The AOC AGON Pro AG274QGM should be an incredible competitive gaming display
Gone are the days where, if you wanted a decent monitor for eSports, you had to settle for 1080p with an underwhelming TN panel. We’ve already had 1080p monitors pushing up to 360Hz with fantastic colour (check out our review of the awesome AG254FG), but now, the bar has been raised.
AOC’s new AG274QGM monitor has a 27″ 1440p display that pushes an incredible 300Hz. This alone is a mighty achievement (although there are also 360Hz 1440p displays being made), but the AOC AGON Pro AG274QGM manages these insane speeds with a mini-LED panel complete with 576 dimming zones and HDR1000 certification.
IPS displays are fantastic for gaming, with fast response times, class-leading refresh rates and stunning colour, but if there’s one area they have lacked in, it’s that the black levels couldn’t match those of OLED displays or even VA panels. With mini-LED displays, they can now put affordable full-array local dimming (FALD) solutions into monitors, making IPS HDR displays a much more attractive proposition (with HDR that’s actually worth using, beyond having a wider gamut).
We can expect this new AOC monitor to produce deep blacks contrasted by super-bright highlights, with much less of the haloing often associated with fewer dimming zones. Thanks to G-Sync Ultimate, you can still use HDR without having to trade-off for a drop in responsiveness and increased input lag. It really is the best of all worlds. Stunning HDR and mini-LEDs for an amazing picture, 300Hz refresh so you can react faster, 1440p so you can actually achieve these frame rates, along with excellent colour reproduction, viewing angles and the high peak brightness of an IPS display.
The icing on the cake is that it also features Nvidia Reflex Analyser, so you can refine your setup and optimisations and get an instant visual indicator of the results. I can’t wait to get my hands on this display and put it through its paces!
Pricing and availability have yet to be announced, but this technology won’t come cheap. This being AOC, however, the AG274QGM is likely to be priced competitively against similarly specced displays. Of course, if your GPU can’t handle 1440p at 300Hz, this won’t be the monitor for you, in which case check out the AGON AG273QXP (1440p, 170Hz, Nano-IPS), or the very affordable AOC CQ32G2SE.
