AOC GAMING 27G2SPU 165Hz IPS Monitor Review

Performance

At Full HD, this is quite a downgrade from my personal 4K monitor. I do miss that bigger pixel count, and I’m pretty used to 32-Inch panels too. That being said, this doesn’t feel too bad at all. Reading websites, browsing reddit, some more reddit, and frankly, not much else this morning, has been absolutely fine. Actually, the endless social media scroll is rather nice at 165 Hz, that’s for sure.

The colours look great on the monitor, with good vibrancy and decent black levels making pretty much any media really pop. Photos, YouTube, and all the usual look really good. Plus, it just makes it nice to use in general, regardless of the specific task.

While you can side by side two windows on Full-HD, some scaling or zooming may be required, but it can be done in a pinch. It looks good enough to me, but for productivity and handing more windows, 1440 or 4K is the way to go.

This monitor is all about the gaming though, and that’s why it has a 1ms response time, Adaptive Sync and a 165 Hz refresh rate. So playing, and failing spectacularly at Apex, looked fantastic. The clarity and speed of the display are sublime, and while it did improve my reaction times and made the game feel a little easier, I still suck pretty bad at this game.

A lot of games support high refresh rates though, and ripping through the world of GTA Online is awesome. Plus, at Full HD, hitting higher refresh rates is possible without needed flagship graphics cards.

Overall though, for an entry-level into the world of competitive gaming monitors, it’s an absolute blast. Plus, it’s great for single-player games too, just enjoying smoother gameplay is enough, it’s not always about FPS response times! But overall, nice black levels, good colours, and smooth motion make it great for all kinds of daily use.

Calibration Test

Out of the box, the colours were pretty decent and while a calibration did improve them, it wasn’t really that noticeable, so top marks to AOC as it seems really well setup.

Uncalibrated

Calibrated

Uncalibrated

The Gamma looked goo, sitting at 2.1 which is perfectly fine, However, calibration got that dead on 2.2. From what I can see (and on most AOC monitors, actually) using the displays Gamma 3 option in the OSD is Gamma 2.2.

Calibrated

Uncalibrated

A little high uncalibrated, but very close to the 6500K reference afterwards. Honestly, it’s not a huge difference though, the monitor looked pretty much as good at the defaults.

Calibrated

Uncalibrated

Anything under 5 is good, but under 3 Delta-E is superb, and as you can see, the colours are really accurate here (lower scores mean closer to reference).

Calibrated

Calibration tightened this up further, but again, it’s pretty hard for the human eye to see differences below Delta-3, so this monitor is doing awesome! For most users, I suggest setting the monitor to its “warm” colour profile and leaving other settings alone.