AOC AG246FK6 Review – 610Hz Gaming Monitor

This is, at least for the moment, the fastest gaming monitor you can buy. This is the AOC AG246FK6, and in its overclocked mode it will run at a blistering, almost implausible, 610 hertz. 610 frames per second. That is unfeasibly fast. It seems almost impossible that this thing can even run at 610Hz, let alone if you’ll see a benefit from it. And yet, here it is, and it works. Whether you’ll see a benefit though, well I think that’s something we can discover together in this video, so let’s get into it. 

Let’s start with a brief tour to see what it is exactly we’re looking at. This is a 24.1 inch “Ultra-Fast TN eSports” panel housed in a compact and flush-bezeled plastic frame. It has an RGB ring on the back (that you can turn off if you want), and has a fully adjustable stand. The stand itself has height, tilt and swivel adjustment, plus rotation for portrait mode if for some insane reason you want to put a TN panel with horrible viewing angles vertical. The stand actually has a cool set of height and angle markings so if you are actually an esports pro you can note down your preferences and get it right every time you have to take it to competitions. IO is two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, and a four port USB 3 hub, with a yellow port for charging, and two of the ports are in a little pocket on the side. Interestingly, you also get two headphone stands. One is on the stand itself, a little flip-out arm that you’d struggle to use if the monitor is up against a wall, and one spring-loaded on on the same side as the USB ports. It’s a thin bar that I don’t think would be great for your headphone’s cushions, but it is nicely spring-loaded, so there’s that. 

The on screen menu is controlled with a joystick style switch on the back, and the menu itself is AOC’s newer design. It’s easy enough to use and pretty big, and damn does it have a lot of options. You get 21 overdrive modes, local dimming, adaptive sync, and so much more. Strangely the default brightness is only 10 – out of 100 – so the thing looks incredibly dim right out the box. Happily though AOC seems to have got the message on the default overdrive mode, as it’s set to 10 by default (out of 20). We’ll come back to how that performs later on. The other defaults seem a little strange at first too – higher than normal saturation (they call it “Game Color”), high ‘black equaliser’, but it makes sense once you realise this is truly laser focused on being an esports display. 

That also explains why it looks so weird. It’s oversaturated and yet still kinda bland, lacking contrast, and a little grainy. Amazingly the colour gamut coverage is almost exactly 100% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum which is impressive, although the colour accuracy is… yeesh. A DeltaE average of 6.16 and a max of 16.72 is really pretty impressive. What’s funny is that if you set this to the sRGB mode you’ll actually get a perfect result. I know that because AOC include a colour calibration certificate in the box showing a sub one DeltaE. In the FPS1 mode though, it’s pretty dreadful. Brightness is pretty good at 400 nits, with contrast only running at 1200:1 or so with a pretty blue white point. That is something you can tune though. 

The big thing with TN panels though is viewing angles. While sitting perfectly straight on to it, both vertically and horizontally, it can look ok, at any other angle – slightly too high, a touch too far left, tilted slightly off – it looks rough. Washed out or dim, oversaturated or flat. You need to be locked in to view this right, and for the majority of people that isn’t a pleasurable experience. Kicking back in your gaming chair and watching a film on this thing would be a pretty miserable experience.

Of course, we should focus on what really matters on this thing, the refresh rate. If you were wondering if this thing can actually display 610 frames per second, my 1000FPS camera shows that it indeed can. The ghosting here shows the pixels can’t quite keep up – there’s a trail of two or three frames behind the movement, but considering that at 610 hertz the frame time is under 2 milliseconds (1.64 milliseconds, specifically) it isn’t surprising some shades struggle. There are literal crystals being twisted around 610 times per second here, of course they struggle to do that instantly! Still, if we go frame by frame – with each frame being one millisecond – it takes an average of a frame and a half to see the display change. This is running at 610 hertz. Mental.

As for the actual response times, testing with my open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com if you want to test your own 610Hz display…) on the default overdrive mode we get an average of 2.7 milliseconds. That’s lightning fast – not quite as fast as the refresh rate, although as we’ve seen from the high speed that isn’t too surprising – with only some of the full white transitions taking a little longer. Interestingly this TN panel is inverted to IPS and VA panels, where they struggle with bright to dark, versus this TN that struggles to get bright. That’s kinda funny. Anyway, the default mode has no notable overshoot, which leads me to think, can we push this harder? Well we’ve got 10 higher modes to do just that, so what does 20 (max) look like? Yeahhhhhhhhh not great. The average initial response time does drop to just 1 millisecond which is amazing, but the perceived time goes UP to 3.7 milliseconds thanks to the genuinely insane overshoot. Like, one of the transitions that goes from full white to half white literally drops to 0 before rebounding back up. Look how far it misses its target. That’s terrible. Luckily there are 9 other modes between this and the mid point, and 15 actually offers a pretty decent result. The initial response time is just 1.8 milliseconds – really close to the refresh rate window – and the overshoot is much more manageable. Not perfect, but good enough. Maybe 14 might balance it slightly better, but it seems around that point is perfect. Oh and latency is amazing, under one millisecond on average, which is a real competitive advantage. 

What does that mean for gaming? Well, for those ultra-fast esports type games – Rainbow Six Siege is my preference there – it’s undeniably fast and smooth. The trade-off with the colour palette does play a role in the gaming experience, but when you’re an esports pro you aren’t playing with the prettiest settings, you’re playing for kills and wins, and that normally means cranking settings to horrible looking but utterly effective extremes. This panel does exactly that, the compromise of naff visual quality is more than made up for by the insane smoothness and speed – both in latency and sheer volume of frames. As long as your game can keep up, which isn’t exactly easy at over 600 FPS, you get an unmatched experience. For non-esports games though, you’re going to struggle to enjoy them nearly as much. The compromises work very well for esports games, but the balance shifts for literally anything else. This feels very much like a one trick pony, which is fine if that’s what you want, but if it isn’t? Well maybe this isn’t for you.

Actually, on the topic of why you might buy a monitor like this I have a whole load more thoughts about that, so the next video I post will be exactly that – why. Both why you should and why you absolutely shouldn’t. For this specific monitor though, unless you are actually an esports pro I wouldn’t recommend this thing. It is lightning fast for sure, and man the motion clarity is almost unparalleled, but the visual experience relies on you being in the perfect viewing position at all times, and putting up with some really naff colours, contrast and sharpness. If you’re willing to make that trade off – for everything you use this for remember, not just in games – then you’re welcome to splash the £600 needed to get your hands on this thing. That’s an awful lot of money for a 1080p display, although it is in line with the other 600Hz displays on the market. Actually, compared to Asus’ 610Hz version, this is an absolute steal. That is more like a grand, so if you are an esports team, well actually if you’re an esports team you have a monitor sponsor so you’ll use what they give you, but if you do have purchasing decisions, check this one out. For everyone else, I actually have another 500Hz+ display coming real soon that I think will offer a much better balance, so make sure you’re subscribed so you see that one when it’s out.