THE PERFECT MONITOR – AOC AG276QZD2 QD-OLED Gaming Monitor Review

Seriously, genuinely, this is the perfect gaming monitor. This is the AOC AG276QZD2 – and that ‘2’ appended there is really important, because with it comes a serious improvement. This bad boy is a QD – quantum dot – OLED panel, and that means it is frankly amazing. I’m going to run out of gushingly positive adjectives real fast here, so let me explain why exactly I’m so smitten with this thing, starting with a tour around it. This is a 27 inch panel, with reasonably thin bezels all round, including a fairly thin chin bar. The back is nicely stylised, complete with RGB lighting that you can fully disable if you are that way inclined. The stand is fully adjustable, sporting tilt, height, and swivel adjustments, plus 90 degrees of rotation to put the panel into portrait mode if you are crazy enough to have this as a secondary monitor. IO is decent, with two HDMI 2.0 ports – sadly not 2.1 so these top out at 144Hz rather than the full 240Hz – and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports which can do the full 240Hz. You also get a two port USB hub, with the yellow port being for charging devices, and it does have speakers built in, although they do leave a fair bit to be desired. 

Spec wise, this is a stunning 1440p 240Hz QD-OLED panel, claiming to hit 250 nits of peak brightness and a whopping 99 percent coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum – and in fact AOC include a calibration certificate in the box that shows that it does, in fact, hit that – and an excellent DeltaE figure too, almost always under 1 which is excellent, meaning this is a very accurate panel. In my own testing with the Datacolor SpyderX2 I saw the same 99% coverage of DCI P3, and 83% of Rec2020, around 242 nits of full screen peak brightness, and an average DeltaE of just 0.77 which is excellent. One thing I do want to explain quickly though is that brightness figure. OLEDs – especially glossy panel QD OLEDs like this – are deceptive when it comes to brightness. 250 nits really isn’t a lot, but whether it’s the matte coating most other monitors offer, or some black magic in the panels themselves, this 250 nits is nowhere near the same experience as say an IPS panel outputting 250 nits. My camera picks this up pretty well actually – this is how I’d usually expose a shot to film a monitor, but for this one, even under my bright studio lights, the monitor is super blown out. I have to turn the camera down a fair bit to expose for the display at full brightness, which means everything else looks super dark. This is in incredibly bright monitor to the eyes, even though the specs don’t necessarily reflect that. 

Naturally, being an OLED this has instant response times – OSRTT is likely the limiting factor in measuring this accurately here, reporting under 1 millisecond pretty much across the board. The nice thing about QD-OLEDs though is that unlike their W-OLED counterparts – of which the AG276QZD ‘1’ was one – this doesn’t have an adaptive brightness limiter that cuts back the brightness of brighter scenes. This is full bore, the whole time. It’s amazing. You do have a whole bunch of OLED care settings though – even more than my EVNIA 8600 offers in fact. You have pixel orbiting, which uses the spare pixels on the edges of the panel to move the 1440p image around slightly so you don’t get burn in. You’ve got the full pixel refresh, the screen saver which dims the brightness if there isn’t activity on the screen, logos protection which also dims the display if there are static logos on screen for long periods, boundary dimmer which if you have black bars on screen can help again dim the display appropriately, taskbar dimmer which, you guessed it, dims the taskbar in particular, and thermal protection which dims the brightness if the monitor gets to be over 60 degrees celsius. Basically, it either can refresh the display or dim the display – but there’s a bunch of options for dimming that can make it more or less intrusive. As someone who has been using a QD-OLED panel as my main display, I can say that burn in really isn’t a concern at all. Even after months – possibly going on a year now – there is not even a hint of burn in. QD-OLED is amazing.

Naturally, for gaming this is just incredible. It’s lightning fast, low latency – right around half the refresh rate according to OSRTT – and just a ludicrously smooth experience thanks to the 240Hz refresh rate and instant response times from the OLED panel. It’s also vibrant and rich, which makes games look absolutely amazing and only adds to the exceptional gaming experience. This really is all you could ask for in a gaming monitor. Naturally, the downside to having such an amazing monitor is that it becomes abundantly clear that your losses in games is a skill issue, not an equipment issue, so if your ego can’t take that hit, don’t buy this monitor. Otherwise, have at it. Jokes aside I think it’s pretty obvious that I really enjoyed gaming on this thing – much like my EVNIA 8600 it’s an exceptional experience in all genres, be that competitive CSGO, or laid back farming sims, it’s a great time.

I should also mention that because this is a QD-OLED panel, rather than W-OLED, this has a lot closer to a conventional pixel layout than its W-OLED counterparts. This is a tri-dot pattern, with red, green and blue dots. That means text looks perfect, rather than a W-OLED which has red, green, blue and white LEDs per pixel, meaning text looks blurred and less than pleasing to the eye. This doesn’t have that problem at all, which again is why I much, much prefer QD-OLED panels, especially for monitors. Combine that with the much better burn in performance, the lack of an intrusive adaptive brightness limiter, and the generally much better visual experience, and yeah, this is for sure my choice.

What helps with that even more is that this bad boy – despite being literally every gamer’s wet dream in terms of specs and experience – is just £450. A couple years ago that wouldn’t have bought you any decent 1440p high refresh rate monitors, and now it buys you the best? Hell yeah! While it is still expensive – and I know a lot of people are more in the £100-200 price range, of which AOC has some phenomenal options there too – if you have the cash, this easily gets a glowing recommendation from me. This feels basically unbeatable in terms of price and performance. Amazing job there AOC!