**The Acer Predator X34: A Gaming Monitor That Delivers**

In today's world of high-performance gaming, having a top-notch display is crucial for an immersive experience. The Acer Predator X34, with its 3440 x1440 QHD resolution and Nvidia G-Sync technology, is a beast of a monitor that promises to deliver unparalleled performance. But how does it fare in the real world? We put the Predator X34 through its paces to find out.

**Viewing Angles and Color Accuracy**

One of the key factors that sets the Predator X34 apart from other monitors is its viewing angles. Unlike curved TVs, where sitting off-center can lead to a reduced viewing experience, the Predator X34's 21:9 aspect ratio means that even when sitting slightly off-center, you'll still get a great view. However, for single-person use cases, this might not be as ideal. But with a few online tests using our colorimeter and some expert tweaks, we were able to dial in the colors and achieve excellent consistency across the panel.

**Brightness and Saturation**

The Predator X34's brightness is relatively high, making it suitable for indoor environments where you need a good amount of pop to see what's on screen. Saturation levels are also excellent, although we did find that we had to tone them down slightly in the settings control panel. This was largely due to some minor backlight bleed at the corners and top edge of the display, which only became noticeable under very bright lighting conditions.

**Productivity and Content Creation**

For productivity and content creation work, the Predator X34 is a real treat. With its 21:9 aspect ratio, you'll have plenty of horizontal screen real estate to get creative with your projects. We found that having multiple applications open side by side was no problem, even when using Adobe Photoshop and PowerDirector simultaneously. This extra space also means there's room for a chat window or other tools without feeling cramped.

**Gaming Performance**

One of the most exciting features of the Predator X34 is its Nvidia G-Sync technology, which allows it to keep lockstep with an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. When enabled, this ensures that pixel rendering is synchronized perfectly with frame rendering, completely eliminating any tearing artifacts or jitter. This results in a buttery-smooth gaming experience that's similar to watching HD or Ultra HD video content.

**G-Sync Gaming Experience**

To fully appreciate the G-Sync technology on the Predator X34, you'll need a robust graphics card to push pixels at its native 3440 x1440 resolution. We tested the monitor with a 2GB GTX 960 card and found that it was passable but required turning down detail settings to medium-high. A more powerful GPU like a GeForce GTX 970 or higher would have provided a much smoother experience, especially when cranked up on high detail settings.

**Conclusion**

Overall, the Acer Predator X34 is an exceptional gaming monitor that delivers unparalleled performance. Its Nvidia G-Sync technology ensures a seamless gaming experience, and its 21:9 aspect ratio provides plenty of space for productivity and content creation work. While it may come with some minor drawbacks, such as limited pivot positioning and on-screen controls, the Predator X34 is a top pick for anyone looking to upgrade their gaming setup.

**Hardware Editor's Choice**

The Acer Predator X34 is an easy hot hardware editor's choice, but we recommend doing some research before committing to this monitor. Make sure you have a robust graphics card to match its capabilities, and be prepared to shell out around $1,300 for this beast of a display.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey clearly nothing says geek like 34 in of curved IPS Ultra HD g-sync enabled gaming love hey it's Dave altavilla for hot hardware and I've got the Acer Predator x34 gaming monitor here with me we're going to tame this beast and show you what it can do next Acer offers a couple of different models of curved 34-in panels with adaptive refresh techn technology the XR 341 CK which is the AMD freesync enabled model and the Predator x34 XR 341 cka operative letter A there you see here which is the Nvidia gsync enabled version other than which adaptive refresh Camp you choose Nvidia or AMD there are also some differences between the two variants specifically the x34 we're testing and addition to g-sync technology will overclock to 100 htz while the freesync x34 will Top out at 75 htz we've also heard of a few quality issues with the freesync version so it's important to make that distinction out of the gate this is the Predator x34 g-sync version which is still very new to the market top level specs however on both panels goes like this you've got a 3440 x440 native resolution across a 34in curved IPS display with a 21 by9 format aspect ratio the panel has a 3800 mm curved radius in a 4 millisecond second gred gray pixel response time brightness lights up at 3 nits and the display is ready to be able to deliver a full 100% srgb color gamut this is an 8bit high FRC panel the x34 contrast ratio is rated at 100 million to one which frankly sounds like more than a bit of speckmans ship but we'll look at contrast performance subjectively in a bit finally the Predator x34 also supports Acer eye protection blue light redu tion technology which looks way too warm for my taste but could definitely come in handy to save your peepers if you have to work on this display all day long frankly I'll out like I do the Predator x34 total kit comes with a kind of short display port cable a usb3 root Port cable a visam mount bracket and a lit pack a quick walk around of the Predator x34 shows its cool almost menacing looking stand which does a nice job of stabilizing this w aspect Beast it also has a nice red accented cable pass through guide and the Tilt hinge for the stand allows for a very wide range of movement up and down while the handle on top makes for easy lifting of its nearly 22lb frame and it's a good thing that handle is there because as you can tell by the stands design there's absolutely no pivot capability which is kind of tough because those sharp legs could dig in pretty well on whatever surface they're on potentially marking it however Acer does include some Thin rubber skids in the bottom of the stand where it makes contact with the surface area it's on for input you get a single standard display port 1.2 port and an HDMI 1.4 Port which is 60 HZ capable only you also get a 4x1 usb3 Hub and a headphone output Port The Hub supports one Upstream connection from your PC and four Downstream connections you'll also notice that the back casing is a glossy black plastic which frankly isn't the best for fingerprint coefficient but since this side of the panel is usually out of sight it's not a big deal also on the back side of the panel you'll notice there's a pair of stereo speakers with DTS sound and they're powered by a 7 watt self-contained amp the speaker Port area is angled up and it's a nice bonus to have in a pinch they actually sound pretty good too with decent range and volume though they won't replace a dedicated PC audio speaker system so onscreen controls and menu operations there's a row of six buttons under the right edge of the panel one is for power and the rest are for navigation this row of Little Red Devils can lead to such a confusing and frustrating experience trying to tweak monitor settings that I was pulling my hair out and damn it I can't afford to lose anymore again not a deal breaker by a long shot and the panel does have some nice controls for lots of things like gamma color temperature and adaptive contrast but man Acer has to figure out a better way to do this the good news is once you you get this bad boy set up it's hopefully set it and forget it you probably also notice that there's a row of LED lights here that Acer allows you to adjust in the ambient lighting control area there are a few different Hues you can choose from for that special Zada viiv and that little extra bling in your gaming Throwdown but let's get it on with this curvaceous Beauty First the curved radius on this display is just right we work with 30-in panels quite a bit at hoda.com and at 30in you do start to notice yourself peering at the corners and edges of a display once in a while at 2560 res and above for 34-in panel that issue would become even more prominent a slight curve like this works really well at bringing the edges in for your periphery and even though as you can see the Predator x34 is 172° viewing angle is excellent for one person directly in front of the panel the field of view is set up rather perfectly full disclosure I think curved TVs are silly TVs are meant to be viewed by more than one person sitting in a room and viewing angles on a curved TV can only be ideal if you're sitting dead center in front of it not so with a PC monitor or at least that's usually not the case the single person use case is actually well suited for a curved display in terms of color accuracy and consistency across the panel we didn't have any professional great equipment on hand but a few online tests in our Colorimeter definitely helped us dial things in with The Predator x34 and assess its performance as well the panel is reasonably bright offering plenty of pop for just about any indoor environment saturation is excellent as well and we actually found ourselves taming it down a bit in the settings control panel there's a high degree of adjustability here so it wasn't an issue color uniformity is excellent across the screen with good continuity from edge to edge gradient response was also excellent and there was no problem with dialing in gamma settings to a spot where the full spectrum was visible with 2% step increments for both dark and light shades we did notice however a touch of backlight bleed at the corners of the display and along the top edge of the panel however we had to really drop Studio lighting to see this prominently in practice for most environments you're not going to notice it and in reality it was a complete non-issue for the panel we tested watching video content on this display is an absolute Joy though its 21 by9 format will cause black bars and framing depending on the content you're viewing even in full screen mode your Source content is going to have to support a 21 by9 format or the video player you use will need to support scaling to that aspect however HD video at 2K or up at Native 21 by9 is pure geek Nirvana technically the Predator x34 is an ultrawide QHD display that offers almost 2 and a half times the number of pixels versus standard 1080P or roughly 4.95 3 million pixels productivity and content creation work on the Predator x34 was also a pleasure with lots of extra horizontal screen real estate and not much missing vertically versus the 2560 x600 panels that we tend to do most of our production work on at this resolution and aspect ratio there's also lots of room to fire up both Photoshop and power director here side by side for example and still have room on either side for a chat window or perhaps a Pandora or Spotify Paine piping in some inspiration and again once you've properly calibrated this panel color accuracy and consistency are solid so let's wrap things up on the gaming front after all this is an Nvidia g-sync enabled panel that supports adaptive refresh rate and allows the monitor to keep lock step with an Nvidia GeForce graphics card you can find an extensive list of Nvidia GeForce gpus that support gsync technology at nvidia.com when enabled since the panel updates pixel precisely synchronized with the frames rendered by the GPU it completely eliminates any tearing artifacts Jitter or wander that you can see sometimes while gaming if vsync is not enabled even with vsync enabled you can't match The Buttery smoothness of gaming with a g-sync enabled monitor like the Acer Predator x34 the effect is that dramatic and it's similar to experiencing HD or Ultra HD video content versus standard defa once you've seen gsync and adaptive refresh rate technology in general do its thing you can't unsee it and you won't want to go back to anything else one word of caution however with respect to the preditor x34 is that you'll want to have a fairly robust graphics card to push pixels at its 3440 x440 native res I would recommend a GeForce GTX 970 or higher if you want to game at Native res with all the eye candy turned up we extensively tested the panel on a 2 GB GTX 960 card and it was passible but required turning down detail to medium high settings with low anti-aliasing perhaps a 4 gig frame buffer would have offered a bit more Headroom but we recommend more GPU Firepower as well wrapping it all up will definitely take it and the Acer Predator x34 XR 341 cka the g-sync version is easily one of our top picks this year for gaming monitors at $1,300 it's definitely pricey but short of its lack of pivot positioning for its base and some frustrating on-screen controls this is one fantastic ultrawide aspect monitor for gaming or for anything else for that matter it's gorgeous and gsync gaming on this Beast is pretty damn Kick-Ass it's an easy hot Hardware editor's choice but make sure you stop by H hardware.com for our full review thumb up this video if you liked it and subscribe to us here for more gaming gear goodness and our 2 and a half Geeks webcast it's Dave altavilla for hot Hardware with the Acer Predator x34 Nvidia gsync enabled gaming monitor hey thanks for stopping byhey clearly nothing says geek like 34 in of curved IPS Ultra HD g-sync enabled gaming love hey it's Dave altavilla for hot hardware and I've got the Acer Predator x34 gaming monitor here with me we're going to tame this beast and show you what it can do next Acer offers a couple of different models of curved 34-in panels with adaptive refresh techn technology the XR 341 CK which is the AMD freesync enabled model and the Predator x34 XR 341 cka operative letter A there you see here which is the Nvidia gsync enabled version other than which adaptive refresh Camp you choose Nvidia or AMD there are also some differences between the two variants specifically the x34 we're testing and addition to g-sync technology will overclock to 100 htz while the freesync x34 will Top out at 75 htz we've also heard of a few quality issues with the freesync version so it's important to make that distinction out of the gate this is the Predator x34 g-sync version which is still very new to the market top level specs however on both panels goes like this you've got a 3440 x440 native resolution across a 34in curved IPS display with a 21 by9 format aspect ratio the panel has a 3800 mm curved radius in a 4 millisecond second gred gray pixel response time brightness lights up at 3 nits and the display is ready to be able to deliver a full 100% srgb color gamut this is an 8bit high FRC panel the x34 contrast ratio is rated at 100 million to one which frankly sounds like more than a bit of speckmans ship but we'll look at contrast performance subjectively in a bit finally the Predator x34 also supports Acer eye protection blue light redu tion technology which looks way too warm for my taste but could definitely come in handy to save your peepers if you have to work on this display all day long frankly I'll out like I do the Predator x34 total kit comes with a kind of short display port cable a usb3 root Port cable a visam mount bracket and a lit pack a quick walk around of the Predator x34 shows its cool almost menacing looking stand which does a nice job of stabilizing this w aspect Beast it also has a nice red accented cable pass through guide and the Tilt hinge for the stand allows for a very wide range of movement up and down while the handle on top makes for easy lifting of its nearly 22lb frame and it's a good thing that handle is there because as you can tell by the stands design there's absolutely no pivot capability which is kind of tough because those sharp legs could dig in pretty well on whatever surface they're on potentially marking it however Acer does include some Thin rubber skids in the bottom of the stand where it makes contact with the surface area it's on for input you get a single standard display port 1.2 port and an HDMI 1.4 Port which is 60 HZ capable only you also get a 4x1 usb3 Hub and a headphone output Port The Hub supports one Upstream connection from your PC and four Downstream connections you'll also notice that the back casing is a glossy black plastic which frankly isn't the best for fingerprint coefficient but since this side of the panel is usually out of sight it's not a big deal also on the back side of the panel you'll notice there's a pair of stereo speakers with DTS sound and they're powered by a 7 watt self-contained amp the speaker Port area is angled up and it's a nice bonus to have in a pinch they actually sound pretty good too with decent range and volume though they won't replace a dedicated PC audio speaker system so onscreen controls and menu operations there's a row of six buttons under the right edge of the panel one is for power and the rest are for navigation this row of Little Red Devils can lead to such a confusing and frustrating experience trying to tweak monitor settings that I was pulling my hair out and damn it I can't afford to lose anymore again not a deal breaker by a long shot and the panel does have some nice controls for lots of things like gamma color temperature and adaptive contrast but man Acer has to figure out a better way to do this the good news is once you you get this bad boy set up it's hopefully set it and forget it you probably also notice that there's a row of LED lights here that Acer allows you to adjust in the ambient lighting control area there are a few different Hues you can choose from for that special Zada viiv and that little extra bling in your gaming Throwdown but let's get it on with this curvaceous Beauty First the curved radius on this display is just right we work with 30-in panels quite a bit at hoda.com and at 30in you do start to notice yourself peering at the corners and edges of a display once in a while at 2560 res and above for 34-in panel that issue would become even more prominent a slight curve like this works really well at bringing the edges in for your periphery and even though as you can see the Predator x34 is 172° viewing angle is excellent for one person directly in front of the panel the field of view is set up rather perfectly full disclosure I think curved TVs are silly TVs are meant to be viewed by more than one person sitting in a room and viewing angles on a curved TV can only be ideal if you're sitting dead center in front of it not so with a PC monitor or at least that's usually not the case the single person use case is actually well suited for a curved display in terms of color accuracy and consistency across the panel we didn't have any professional great equipment on hand but a few online tests in our Colorimeter definitely helped us dial things in with The Predator x34 and assess its performance as well the panel is reasonably bright offering plenty of pop for just about any indoor environment saturation is excellent as well and we actually found ourselves taming it down a bit in the settings control panel there's a high degree of adjustability here so it wasn't an issue color uniformity is excellent across the screen with good continuity from edge to edge gradient response was also excellent and there was no problem with dialing in gamma settings to a spot where the full spectrum was visible with 2% step increments for both dark and light shades we did notice however a touch of backlight bleed at the corners of the display and along the top edge of the panel however we had to really drop Studio lighting to see this prominently in practice for most environments you're not going to notice it and in reality it was a complete non-issue for the panel we tested watching video content on this display is an absolute Joy though its 21 by9 format will cause black bars and framing depending on the content you're viewing even in full screen mode your Source content is going to have to support a 21 by9 format or the video player you use will need to support scaling to that aspect however HD video at 2K or up at Native 21 by9 is pure geek Nirvana technically the Predator x34 is an ultrawide QHD display that offers almost 2 and a half times the number of pixels versus standard 1080P or roughly 4.95 3 million pixels productivity and content creation work on the Predator x34 was also a pleasure with lots of extra horizontal screen real estate and not much missing vertically versus the 2560 x600 panels that we tend to do most of our production work on at this resolution and aspect ratio there's also lots of room to fire up both Photoshop and power director here side by side for example and still have room on either side for a chat window or perhaps a Pandora or Spotify Paine piping in some inspiration and again once you've properly calibrated this panel color accuracy and consistency are solid so let's wrap things up on the gaming front after all this is an Nvidia g-sync enabled panel that supports adaptive refresh rate and allows the monitor to keep lock step with an Nvidia GeForce graphics card you can find an extensive list of Nvidia GeForce gpus that support gsync technology at nvidia.com when enabled since the panel updates pixel precisely synchronized with the frames rendered by the GPU it completely eliminates any tearing artifacts Jitter or wander that you can see sometimes while gaming if vsync is not enabled even with vsync enabled you can't match The Buttery smoothness of gaming with a g-sync enabled monitor like the Acer Predator x34 the effect is that dramatic and it's similar to experiencing HD or Ultra HD video content versus standard defa once you've seen gsync and adaptive refresh rate technology in general do its thing you can't unsee it and you won't want to go back to anything else one word of caution however with respect to the preditor x34 is that you'll want to have a fairly robust graphics card to push pixels at its 3440 x440 native res I would recommend a GeForce GTX 970 or higher if you want to game at Native res with all the eye candy turned up we extensively tested the panel on a 2 GB GTX 960 card and it was passible but required turning down detail to medium high settings with low anti-aliasing perhaps a 4 gig frame buffer would have offered a bit more Headroom but we recommend more GPU Firepower as well wrapping it all up will definitely take it and the Acer Predator x34 XR 341 cka the g-sync version is easily one of our top picks this year for gaming monitors at $1,300 it's definitely pricey but short of its lack of pivot positioning for its base and some frustrating on-screen controls this is one fantastic ultrawide aspect monitor for gaming or for anything else for that matter it's gorgeous and gsync gaming on this Beast is pretty damn Kick-Ass it's an easy hot Hardware editor's choice but make sure you stop by H hardware.com for our full review thumb up this video if you liked it and subscribe to us here for more gaming gear goodness and our 2 and a half Geeks webcast it's Dave altavilla for hot Hardware with the Acer Predator x34 Nvidia gsync enabled gaming monitor hey thanks for stopping by\n"