AOC 24G4XE Review – £100 180Hz 1080p 24 Inch IPS Gaming Monitor

Just to be clear, the 24G4XE is the less-mobile, but theoretically cheaper version of the 24G4X, an already cheap and frankly excellent gaming monitor. It’s the same panel in both, so if I miss anything here you can find it in my review of the X – although I’ll still give you a full rundown of this XE while we’re here. Really the only physical difference is the stand and VESA mount – the X has a normal height adjustable, centre mounted stand with height, tilt, swivel and rotation adjustment – whereas this XE has a clip in stand that only supports tilting. It does still have a VESA mount, although it’s hidden under a nice cover you’ll need a screwdriver – or ideally a plastic tool – to pop out. Otherwise, this should be effectively the same monitor. So, let’s take a look and you’ll see why I still recommend this rather highly.

Spec wise, this is a 24 inch 1080p IPS panel that runs at up to 180 hertz. They claim a “1ms” grey to grey response time – but of course we’ll see about that – and it has both freesync and is gsync compatible. IO is just two HDMI ports and one DisplayPort, plus a few integrated speakers. Physically this is AOC’s latest design language – muted, all-grey, and pretty subtle. There are a few angles and things to make it a little more ‘gamer-y’ but on the whole it’d fit well even in an office. The on-screen menu is controlled with downward facing separated buttons on the right hand side – not my preference but it works well enough considering I doubt you’ll be in here often. The menu itself is AOC’s newest design, and looks pretty nice, although I’m a little confused why they bury the overdrive settings, arguably the most important setting you should change, on the second page of the gaming settings. I’d want that at the top – maybe second behind the picture mode. Either way you’ve got four total options including off, and we’ll take a look at them in just a second.

To the eye anyway, the panel is pretty nice. It’s reasonably bright, decently vibrant and rich, and has surprisingly good contrast for an IPS panel. Those visuals are backed up by data from the SpyderX2, which reported just shy of the quoted 300 nits of peak brightness, and a 1400:1 contrast ratio even at max brightness. That’s great for an IPS panel! Colours wise it’s equally impressive, with 97 percent coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum, which is frankly fantastic, and as for colour accuracy, that came out to an average DeltaE of just 1.05, which again is excellent especially for a gaming monitor that, at least as far as I saw anyway, doesn’t come with a calibration certificate in the box. 

As for response times, with the default settings (meaning overdrive is off), we can see essentially the native panel performance, and it isn’t all that bad. It averages out to 7.2 milliseconds, which is beyond the 5.56 millisecond refresh rate window, but I’ve definitely seen worse. With overdrive set to the first step, “Weak”, we see the average drop to 6.25 milliseconds. That’s still on the slow side, leaving a ghosted frame on screen, but it’s closer for sure. The next step, “Medium” is where I highly recommend you set this to. The average response time drops to below the refresh rate window at 4.5 milliseconds, and even more happily that isn’t accompanied by heinous overshoot. It’s actually pretty mild, and exactly what I want to see. This is, by far, the best mode, and this is 100% where you should stick it if you have a 24G4X or XE. But, for the sake of completeness, here is the top mode, “Strong”. Strong is an understatement – more like “Heinous”. The initial response time does drop to just 3.1 milliseconds, but if you include the overshoot time you end up with WORSE than no overdrive at all at 7.6 milliseconds on average. Like, a lot of the time with moderately bad overshoot, it isn’t too noticeable to the eye, but this? This was incredibly obvious. Try moving a window around and it’s just horrible to look at!

For some context, here is what the “Medium” overdrive mode looks like at high speed. It isn’t quite OLED fast, but it finishes drawing the frame with a millisecond or so to spare, meaning there is very little motion blur, and next to no ghosting on screen – plus next to no overshoot either. Great experience, 10 out of 10. Now here it is on “Strong”. It’s a disaster. Pay special attention to the white front in the middle – look how burned in it looks when it moves! But even the black frog is visibly off – so yeah please do not use the “Strong” OD mode. It’s awful.

If you were wondering about input lag, happily that is spot on, with OSRTT reporting right around half the refresh rate which is exactly what you want to see. By the way, if you want to be able to test monitors like this yourself, or recommend something to your other favourite reviewers, I designed and built the open source response time tool myself, and sell kits at OSRTT.com, which of course is linked in the description. Anyway, with overdrive on medium anyway, you get a fantastic gaming experience. The 180 hertz refresh rate, combined with the decent response time, means motion is smooth, responsive and decently sharp. 1080p at 24 inches isn’t exactly IMAX quality, but it’s plenty good enough to enjoy flicking around and clicking on heads. The added mix of a pretty vibrant panel makes it even better. It’s just a great time really.

The one thing I should note, and I briefly mentioned it at the start, is the pricing. At MSRP this fixed-stand version is something like £20 cheaper, but both this AND the height-adjustable stand version are currently on sale at £110 pretty much everywhere – including at the global amazon link in the description – which means there is effectively no reason to buy this one over the more featured X model. However, I appreciate that depending on where you are in the world, and when you’re watching this, there might still be a decent price difference between the X and XE versions, and so if there is, I can happily say that this XE is still an exceptional panel, and a frankly stunning value. If the price difference is enough for you to not care about an adjustable stand – especially if you’re going to VESA mount it anyway – get this XE and save your cash. If there’s no price difference, you may as well get the X – but the recommendation stands either way. The 24G4, be it the X or XE, is a phenomenal value and well worth buying if you’re after a 1080p high refresh rate monitor. Great job AOC.