Setting and Display Quality Issues

Pretty much everywhere in every eight since I tried, especially in games that aren't taking advantage of the hundred forty-four Hertz response time, you can just say the crazy amount of trail of the frame and the pixels leaving this colored outline of pretty much everything on your screen. So, I would just avoid using this on high refresh rates, but of course, overdrive isn't even needed; it's just an option now, along with that.

Motion Blur Reduction (MBR) is another feature that's not ideal to use, especially at high refresh rates. MBR is a strobe back light function which causes the backlight to flicker out a frequency matching the refresh rate of the display. This can be used to give you a sharper image and avoid any sort of pixel trailing. However, it cannot be used with adaptive sync. PC monitors dot info did the UFO test for pursuit photography, which can provide a better visual example of these two settings.

Finding the sweet spot between using adaptive sync with overdrive at 144 Hertz versus no adaptive sync and just using motion blur reduction is kind of tedious, especially to the average consumer who has no idea what's going on. For me, using DisplayPort for that 144 Hertz while gaming resulted in an overall smooth image with minimal amounts of smearing. The color was fine, but some minor tweaking was needed in the menus.

The flickering or black screen issue is a problem reported by users with NVIDIA GPUs at low refresh rates (below 75 Hertz) or in the LSC boundary (45-70 Hertz). This can be attributed to the low framerate compensation (LSC) trying to digitally eliminate judder and smooth out the motion. However, this has been resolved in most regions, including my experience.

Unfortunately, this monitor is not ideal for HDR content due to its brightness of 200 nits, which is lower than what's typically required for proper HDR display. Most good HDR displays are 500 nits and up. There are some color profiles available for use with HDR, but they're limited in their fine-tuning options.

Gaming Performance

The overall tone of this review might seem more negative due to the cons and things to be aware of when using this monitor. However, considering its price point (MSRP: $449), which is under $500, it's a great value for the features provided. The 3440x1440p ultra-wide display with 144 Hertz refresh rate and 1 millisecond response time make it an attractive option for gaming.

The monitor's performance was smooth, but some minor tweaks were needed to get the image just right. While filming at 29.97 fps, the lack of fluidity in the video was noticeable due to the low frame rate compared to the monitor's capabilities.

Availability and Price

MSRP is $449, which is not currently available for purchase as it appears that people are reselling or third-party sellers are reselling them for a higher price than MSRP. If you want to get this monitor at its intended price, wait until it goes back down to around $450 before making a purchase.

Conclusion

Overall, the BenQ Zowie XL2546 is an impressive gaming monitor that provides great performance and features at an affordable price point. While there are some cons to be aware of, such as potential issues with motion blur reduction and low brightness, these can be mitigated with proper usage and tweaks. If you're in the market for a new gaming monitor, this one is definitely worth considering, especially if you're looking for an ultra-wide display with 144 Hertz refresh rate at a price under $500.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys I'm random Frank P and today we're gonna be checking out a game II monitor that I think right now is crazy underrated from AOC this is the Cu 34 g2x a 34 inch ultra wide at 34 40 by 1440p 144 hertz our fresh rate has a 1 millisecond response time and comes in under $500 which is just uncharted territory for a monitor with these specs now as far as I know this has been out since the beginning of 2020 but recently just made its way to the US last month so won't pump to check it out go over it all for you guys in case you're interested of upgrading your monitor or just picking up a new one so first when you get it unpacked and set up the monitor itself hits you with that familiar color scheme of black and red accents a pretty subtle curve overall I'd say and a solid bass that won't bug you when it's on your desk as you can see though with the feet here they do kind of stick out to the point where it's just slightly too big for my monitor riser but it's really not a big deal the included stand allows for sixty degrees of swivel around 20 degrees of vertical tilting and 130 millimetres of height adjustment and the stand is also removable if you want to vase a mountain for connections underneath are 4 USB ports one is solely for charging 2 HDMI 2.0 ports 2 display ports and a headphone jack because there are no built-in speakers let's just talk first impressions real quick because out of the box I did think the color representation was pretty nice not too vivid or oversaturated I'd say before we monitor that boast an 80 million to 1 contrast ratio versus a typical 50 million to 1 that bump in contrast was immediately noticeable now it is rated for 119 srgb color and 88% Adobe RGB coverage but like I said the colors don't scream at your face so I'm not sure if that's just the full range it's capable of or if that's what you can like tuna too with a digital you know saturation levels all the way up in the settings but yeah out of the box thought the overall image looked great viewing angles as well also very impressive you can see the very minimal color shift from side to side and honestly in that regard it's one of the better-looking displays I've seen and you can just see the colors image it still holds up from the complete side the boring stuff getting us out of the way in terms of OSD it's located on the bottom right side with four different buttons to navigate the menus and I personally found this very awkward to get into the settings and navigate I'd much prefer a joystick I'm not gonna go over everything here obviously but like most gaming monitors you have your different color settings and like modes and stuff for game genres things like blue light reduction a built in FPS counter a timer a picture-in-picture mode if you kind of want to have this as like two displays an on-screen reticle which if you just press the right menu arrow when you're not in a menu that will appear oddly you can't toggle this on and off inside the menus it's just that right arrow and obviously tons of other little things to tweak the actual image of your display but like I said not the easiest to go through and it does kind of provide some unstable wobble to the monitor since you're pressing up into the buttons which is gonna make the monitor shift now this is a VA panel and for a VA a panel I did expect some sort of backlight bleeding or VA glow as it's known and yeah I did notice some more on the top of the display is you can kind of see here during an all-black scene but when gaming or even during like a darker dimmer scene it's really not noticeable at all just when it's complete black no other pixels and I will admit it's worse through the camera than it is in real life but again this is expected with a VA panel and every panel is gonna be different in terms of severity now again as a VA panel those aren't typically the ones you would favor for a low refresh rate because they're known more it's like a compromise monitor which are gonna have better colors but they're gonna be slightly slower but this does market itself as a 144 Hertz one millisecond response time display it with free sync and out-of-the-box appreciate I remembered seeing clocked the factory settings between five to six milliseconds which again isn't bad for the specs we have here at the price but I try to hit that one millisecond with adaptive sync for NVIDIA users which I'm sure a lot of you are and achieving that without severe amounts of ghosting or pixel trailing you have to enable overdrive in the monitor settings by the way if you curious about using your NVIDIA GPU and gsync with a free sync monitor I'll drop methods for real in the description so for this over dry setting having it on weak and medium probably gonna give you your best result depending on your game and the settings but in pretty much every instance the strong overdrive setting looks terrible pretty much everywhere in every eight since I tried especially in games that aren't taking advantage of the hundred forty-four Hertz response time you can just say the crazy amount of the trail of the frame and the pixels leaving this colored outline of pretty much everything on your screen so I would just avoid using this on high but of course overdrive isn't even needed it's just an option now along with that this monitor features MBR which is motion blur reduction and this is a strobe back light function which causes the backlight to flick out a frequency matching the refresh rate of the display I'm showing you examples here this chart from PC monitors dot info they did the UFO test but pursuit photography so you can get a better visual example of these two settings now MBR cannot be used with adaptive sync but it's aimed to give you a sharper image to avoid any sort of pixel trailing and it will admit for someone like me who doesn't review monitors too frequently and wants that you know quick plug and play experience out of the box finding that sweet spot between you know adaptive sync with overdrive at 144 Hertz versus no adaptive sync and then just using motion blur reduction it is kind of tedious especially to the average consumer who has no idea what's going on so with it that the sync in my r-tx 28 ET i using DisplayPort for that 144 Hertz for me while gaming overall the image was very smooth I'd say minimal amounts of smearing if you will the color is the motion I thought everything looks fine with some minimal color tweaking in the menus I didn't go crazy and mostly left everything stock I just bumped the brightness a bit pretty much now keep in mind for this video I'm filming it at 29.97 fps so obviously on video that 144 Hertz won't look as fluid as it is when gaming in real life and just overall I personally haven't had any issues with this monitor now I did want to mention some users have reported that with NVIDIA GPUs a flickering or black screen issue would be apparent under 75 Hertz or in the LSC boundary which is I believe 45 to 70 Hertz an LS C is low framerate compensation so it's trying to digitally eliminate judder and smooth out the motion in the game if your frame rate falls below the refresh rate this did see like a common issue overseas like I mentioned the beginning for that first wave of releases but since it's come to the US over the past month I haven't seen any real you know issues or people reporting this still being the case so did one out there like for me I had no issues the last thing before we wrap it up this is marketed as an HDR display but I really wouldn't use it because the monitor is only 300 nits brightness and 200 and its stock out of the box so it looks very dull and just washed out and little lit with HDR on it's pretty easy to see the difference here now most good HDR displays are 500 nits and up so 200 nits here out of the box is just not gonna cut it and also there are some color profiles you can use with HDR on but you can't access any of the fine tuning to the colorist contrast and all that stuff you can't use any of that they just have a few select profiles to use with HDR so like I said I just avoid it overall so I know the overall tone to this review might have felt more negative than positive but at the end of the day you have to remember this is under $500 i'm playing MSRP is 449 which is crazy affordable for all these specs 3440 by 1440p ultra wide 144 hertz refresh rate 1 millisecond response time with these specs and other gaming monitors they start at like $700 and up so you get a big price cut for the same features and it really is a great monitor I know I pointed out a lot of them with you more you know cons and things to be aware of that's just letting you know what you're kind of you know sacrificing for keeping some money in your wallet now I will say like I said MSRP 449 I don't believe it's in stock right now because when I checked I've seen a bunch people reselling theirs or third-party sellers just reselling it for a crazy uptick so I don't think it's in stock don't pay that price wait till it's back to 450 then you will be very very happy with what you're getting all these specs at that price so yeah that'll wrap it up hope you enjoyed this video if you did give the review a big thumbs up show your support feel free to follow me on twitter at random Frank P and lastly if you haven't already hit that subscribe button hope you enjoyed have a good daywhat's up guys I'm random Frank P and today we're gonna be checking out a game II monitor that I think right now is crazy underrated from AOC this is the Cu 34 g2x a 34 inch ultra wide at 34 40 by 1440p 144 hertz our fresh rate has a 1 millisecond response time and comes in under $500 which is just uncharted territory for a monitor with these specs now as far as I know this has been out since the beginning of 2020 but recently just made its way to the US last month so won't pump to check it out go over it all for you guys in case you're interested of upgrading your monitor or just picking up a new one so first when you get it unpacked and set up the monitor itself hits you with that familiar color scheme of black and red accents a pretty subtle curve overall I'd say and a solid bass that won't bug you when it's on your desk as you can see though with the feet here they do kind of stick out to the point where it's just slightly too big for my monitor riser but it's really not a big deal the included stand allows for sixty degrees of swivel around 20 degrees of vertical tilting and 130 millimetres of height adjustment and the stand is also removable if you want to vase a mountain for connections underneath are 4 USB ports one is solely for charging 2 HDMI 2.0 ports 2 display ports and a headphone jack because there are no built-in speakers let's just talk first impressions real quick because out of the box I did think the color representation was pretty nice not too vivid or oversaturated I'd say before we monitor that boast an 80 million to 1 contrast ratio versus a typical 50 million to 1 that bump in contrast was immediately noticeable now it is rated for 119 srgb color and 88% Adobe RGB coverage but like I said the colors don't scream at your face so I'm not sure if that's just the full range it's capable of or if that's what you can like tuna too with a digital you know saturation levels all the way up in the settings but yeah out of the box thought the overall image looked great viewing angles as well also very impressive you can see the very minimal color shift from side to side and honestly in that regard it's one of the better-looking displays I've seen and you can just see the colors image it still holds up from the complete side the boring stuff getting us out of the way in terms of OSD it's located on the bottom right side with four different buttons to navigate the menus and I personally found this very awkward to get into the settings and navigate I'd much prefer a joystick I'm not gonna go over everything here obviously but like most gaming monitors you have your different color settings and like modes and stuff for game genres things like blue light reduction a built in FPS counter a timer a picture-in-picture mode if you kind of want to have this as like two displays an on-screen reticle which if you just press the right menu arrow when you're not in a menu that will appear oddly you can't toggle this on and off inside the menus it's just that right arrow and obviously tons of other little things to tweak the actual image of your display but like I said not the easiest to go through and it does kind of provide some unstable wobble to the monitor since you're pressing up into the buttons which is gonna make the monitor shift now this is a VA panel and for a VA a panel I did expect some sort of backlight bleeding or VA glow as it's known and yeah I did notice some more on the top of the display is you can kind of see here during an all-black scene but when gaming or even during like a darker dimmer scene it's really not noticeable at all just when it's complete black no other pixels and I will admit it's worse through the camera than it is in real life but again this is expected with a VA panel and every panel is gonna be different in terms of severity now again as a VA panel those aren't typically the ones you would favor for a low refresh rate because they're known more it's like a compromise monitor which are gonna have better colors but they're gonna be slightly slower but this does market itself as a 144 Hertz one millisecond response time display it with free sync and out-of-the-box appreciate I remembered seeing clocked the factory settings between five to six milliseconds which again isn't bad for the specs we have here at the price but I try to hit that one millisecond with adaptive sync for NVIDIA users which I'm sure a lot of you are and achieving that without severe amounts of ghosting or pixel trailing you have to enable overdrive in the monitor settings by the way if you curious about using your NVIDIA GPU and gsync with a free sync monitor I'll drop methods for real in the description so for this over dry setting having it on weak and medium probably gonna give you your best result depending on your game and the settings but in pretty much every instance the strong overdrive setting looks terrible pretty much everywhere in every eight since I tried especially in games that aren't taking advantage of the hundred forty-four Hertz response time you can just say the crazy amount of the trail of the frame and the pixels leaving this colored outline of pretty much everything on your screen so I would just avoid using this on high but of course overdrive isn't even needed it's just an option now along with that this monitor features MBR which is motion blur reduction and this is a strobe back light function which causes the backlight to flick out a frequency matching the refresh rate of the display I'm showing you examples here this chart from PC monitors dot info they did the UFO test but pursuit photography so you can get a better visual example of these two settings now MBR cannot be used with adaptive sync but it's aimed to give you a sharper image to avoid any sort of pixel trailing and it will admit for someone like me who doesn't review monitors too frequently and wants that you know quick plug and play experience out of the box finding that sweet spot between you know adaptive sync with overdrive at 144 Hertz versus no adaptive sync and then just using motion blur reduction it is kind of tedious especially to the average consumer who has no idea what's going on so with it that the sync in my r-tx 28 ET i using DisplayPort for that 144 Hertz for me while gaming overall the image was very smooth I'd say minimal amounts of smearing if you will the color is the motion I thought everything looks fine with some minimal color tweaking in the menus I didn't go crazy and mostly left everything stock I just bumped the brightness a bit pretty much now keep in mind for this video I'm filming it at 29.97 fps so obviously on video that 144 Hertz won't look as fluid as it is when gaming in real life and just overall I personally haven't had any issues with this monitor now I did want to mention some users have reported that with NVIDIA GPUs a flickering or black screen issue would be apparent under 75 Hertz or in the LSC boundary which is I believe 45 to 70 Hertz an LS C is low framerate compensation so it's trying to digitally eliminate judder and smooth out the motion in the game if your frame rate falls below the refresh rate this did see like a common issue overseas like I mentioned the beginning for that first wave of releases but since it's come to the US over the past month I haven't seen any real you know issues or people reporting this still being the case so did one out there like for me I had no issues the last thing before we wrap it up this is marketed as an HDR display but I really wouldn't use it because the monitor is only 300 nits brightness and 200 and its stock out of the box so it looks very dull and just washed out and little lit with HDR on it's pretty easy to see the difference here now most good HDR displays are 500 nits and up so 200 nits here out of the box is just not gonna cut it and also there are some color profiles you can use with HDR on but you can't access any of the fine tuning to the colorist contrast and all that stuff you can't use any of that they just have a few select profiles to use with HDR so like I said I just avoid it overall so I know the overall tone to this review might have felt more negative than positive but at the end of the day you have to remember this is under $500 i'm playing MSRP is 449 which is crazy affordable for all these specs 3440 by 1440p ultra wide 144 hertz refresh rate 1 millisecond response time with these specs and other gaming monitors they start at like $700 and up so you get a big price cut for the same features and it really is a great monitor I know I pointed out a lot of them with you more you know cons and things to be aware of that's just letting you know what you're kind of you know sacrificing for keeping some money in your wallet now I will say like I said MSRP 449 I don't believe it's in stock right now because when I checked I've seen a bunch people reselling theirs or third-party sellers just reselling it for a crazy uptick so I don't think it's in stock don't pay that price wait till it's back to 450 then you will be very very happy with what you're getting all these specs at that price so yeah that'll wrap it up hope you enjoyed this video if you did give the review a big thumbs up show your support feel free to follow me on twitter at random Frank P and lastly if you haven't already hit that subscribe button hope you enjoyed have a good day\n"