The AOC G3 U32G3X has very good image quality, and by cutting out non-essential features, it’s also available at a good price
- Manufacturer: AOC
- Model: G3 U32G3X
- SKU: U32G3X/BK
- Display Type: 32” IPS Gaming Monitor
- Resolution: UHD 3840*2160
- Refresh rate: 144 Hz
- Price when reviewed: £649.99
- Supplied by: AOC
AOC G3 U32G3X Review
Overview
The AOC G3 U32G3X is a 32”, 4K, 144 Hz gaming display with HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 inputs. It has both FreeSync and G-Sync support, making it a great choice for PC and console gaming.
AOC’s G Series displays have an excellent and well-deserved reputation. By cutting back on nice-to-have but non-essential features, the G Series monitors are renowned for having great picture quality at a highly competitive price. The U32G3X exemplifies this; It may not have many bells and whistles, but what it does, it does very well.
I was very impressed by the out-of-the-box performance of the U32G3X. Gamma tracking and colour temperature settings needed no adjustment, and aside from setting the display to your preferred brightness level, you may never need to adjust any of the settings. Colour accuracy is great, and panel uniformity is also top-tier.
The gamut coverage is by no means the highest we’ve tested, but it comfortably covers sRGB with no glaring oversaturation, and given that HDR400 isn’t generally that impressive anyway, the merely average DCI-P3 coverage isn’t an issue. Likewise, the peak brightness of 400 cd/m² isn’t buzz-worthy, but it’s plenty for most gaming environments.
So, on paper, the U32G3X probably isn’t going to set the world alight, but that didn’t stop it from putting in a solid performance across every one of our tests. Gaming performance is excellent, the picture is bright, rich and vibrant, and it looks just as good as some far more expensive displays we’ve tested. Chart-topping numbers are great, but as far as real-world performance goes, the U32G3X meets my requirements and then some.
As far as what you don’t get, there’s no integrated USB hub, no DP over USB-C input, no speakers (though it does have a 3.5mm audio out), and you’re stuck with the unintuitive bank of buttons on the underside of the display for navigating the menus rather than the more common joystick. As long as these features aren’t essential to you (AOC has some great alternatives if they are), it’s a great way to keep costs down without compromising on image quality.
Design and build
The AOC U32G3X maintains its no-frills approach with its minimalist case design. The gentle curves are mostly dressed in matte black plastics, with subtle red accents across the rear vents, in a stripe down the rear of the stand, and on the underside of the lower bezel. It’s an understated but pleasing aesthetic.
I appreciate the more compact stand that AOC has fitted to the U32G3X, with the X-shaped base sitting flush with your desk, but it’s very lightweight and not as stable as I’m used to. It’s mostly fine, but the display wobbles quite a bit if you get too enthusiastic when gaming. You can of course swap it out with a VESA 100 compatible stand or monitor arm if needed, but stability is something I hope AOC will address in future revisions.
A large cable management hole is built into the stand, with ample space to feed multiple display and power cables through, helping keep your setup organised. I much prefer this solution to fiddly clips that require you to bend your cables around corners to fit them in. Although the hole looks prominent in the promotional images, it’s hidden behind the display unless you have it at its maximum height.
Ergonomically, you can tilt the display -3.5/+21.5 degrees, swivel +/- 30 degrees, and adjust the height by 130 mm. The U32G3X does not support pivoting into portrait orientation.
The AOC U32G3X has an integrated power adapter, so no power brick to find a home for. You get a power cable, 1.8m DisplayPort cable and 1.8m HDMI 2.1 compatible cable in the box.
If there’s one area I would happily pay a bit extra for improvement, it’s the bank of control buttons. There are five buttons, and even though you can suss them out pretty quickly, I found I accidentally ended up hitting the display input selector or turning off the display when I was trying to make a minor change to the brightness. The menu and sub-menu arrangement is well-organised and easy to navigate, but It’s unintuitive which buttons to press to select things within the menus and make adjustments – again, it’s something you can figure out and, with regular usage, it’s second nature, but a joystick (or the excellent AOC quick-switch peripheral) would be much better. Fortunately, the factory setup is so good I rarely entered the menus, but seeing as AOC has been using the same GUI/button combo for several years on the AOC gaming range it’s probably time for a change.
Finally, the build quality is good but the materials used are pretty average. The panels have no uneven gaps and there’s no creaking when adjusting the display, but the plastics AOC has used are very thin in places, most notably on the lower bezel frame and around the rear of the case, which flex considerably under pressure. It doesn’t affect the usage of the monitor, so it’s another cost-saving measure that I’ll gladly take over degraded picture quality, but the U32G3X lacks the more premium feel of AOCs AGON and AGON Pro range.
Connectivity and Supported Resolutions
The AOC U32G3X has 2x HDMI 2.1 and 2x DisplayPort 1.4 for display connections to your PCs, laptops and consoles, along with a 3.5mm audio out. The excellent factory calibration and dual high-speed HDMI connections are perfectly suited to console gamers looking to get a taste of the quality of display that PC gamers enjoy.
The U32G3X supports the following optimum resolutions:
HDMI 2.1: 3840*2160 @ 144 Hz
DisplayPort: 3840*2160 @ 120 Hz (144 Hz with DSC)
As the U32G3X supports HDMI 2.1, you get the full benefit of the 144 Hz refresh rate via HDMI (120 Hz maximum on consoles), and 144 Hz over DP with a DSC-compatible GPU. It is also certified G-Sync compatible, as well as supporting FreeSync, with an adaptive sync window that spans 48-144 Hz via G-Sync and FreeSync (48-120 Hz on console). This makes it great for high-end gaming PCs as well as the current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
The U32G3X does not have a USB hub or USB-C connectivity.
Display quality
The AOC U32G3X is well-suited to gaming as well as media consumption and productivity. Colours are accurate and vibrant, and the high-resolution display produces a sharp image across the expansive 32” display. I have been using it for high-refresh 4K gaming on an RTX 4080 and Xbox Series X, as well as a;l of my day-to-day work, where the vast amount of screen real estate is ideal for managing large documents and data sheets, as well as quickly navigating web pages. Text is crisp and easy to read, even at 100% image scaling
It’s fantastic for gaming; I’ve had so much fun romping around the Palpagos Islands, capturing Pokemon (ahem) Pals, and also getting slightly emotional on my playthrough of A Plague Tale: Requiem. The luscious colours pop on the U32G3X, and I found the screen snappy and responsive. I even put in a decent showing on Counter Strike 2, with the low input lag and fast response helping keep my aim true. The U32G3X can’t compete with the AOC OLED I recently tested, but it’s certainly on par with my AG324UX, which itself is an amazing monitor.
Left: AOC G3 U32G3X – Right: AOC AGON PRO AG324UX
Panel response
I was impressed by the IPS panel of the U32G3X, even despite having recently tested the blisteringly fast AOC AG276QZD OLED. Most grey-to-grey transitions occur in well under 10 milliseconds, with a few outlying results at around 20 ms. Switching the overdrive to medium helped bring it down to sub-20 ms transitions across the board, with the overall scores being representative of the best that IPS has to offer. There’s a slight amount of blur remaining, but no distracting haloing/inverse ghosting from the overdrive, and unless you’ve been spoiled by the lightning-fast response of OLED, you’ll likely be more than happy with this display.
With regards to the overdrive, the above results are based on the max refresh rate of 144 Hz – if you’re gaming at 60 fps I’d recommend bumping the overdrive down to weak. Medium offers very slightly better G2G response, but there’s some noticeable overshoot using the medium setting. High overdrive settings do increase the G2G response further but with extreme overshoot causing shimmering and inverse ghosting that is unusably jarring.
Brightness, contrast and colour
The peak brightness of 398 cd/m² is admittedly far lower than some modern HDR displays can achieve, but that’s a bar that has only recently been raised (at a considerable cost); 400 cd/m² is more than enough for a display sitting a couple of feet from your face. The black handling complements this, and although it’s basically average for an IPS display, the black levels keep the contrast ratio at approximately the specified 1000:1 contrast ratio regardless of brightness. Light bleed is apparent, especially on all-black scenes, which can look slightly washed out, but the U32G3X fares favourably against pretty much anything bar FALD or OLED displays, and there’s no backlight bleed from around the bezels.
The U32G3X is calibrated to an average DeltaE of 0.79, which is outstanding for a mid-range monitor. Calibration brought this down to an insane average DeltaE of just 0.05, which is fundamentally flawless. Indeed, even before our calibration, the factory setup perfectly matched my frequently recalibrated workstation display – Top marks for the U32G3X.
The gamma test results were also superb; Gamma 1 (default) hugged the 2.2 curve perfectly, with no notable deviation. For what I imagine is the majority of users who just want a plug-and-play display to be ready to go out of the box, it’s another feather in the well-adorned cap of the U32G3X.
Gamut coverage and HDR
The panel in the U32G3X has 10 bit (8-bit+frc) colour depth, allowing it to display up to 1.07 billion shades of colour. Gamut coverage* is average going by the numbers, but plenty for most gaming and movie-watching scenarios.
- sRGB 99.8% coverage – 124.6% volume
- AdobeRGB 79.9% coverage – 85.8% volume
- DCI-P3 87.0% coverage – 88.2% volume
*Coverage refers to how much of the specified area of the gamut is covered, whilst volume includes any colour that extends beyond the defined gamut.
The U32G3X has decent gamut coverage – the sRGB coverage covers 100% of the range, with a volume of 124.6% if you don’t clamp it to the sRGB range. This gives a beautifully vivid colour with no unwelcome oversaturation that can make images look cartoon-esque. You can clamp the sRGB range, but the brightness is locked at 70% which is roughly 220 cd/m². The accuracy is still good, though, so if you don’t mind a locked brightness it’s still perfectly usable for accurate content creation.
The AdobeRGB and DCI-P3 coverage is ho-hum, but this is specifically a gaming monitor, and with it only supporting HDR400, you aren’t likely to be using either of these colour spaces. With regards to HDR, you get slightly increased colour over SDR, but there’s no local dimming and the contrast remains the same. The HDR game and movie settings over-saturate reds, and whilst the DisplayHDR setting has more natural colour, it has a muted appearance. SDR offers the best overall experience, so if you’re looking for HDR, I’d recommend one of the newer OLED or Mini-LED FALD displays, but be prepared to pay a premium.
Viewing angles and uniformity
Panel uniformity is excellent, equalling the best IPS displays we’ve tested. Colour retains accuracy across the display, and brightness is remarkably consistent. As this is an IPS display, off-angle viewing is very good, with only minor losses to saturation from extreme angles.
Sound quality
The AOC U32G3X does not have integrated speakers, however, it does have a 3.5mm TRS audio-passthrough, which can be useful if you are sharing the display between multiple consoles or PCs. It’s restricted to stereo output, but the audio signal was clean and didn’t introduce any apparent latency.
Summary
The AOC G3 U32G3X is a great bigger-screen display for console and PC gamers. Ready to go straight out of the box, the picture is bright and vibrant, the accuracy is superb, and it’s responsive enough for fast-paced competitive gaming. At £649.99, you’re getting high-end picture quality at a mid-range price, albeit with the omission of speakers, a USB hub and a USB-C connection. AOC offers monitors that have very similar performance and include those features, but if you don’t need them and want to save a couple of hundred pounds, the U32G3X is worthy of making your shortlist.
