AOC Q27G3XMN 27″ 2K QHD 2560×1440 180Hz 1ms Mini LED Gaming Monitor

I took way too much time before buying this. Yes, it’s totally worth it.

1. The colours are outstanding. Please don’t let people throw you off by remarking on a pinkish hue. For me, I’ve not noticed it. Colors look vibrant, darks are indeed dark and all that jazz. How this translates for you most likely:

+you want to play games way too long,
+watch movies for way too long,
+sink hours upon hours needlessly web surfing.

Why? Just cuz. The screen looks that freaking amazing! And you can’t believe it costs under $300.

Then there’s the stand. It’s proven more useful than I would have predicted. Sometimes I like to feel super official and read my kindle books on a bigger size screen – especially for DK books or you know, those cool “coffee-table” kind of books I think they are called. Anyway, this monitor is AMAZING for that. I thought adjusting the screen to different orientations would prove more challenging and keep me from wanting to do it often, but not at all. Luckily it doesn’t take massive strength or strain or anything to move the monitor around, and sometimes that allows for experimentation using your monitor in ways that you may not even realized you’d appreciate. Again, for me, that’s proven true in regards to reading kindle books on this monitor. I think I’d now ALWAYS prioritize having a useful, functional stand. I know that monitor arms are a thing, but for some of us, we just want to buy the monitor and be able to use it for as long as possible without having to buy anything else 😉 With this, you have one of the very best monitor stands I could imagine.

I also want to mention the warranty – a 3 YEAR WARRANTY that goes so far as to cover ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE in the first year. Now that is value unparalleled, and provided that they folow through on those promises to the customer, it’s really hard for me to recommend anything else. To anyone who is shopping on a budget but wants something that doesn’t feel budget WHATSOEVER, I’d say go this route.

When I was monitor shopping, I tried an array of different monitors. Initially I was going for a 42 inch monitor, trying to go for the “best of the best”. The Gigabyte Aorus 43vu, for instance, is a great monitor as is the LG C3 in that size category. I tried 34″ and 32″ inch monitors. Interestingly, even if price wasn’t a consideration, I’d still argue that this 27 inch screen provides the better QUALITY and VALUE, which is kind of crazy to be getting both things at once, you know? I kept thinking that a 27 inch screen wouldn’t be as “fun” as a bigger screen, but as it turns out, for gaming from a desk, I will now ALWAYS choose 27 inches over 32 inches and anything bigger. Basically, I was wrong thinking bigger translates to a more enjoyable experiencd. ! I know these are specific details, but there may be someone else out there going, hey! I love this monitor, but it’s ONLY 27 inches! I can’t tell you for sure that it is enough, but for me, the 27 vs 32 inch monitor debate ends with the 27 being the clear choice. Compared to the 43 and 42 inch sized monitors, I definitely prefer gaming on this 27 inch monitor too, I occasionally game on the bigger television I own. I so prefer gaming on the 27.

Look, I don’t want to encourage anyone to buy this who is gonna hate it. I’m sorry if this love letter to this monitor leads you astray and your experiences end up different than mine. But for real, if you want to skip skimming all the reddit forums and the few reviews you can find on this monitor, just take this recommendation. I came in to this skeptical and am seriously blown away.

Let me address a couple of things I was worried about:

+it being too big, too thick. It isn’t. For me, it’s perfect. It doesn’t remind me of the 1990 CRTV days, and the depth it does have…it just feels right for the picture it creates, as strange as that is to say that way. I have a desk depth of 30 inches. I’ll try to upload photos later in case that will help someone determine if it seems too big.

2. pinkish hue: totally don’t see it. Nothing distracts, nothing makes me go oh, this monitor has a bad picture. It’s good. For the money, it’s great! You could tell me this should cost someone $600, and I’d believe it. It performs far above its asking price.

Think about that. How often do you buy something that feels really like it should cost twice the price even?
Not often enough! Do yourself a favor! Go for it.

(To everyone who wants to make a size matters joke, ditto. Enjoy your day and this review!)

It’s been a week now that I’ve had the monitor hooked up so I’ll share my experience so far. This is gonna be a long one but an honest review.

The stand has long front legs, if you have a smaller desk around 24 inches front to back know that this monitor takes up a lot of room. It would be best suited to go on an arm. It does have height tilt and swivel but no rotation.

Out of the box I checked for dead/stuck pixels and there were none. Great way to start off.

With local dimming on medium the contrast ratio is amazing. Rtings tested it over 9000:1 and mine easily matches that. Coming from an ips monitor this is a night and day difference, this outclasses any ips monitor on the market. Are you tired of your ips monitor having greys instead of blacks? This Aoc has blacks and they are dark. The black uniformity is so much nicer than ips, it doesn’t have bright spots in the corners or the edges.

This isn’t an old Va panel, it’s fast. Response times are great for a Va. It’s slightly slower than most gaming ips monitors but it’s far from bad. Playing dark games like dead by daylight you don’t see black smearing, same with cod, battlefield and rocket league. Black smearing is noticeable on slow Va panels, once again this is a fast Va panel. Think Samsung odyssey g7 fast for half the price. I had a g7 that I returned for qc issues and this monitor is just as good for response times.

Brightness- omg this thing gets bright in hdr, over 1,000 nits. Yeah it only has 336 zones but these are mini led and it gets super bright while having very minimal blooming. I got blinded by a flash grenade in cod and instantly felt like faze jev, iykyk. Seriously tho this monitor gets super bright and hdr looks great on here. Pc Gaming in hdr has been a wonderful experience with this monitor, something you can’t get with any other monitor under $300

It doesn’t have speakers but who cares, monitor speakers normally suck. It has 2 hdmi and 1 display port. It doesn’t have a usb 3.0 hub, which would’ve been nice but for $279 you really can’t complain about that. They had to cut costs somewhere and I’ll happily deal with that cut being here.

Honestly the worst thing about this monitor are the buttons on it. They should’ve put a joystick on it like gigabyte does, that wouldn’t made the experience a lot easier for getting all the settings dialed in.

For $279 you get over 9000:1 contrast, 1000+ nits of brightness in hdr, fast response times, low input lag. You can’t get those specs with any monitor for this price.

Over the last 5 years I’ve used/tested dell s2721dgf, s2716dgf, gigabyte m27q, gigabyte m28u, gigabyte M34wq, mono price dark matter 34, Samsung g7. This is by far the best out of all of those monitors and some of those monitors cost over $500. Very happy with this purchase, great monitor for pc gaming.

A decent sized 27″ 1440p screen with true HDR1000 and local dimming and other nice features, all for under $300.

I really can’t express how good this monitor is especially considering the price. I’m coming from the Dell S2721DGF (IPS panel, 1440p 27″) and I do NOT regret getting this monitor at all. It’s just great! No more IPS glow, inky blacks. The pros just outweigh the few cons this monitor has. I have not experienced any VRR flickering, black smearing and the response times are great.

The only bad visual thing I have noticed are “scanlines” and they really only appear in bright solid colors liked red and blue but you won’t notice this while gaming and the lines will blend in as long as your face isn’t 1 foot from the screen.

I finished the last half of Detroit: Become Human on this monitor and it was absolutely gorgeous. The game is very dark and can also get very bright and really let this monitor show what it is capable of.

Overall it’s great and if you’re on a budget this monitor is fantastic. You don’t even have to be on a budget to get this, if you just want a great experience that is cheap, or don’t want to spent hella $$$ on OLED, this is for you.

PROS:
– Good 1440p picture quality and noticed no difference in quality from my previous monitor.

– HDR1000 (Jaw dropping and literal eye squinting brightness. If you ever wanted to get flashbanged in real life this monitor can do that for you. My unit maxes at about 1100-1200 nits with HDR and LD on.)

– Local Dimming (Very well done, you can get inky blacks with this on and there is surprisingly little bloom.)

– VRR/Adaptive Sync

– Native Contrast (about 4000:1)

– 180hz refresh rate

– Monitor stand (Tilt, pivot, swivel, rotation. This stand has it all.)

– 4k downscaled to 1440p on consoles (Xbox will allow you to choose 4K UHD to allow you to use the HDR10 feature!)

– Mini-LED (No burn in, while still getting a decently close experience to an OLED)

CONS:

– Not the best OSD with terrible button controls. (You’ll most likely accidentally press the power button your first few tries)

– Pink/red hue out of the box. (Look at Rtings review on this and the color calibration portion will tell you how to fix it)

– HDMI 2.0 (Doesn’t really matter to me as I don’t even have a new gen console.)

– No USB ports

Monitor looks great for HDR gaming, it gets bright, and it looks fun. Maybe not accurate, but accurate enough for me as a casual media consumer and gamer.

4k is significantly better than 1440p, while in my opinion 1440p is not miles better than 1080p on a 24in monitor. But it is a slight improvement with far detail in games you can’t supersample(DLDSR, DSR, AMD Super Resolution, Internal Resolution sliders) to 4k. The refresh rate of 180 is stable on my unit and with strong pixel response settings gives me good motion clarity. Latency on this screen has tested above average in many conditions and in my personal experience it feels snappy and responsive. The VRR implementation does not detract from any of the monitors features and works perfectly with any setting you use, except of course at low refresh rates higher pixel response times leads to ghosting but that is common with VA panels.

As a VA panel contrast is much better than another mini-led IPS with 3x the dimming zones. I think it looks better than even an 1100 dimming zone IPS for contrast and perception of black levels. But since it is a mini led with only 330 dimming zones in some circumstance it is impossible to not see the dimming zones activating and deactivating, a problem that is less noticeable the more dimming zones your monitor has. In gaming its not distracting but on general desktop use you might notice it. For general desktop work use disabling local dimming is preferable, like typing up a paper ect ect. This monitor allows you to disable it even in HDR, which is nice if you keep your windows desktop locked to HDR mode.

This monitor would be better if it was glossy, or even semi-glossy. VA panels are very good at contrast, and the matte AG coating doesn’t let it shine the way it should. It does look very good, even with the AG coating, it could just be better.

I personally keep windows in HDR mode, but swap between a few settings depending on time of day. First thing you’re going to want to do is use the windows HDR calibration tool to generate an ICC profile, I suggest you do /not/ touch the saturation slider. After this profile is set you’re going to want to find the SRGB —> gamma2.2 project since most SDR content is gamma2.2. Any other thoughts on that are advanced and if you know you know.

30 Windows Content Brightness + 200nit/2.2 lut
80 Windows Content brightness + 400nit/2.2 lut
100 Windows Content Brightness + 480nit/2.2 lut

The 200 nit config generally provides me with the best results at night for SDR content, and overall for any time of day the best results for auto-hdr content. True HDR content ignores windows content brightness but not the lut file.

Personally, I miss 4k of the IPS I ruined, but despite having the same HDR1000 spec, and the IPS having more dimming zones, I am enjoying the quality of this monitor more. Its also easier to run games that don’t have DLSS or a good implementation of DLSS.

TLDR: This is a fantastic FALD HDR1000 gaming monitor. You can do little wrong, especially given its priced this competitively.

The spec of the monitor is uplifted to a tier 0 in the nowadays monitor market in the US with HVA panel, perfectly matching it’s 1200 nits Mini led light panel, plus it’s QD color film that allows it to achieve enhanced color range on SRGB, DCI P3 and HDR.

The HDR mode is insanely good and adjustable, one of the pictures provide a comparison to a HDR 10 Asus PROFESSION minitor, it’s just too obvious beyond words.

Gaming wise, this monitor does not gives off a lot of heat, actually after max HDR 3 hours instense ping, I could feel only 5 degrees at most different on the back panel of monitor. Since it’s a HVA panel, the motions doesn’t blur in movements or aiming, as far as I could sense, unlike some garbage VA panels out there. The response time is also really good, just 0.4 ish millisecond slower than Asus 240hz monitor, which I doubt people can feel it as human.

Considering it’s price at $309 USD, it is an overkill that no other 2k monitors could even be COMPARABLE, plus the fact that AOC is a top tier monitor company with reliable warranty, so why not?

Overall it is THE ONE you won’t regret buying it if you are not a 4k-MUST person and don’t mind the color of this monitor being slightly red (the nature of all QD films).

My old monitor is an Asus IPS which I bought around 4 years ago for $350. It has been giving me problems lately, hence why I am looking for a replacement.

I will admit I got tunnel visioned to this due to the true HDR hype. After testing it, I have a lot of irks with this monitor.

Pros:
The AOC’s features and performance its absolutely great for its price point. To get entry level true hdr for about $300 is insanely good. Especially when used for gaming. The 180hz refresh rate just feels smooth when gaming and the blacks are darker when compared to my IPS monitor (see picture). If you are coming from another budget or entry level monitor, this is definitely a huge upgrade.

Out of the box, I did need to calibrate the color settings, I only adjusted the rgb on settings (followed monitors unboxed), and applied rtings color profile. It improved the color quite a bit and I was happy with its accuracy. I used displayport and not hdmi. It does have hdmi 2.0.

Cons: (reason why I decided to return it)
Comparing it to a midrange IPS panel, the AOC monitor just looks washed out. (See my pictures) The only advantage the AOC had was with the deeper black color, this is after calibrating. Moreover, its SDR performance was just atrocious for me. Moreover, the fact it doesnt have a monitor “nipple” and just buttons makes it so tedious to change the settings and brightness. Lastly, it is thick and made out of cheap plastic. It feels like im using gen 2 flat screen from the 2010s. Like my wife said, “it feels like I am back in the highschool computer lab”

In conclusion, this monitor is hard to beat at its price point as a gaming monitor. If you are coming from an entry level IPS monitor or below, and are on a TIGHT budget, this monitor is a huge upgrade. However, coming from a midrange IPS panel, I just dont see this as an upgrade. Especially when there are a lot of new monitors coming out this 2024.

Review is for the AOC Q27G3XMN 27″ Mini LED. They have a bunch of monitors mixed here in the reviews.
Coming from an IPS monitor it is amazing to see actual black colors in games again.

The depth and colors are spot on in HDR mode. It took some fiddling between Windows setting and the super awkward 4 button OSD(on screen display) adjustment right next to the power button. Have to turn on HDR in Windows, HDR on the monitor and then adjust the windows HDR slider.

It is not perfect with the dimming zones as there is plenty of bloom bleed in some settings like World of Warcraft. Things like if the something super bright goes behind the chat window the colors of the chat Window light up some. But the brightness is amazing. Going blind when I get flashbanged I’m CS2 and loving it. You can almost get a sense of how bright it is from the photo of BF2142 I uploaded. My old monitor was 250 nits I think and this does around 1100 nits according to some reviews.

The motion is buttery smooth at 180hz and I have not noticed any ghosting which is supposed to plague low quality VA panels.

Love it=]

The side by side in the video I uploaded is next to a 15 year old Dell monitor but the video does not do it justice. I am a terrible CS2 player but I cannot stop playing because it looks so pretty.

(Update) After a month I decided to try the DP cable that came with it instead of my old DirektKabal 1.4DP cable and I got vertices lines so if you use the DP cable that came with it and you get vertices lines try to replace the cable.

PRO:
+ just great picture quality, in relation to my new Gigabyte M28Q-Pro 27″ IPS, this monitor is quite a bit better.
+ SDR picture shows markedly high contrast, visibly better than my IPS panel
+ HDR picture quality is just next level, deep blacks, and incredible highlights
+ pretty fast response time, using medium Overdrive seem to cover almost all the monitor’s refresh range well, minimal ghosting/artifacts. Almost a single OD monitor, usually only high end monitor has a single OD experience. This has most of that. Set to medium and forget it.
+ fairly bright in SDR and HDR mode probably due to mini-LED backlight.
+ price, for 280, this is HDR capable hardware, incredible value for 2024/Jan. I can see next year or so, many manufactures will have to offer true HDR at this price or their sale will dip. This just puts too much pressure on this price segment. May need another 3-4 years for OLED to get to this price, then that’ll be a real upgrade to this monitor.

CON:
+ clumsy 5-button controls feels like from monitors that’s 5-7 years ago
+ little on heavy side, about 12.5 lb w/o stand, as my 27″ IPS is just 10.5 lb no stand, I use monitor arm for both
+ no USB connection back to PC for firmware updates etc.
+ need color management profile calibration, as the factory default little too RED.
+ in some HDR content I can see bright contours around dimming zones. Probably limitation of 350 or so dimming zones.
+ no fancy extras like: PIP, KVM switch, joystick/control, usb firmware updates, fancy LEDs etc etc.
+ viewing angle not as good as IPS but that’s just nature of VA panel

Summary:
I think they dumped all the money into picture quality on this monitor, and just left out all other features. If you only care about great picture and true HDR, this is really difficult to pass.

Scores:

SDR picture quality: 4.5/5
HDR picture quality: 4.5/5
manual control: 1/5
feature set: 1/5
value: 5/5

I’ve had the KTCmini led and Innocn mini led monitors.
While AOC monitor has less dimming zones than both, it outperforms them. The matte coating isn’t too aggressive for a cleaner image, HDR looks perfect both in colors and “gamma”, while having no serious firmware issues except for the occasional refusal to wake from sleep. All at half price of alternative products.

This thing slaps for the price:

-HDR looks fantastic, especially in games. The inherent contrast of VA panels allows for an HDR image that’s better than most IPS FALD panels out there with twice the number of dimming zones.

With the right settings and content, bloom is very minimal and the brightness is retina-melting. I tested my unit at 1372nits, that’s darn near HDR1400 territory.

Does it do fine contrast detail as well as my Sony OLED TV? Of course not, but never having to worry about image burn-in is worth the trade-off.

-Great pixel response times for a VA panel. There is very little of the dark pixel smearing that’s common with most VA panels. You used to have to pay $600 for something like the Samsung Odyssey to have remotely decent VA pixel response, but this panel is nearly as good, at half the price.

-SDR looks great after proper calibration. You don’t really want to be using this monitor (or any local-dimming monitor, for that matter) in HDR mode while browsing a PC desktop. Still images, text and icons just won’t look good on anything less than per-pixel dimming. Follow a guide on proper settings and ICC profiles, and it will look great with local dimming turned off.

-I have some minor complaints about the OSD and lack of finer settings, but at this price it’s kind of hard to complain. I was particularly surprised by how nice the stand was at this price range. The monitor can be positioned easily, and there is very little wobbly.

If you want to experience true HDR for under $300, I just don’t think anything else exists out there right now. This is it, and it comes with a surprisingly small amount of downsides for the cost.