AOC CU34E4CW Ultrawide 120Hz Professional Monitor Review
Performance
AOC has a solid monitor here, and while not their flagship model, it’s packing enough goodies to make it a great monitor to use day to day, or night to night, depending on your lifestyle. It features a quality VA panel, which features a decent contrast ratio of 3500:1. with decent vibrancy and black levels. Yes, you’re going to get a bit of clouding from the backlight, but unless you’re watching dark content in a dark room with the backlight up super high, that’s rarely going to be an issue, and it’s pretty much just how VA works.
It’s nice and bright, though, a typical office monitor tops out at around 250 nits, while this one can push up to 350. That doesn’t sound like a lot more, but you can tell, and it’s enough to make the monitor feel bright and clear even under harsh office lighting.
The colour reproduction is decent too, covering around 120% of sRGB, it can easily and accurately represent any SDR content, which is to say media like movies, YouTube, photos, web pages, they’ll all look pretty much as intended. This is good for those doing a bit of video or photo editing, too.
The gaming performance isn’t going to set the world on fire. With a 4ms GtG response time, this isn’t an eSports beast. However, if you just want to enjoy some ultrawide Skyrim, Minecraft, Civilization, or Forza, for example, then it’s absolutely more than enough. If you want to be a CS:GO champion, then get something more competition-focused. But if you just want a freaking massive display for immersion, you can’t really go wrong with a 34-inch ultrawide panel like this.
The refresh rate is 120Hz, while that may not sound much in today’s market, frankly, it’s all you really need. 3440×1440 at 120 FPS isn’t too lofty a goal for most PC builds these days, with mid-range GPUs able to keep up, even in a lot of the more demanding modern titles, with few exceptions if you’re realistic about graphics settings.
Having multiple display connections is nice, as you could easily use the DisplayPort for your desktop PC, the Type-C for your work laptop, and have the HDMI ports left over to hook up something like a PlayStation and Xbox, making this your work and play hub with minimal fuss.
