,000 MiniLED backlit version of an otherwise similarly spec’d monitor. Or you could view it as nearly twice the price of the AOC U28G2XU, an equally similar, if slightly smaller, 4K 144Hz IPS monitor.

So, what do you get for your money? Well, starting with the obvious, the panel, you get a 32” 3840×2160 144Hz native IPS panel that you can use the OSD to overclock to up to 160Hz. It’s worth noting that that feature is only available over DisplayPort 1.4 with display stream compression (DSC). That means you’ll need an RTX card or RX 5000 series AMD card or newer. Still, Asus reckons the panel is good for a 1ms GtG response time, up to 600 nits of peak brightness in HDR, or 450 nits in SDR and 96% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum. The rest of the package isn’t bad either, with full G-Sync compatibility and FreeSync Premium Pro support, ELMB Sync – their backlight strobing mode that works with adaptive sync enabled, and pretty typical gamer styling with sharp lines and a jutting stand. The stand does offer the usual adjustability, although more interestingly it also features a tripod thread in the top of the stand so you can attach your streaming camera straight to the monitor.

Taking a quick peek at the on screen menu reveals an impressive number of settings, chief of which has to be the overclocking option. If 144Hz wasn’t quite enough for you, you can push it up to 160Hz. You of course have a number of overdrive modes – six in total if you include off, a surprising number of options for the ELMB Sync setting including “Clarity Level” and “Clarity Position”. It is worth noting that ELMB sync only works at over 85Hz. Any less and it turns itself off. You even have their “GamePlus” features like an FPS counter, crosshair, sniper zoom mode or even a stopwatch. You’ve also got the “GameVisual” modes, aka game modes like FPS, racing or a dedicated sRGB mode. What’s more interesting to me is the options under “Color”, which include the “Display Color Space”, which you can limit just to sRGB, DCI-P3 or “Wide Gamut”. I’ll talk more about this later in the video, but suffice to say you should leave this in “Wide Gamut”.

So, onto some actual testing. Since we are talking about colour, let’s look at those results. My SpyderX reported around 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum – a touch shy of their 96% claim but I’d call that within reason. More importantly, this monitor comes factory calibrated with a certificate in the box, and I’m happy to say that it had a DeltaE of under 1 straight out the box, so that’s fantastic. I did test with the DCI-P3 setting on and I just got less coverage and slightly worse accuracy so like I said just leave this in “Wide Gamut” for the best experience. Brightness wise I’m happy to say this beat the 450 nits typical quoted figure with more like 540 nits in SDR. The uniformity was a little off but wasn’t all that bad and certainly looked fine to my eyes. Oh and the contrast ratio was 1020:1, which is pretty standard for an IPS panel like this.

As for response time.. A 1ms monitor, this is not. Even with the maximum (and horrendous) overdrive mode and only looking at the initial response time, the best single result I got was 1.8ms. The average is more like 4ms – if you ignore the overshoot, which is a rather big ask. Personally I’d back it off to “Level 3” as that offers zero overshoot, but still decently fast at around 6.5ms average. It’s just a much better experience overall. And of course all this data comes courtesy of my new OSRTT PRO tool, which you can now get from OSRTT.COM. As for input lag, the Time Sleuth reported that at just 1ms which is excellent, and OSRTT reported it as under one frame so it’s spot on.

For gaming this is just fantastic. It’s a proper top-shelf experience, it’s smooth, very crisp and pretty responsive. While I’m not sure many people will be playing fast paced games with this, it does work fairly well for it. I wouldn’t call it the primary use case though, even if I did have quite a lot of fun playing with it. I’d imagine that a game like Cyberpunk is a better choice of genre. It’s a little slower paced, more about the beautiful world and story than outright performance, and is less harsh on slower response times. Either way it’s a great experience.

For general usability, I found it a little strange. Despite, as best as I can tell, still using the standard RGB pixel layout, it injects red into small text in things like Windows explorer which doesn’t look right. You can tone that down by decreasing the “VividPixel” setting in the Image menu, but dropping that below 50% just makes everything look blurred and lacking sharpness so that’s not really a fix either. It isn’t a massive problem, but it is something I noticed while testing it. Still, for content consumption, or even content creation, it’s of course fantastic. The colours look fantastic, it’s beautifully sharp and the 32” display works well for that extra bit of immersion as it fills your vision just a little more than I’m used to.

While testing this, you know playing games, watching my own videos like a self-absorbed idiot, I was looking for something to distinguish this over the AOC U23G2XU I reviewed a little while ago. I mean this is twice the price! Sure maybe add £100 for the ROG logo, but double? I don’t know. The response times are pretty similar, and I’d say the actual usage experience is pretty similar too. Obviously the U28 is smaller at 28”, the brightness isn’t quite as good at more like 300 nits or so and the contrast ratio is more like 700:1 instead, but on the whole I’d personally rather save the cash. But, for the sort of person who can afford a GPU powerful enough to actually enjoy gaming at 4K high refresh rate, that extra bit of brightness, contrast and quality might just be worth it. But if you are going to spend that much, why not get the fancier MiniLED backlit version instead? Tough choice for the lucky few that can afford one.