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Having revealed the Agon Pro AG344UXM in China earlier this year, AOC has now confirmed pricing and availability outside of the country. Elsewhere, the Agon Pro AG344UXM offers 10-bit color depth, which combined with the 1,000 nits peak brightness earns it VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification. It also has 99% DCI-P3, and 100% sRGB color gamut coverage and a 1 ms GtG response time. It’s an ultrawide so it’s bigger than your usual office display, but it is not the biggest monitor we’ve seen to date. However, you have to prepare your desk since this monitor needs more than 32 inches of width and 15 inches of depth. It is also quite heavy at 28.15 pounds, so asking for help in setting it up will be wise. Sure, few monitors can match the AG324UX’s exceptional stand, port selection and feature set, but it’s hard to get too excited by those kinds of features when the monitor’s core performance just isn’t as impressive as it should be. Like other AOC screens we’ve tested in recent time, there are 4 overdrive modes available in the OSD menu – off, weak, medium and strong. First of all we compared each mode at the maximum 170Hz refresh rate and captured the perceived motion clarity as you would see it in real use. We will ignore the ‘off’ mode as there’s no benefit in using that at any refresh rate. At the maximum refresh rate of 170Hz there was only a small visual difference between the weak and medium modes, with the medium showing a small improvement in clarity and sharpness. It was hard to spot and pretty minimal in practice. If you push up to the maximum strong mode at 170Hz you start to see a small amount of pale haloing creep in but it’s quite slight at this max refresh rate. Strong mode would seem viable, but actually the medium mode provides a better overall picture quality, being free from any obvious or no noticeable overshoot artefacts at all we felt. Overall motion clarity was good and the image looked pretty clear for a screen with this refresh rate. Screens that can reached higher like 240Hz+ will offer further improvements in motion clarity.
When you enable HDR in Windows the screen switches automatically in to the HDR preset mode. Most of the picture and colour settings are now unavailable or greyed out, so you don’t have many settings you can change. We will be reliant on the manufacturer’s factory setup here. There are 4 HDR modes available to choose from, the default is called “DisplayHDR” and then there are modes for HDR Picture, HDR Movie and HDR Game. Visually they all look pretty similar colour and brightness wise, but the sharpness is accentuated in the Picture, Movie and Game modes. Information about whether the stand can be dismounted. Usually, this is required for wall mounting.Port-wise, the monitor features DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, and USB Type-C (DisplayPort Alt mode). There's also a 4-port USB hub with USB Type-B upstream, a KVM switch, 90 W USB Power Delivery, and two 8W speakers, as well as the usual game modes. I measured a peak luminance of 363cd/m² in SDR mode, which is more than good enough for most lighting conditions, and it managed 447cd/m² in HDR mode, which is enough to earn the AG324UX its DisplayHDR 400 certification. Although I’m not entirely satisfied with this monitor’s HDR performance, as I’ll discuss below, the AOC at least outperforms most of the monitors I’ve reviewed with entry-level DisplayHDR 400 certifications.
The storage humidity shows the lower and upper humidity limit, which ensures safe storage of the display. Storing it outside these limits might damage the display. The default mode has a nice accurate PQ curve and the colour temp is also pretty good across the greyscale. It gets a little too cool in the lightest grey shades and with white, resulting in a 6774K white point and 4% deviance from the 6500K target. Ergonomics Information about the ergonomic functions - height adjustment, swivel angles, tilt angles, etc. VESA mount If we compare the native colour space against other wide gamut references you can see a decent and close match to DCI-P3 is achieved (103.5% relative coverage). The screen doesn’t handle the Adobe RGB space as well unfortunately with only a 93.7% absolute coverage, and some large over-coverage in red shades leading to 111.3% relative coverage. The screens native colour space is very close to DCI-P3 and therefore more suited to HDR content creation and consumption, than it is for photography and professional use which you would probably need Adobe RGB for. Accuracy of DCI-P3 colours is much better with average dE of 1.8 in this default mode which was good. sRGB Emulation ModeThe storage temperature shows the range from a minimum to a maximum temperature, within which storing of the display is considered to be safe. inch ultrawides are great for all types of use because of the extra peripheral view they offer. You can multitask easily with them, while games and movies will look better with wider spans or fields of view. You will need a more powerful GPU for it, but there are a lot of options now that can handle its demand. Although it clearly has its benefits for responsiveness and colour accuracy, the AOC’s IPS panel delivers very underwhelming contrast levels in SDR. A contrast ratio of 933:1 is par for the course for IPS panels, but it literally pales in comparison to rival monitors which employ VA, OLED or QLED technology.
We should note here as well that we measured a super low input lagon the AG344UXM. There was a total display lag of only 1.50ms average, so the screen is perfectly fine for fast paced competitive games if you need. High Dynamic Range (HDR)The screen also offers a high 170Hz refresh rate and supports adaptive-sync for VRR from both NVIDIA and AMD systems. Certifications to be confirmed. All in all if you’re interested in a proper HDR display and are a fan of the ultrawide format, it’s definitely worth taking a look at the AG344UXM. Pros From a colour point of view you can see from the top left CIE diagram that the colour space of the monitor extends considerably beyond the sRGB reference space, mostly in green and red shades and this results in a 129.9% relative coverage (along with excellent absolute coverage of sRGB at 99.7%). Accuracy of sRGB colours is therefore poor with a dE 3.8 average, but this is typical of wide gamut screens. We will test the sRGB emulation mode in a moment. Dimensions, weight and color Information about the dimensions and the weight of the specific model with and without stand as well as the colors, in which it is offered to the market. Width While Mini LED monitors aren't quite on the same level as OLEDs like the much-loved Alienware AW3423DW---OLEDs don't suffer blooming or haloing around bright objects---they tend to have higher brightness and don't suffer the kind of image retention so common in OLEDs.
Information about the maximum vertical viewing angle, within which the image on the screen is of acceptable quality. DCI P3 is a color space, introduced in 2007 by the SMPTE. It is used in digital cinema and has a much wider gamut than the sRGB. The AG324UX’s IPS panel exhibits no ghosting and good motion handling by default, but you can do better – even at its second setting (Medium), Overdrive produces virtually no noticeable ghosting. Switch off Adaptive Sync and you can enable Motion Blur Reduction, which does exactly what the name suggests but introduces ghosting. If you can be bothered, a combination of Medium Overdrive and a very small amount of MBR produces an image with low motion blur and only a small amount of ghosting – this is ideal for shooters. Size class of the display as declared by the manufacturer. Often this is the rounded value of the actual size of the diagonal in inches. Bear in mind that a lot of ultrawide, 21:9 aspect ratio monitors at this sort of size come with curved screens, so this is an interesting option if you prefer flat screens. You need to consider how far away you're going to be sitting from this screen, and whether or not you want the edges to wrap around your field of vision – great for widescreen games, not so great for spreadsheets, for example.
The stand provides a good range of ergonomic adjustments with tilt, height and swivel offered, all of which are smooth and pretty easy to use. The screen does have a bit of a wobble to it as you re-position it though, despite it’s large and heavy stand. Gamma was again good on average at 2.20, but showed some variation across the greyscale as in the default mode. The white point and colour temp had improved a little in this mode, now being closer to our 6500K target, and with a slightly too warm 4 – 5% deviance now measured. We did have a more accurate greyscale now though with dE 1.9 average. Contrast ratio took a small hit in this mode down to 904:1 which was reasonable for an IPS-type panel. Gamut coverage – we provide measurements of the screens colour gamut relative to various reference spaces including sRGB, DCI-P3, Adobe RGB and Rec.2020. Coverage is shown in absolute numbers as well as relative, which helps identify where the coverage extends beyond a given reference space. A CIE-1976 chromaticity diagram (which provides improved accuracy compared with older CIE-1931 methods) is included which provides a visual representation of the monitors colour gamut as compared with sRGB, and if appropriate also relative to a wide gamut reference space such as DCI-P3. The maximum number of colors, which the display is able to reproduce, depends on the type of the panel in use and color enhancing technologies like FRC.
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