recently we checked out the three cheapest
144hz gaming monitors that we could get on amazon.com and we were pretty
impressed well mostly
except for one common problem that they all had they're all running a by modern
standards lower 1920x1080 resolution
so today we've got something new for you guys we've actually never covered a
product from aoc before but this the cq27 g127 stood out to us for a number
of reasons one it's 144 hertz which
means theoretically it should be great for gaming two it's running at 2560 by
1440 resolution three it's got a va
rather than a tn panel and four it comes
in at just 280 us dollars we couldn't find anything
else that has this feature set at this price point so we've got high
expectations and hopefully they don't disappoint us
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i'm actually pretty excited about this because we've had a ton of requests to
cover aoc in the past but the main reason that we haven't done it
is that ever since the crt days their presence in north america has been
fairly limited so i i've been aware that
they're kind of a big deal over in europe and i believe asia but over here
they've had basically very little availability and certainly
no marketing so i
don't really know what to expect because even from other media outlets i haven't
like read a ton of reviews of their products or anything like that first impressions
of the stand are pretty good it's got a nice metal base under a fairly
tastefully if a touch gamery top
tool-less assembly is always a nice touch
honestly i gotta say initial impressions
pretty positive so far height adjustable stand i mean to be clear this is not
like a 140 gaming monitor or anything like the ones
we looked at last time but considering how much higher their
costs would be to get this better panel technology it's a larger display
i i am i'm pretty pleased so far with the
overall fit and finish now i can't say that this is a perfect
job that they've done of the uh the plastic housing here you can actually
see some of the tape that they've used to probably put the
um see this unit in the back here that houses the power supply and the scaling
and all that stuff you can see some of the tape they've used to like tape it on
but in terms of the like the overall feel of
it it doesn't feel cheap it doesn't feel crappy and we've got a reasonable if
unexceptional i o so there's no built-in usb hub but you've got dual HDMI ports
displayport a headphone jack and a power
supply built into the monitor rather than as an external brick which some
people care about it's not a huge deal for me but it is considered a better
feature all right the toollessness continues here
and we're just going to peel this off bezels are looking pretty slim actually
and this is nice not just power cable included but also
displayport and HDMI so in terms of adjustability we've got
your tilt we've got your swivel
no pivot but we do have height adjust i still remember when that used to be like a
super premium feature now it's only really cheap stuff that
it's not included on it's really nice makes a big difference immediately
the deep blacks on this monitor are quite
noticeable compared to if we were looking at like a an entry-level ips or especially
a tn like as this wallpaper
fades off towards the edges it's it's quite dark not bad at all all right 144
hertz option showed up just fine there yes
and because this is a variable refresh rate
monitor that means that even if it is not certified g-sync compatible we can
enable g-sync and it is in fact enabled right now so
without further ado why don't we fire up some games now feels like a good time to
have a look at the on-screen menu everything here is reasonably intuitive
personally i prefer just an instant switch rather than animation
i can see how they might do that bright
frame what even am i looking at here
can you see anything let's see oh what the crap
oh what it just brightens the top corner of the
screen so it's like a faded out washed out
section in the top left corner so you can change the brightness
contrast you can move the position of it around actually you can put it wherever
you want guys let me know in the comments
what is this feature for i would love to know i thought that was
interesting game mode is off by default
oh that's the FPS mode
that looks terrible
okay hold on a second let's get uh let's get
our settings adjusted here oops
i have to say i have just never understood
these weird color profiles that they create for particular genres of games
the correct color profile is the accurate color profile because
that's the way that the developer intended it quite frankly at least
they've got customizable ones so you can have gamer one gamer two gamer three and
then you can adjust things that might actually be meaningful like whether you want the low blue light mode on uh so
you could have like nighttime gaming mode uh whether you want the built-in
frame counter on that's pretty nice to have so their gamer display modes are
not necessarily useless just the canned ones are stupid
okay overdrive can be adjusted to weak medium or strong
medium is usually the best bet there but we'll play around with that a little bit
and low input leg we will leave on
i will say that there's no discernible
increase in input lag compared to what i'd expect from a 144hz gaming monitor
so that's nice to see really responsive a touch on the smeary
side so these are not the fastest pixels that
i've ever seen by a long shot if you pick up a like a decent tn gaming
monitor or you know even one of those really
high-end ips's that lg released recently you're going to see better readability
of of things like text as you're as you're moving around like this you see
that everything's got kind of a trail behind it but
for a va panel i would consider this perfectly reasonable and acceptable
now one thing that's hard for me to tell right now because i'm playing kind of a
dark and gloomy game is
whether this gets any brighter so what i'd like to do is
get rid of doom let's switch to something like cs go and see if my impressions here are
correct because it seems like our maximum brightness i mean even just
opening up something like you know our own website here by the way
Linus techtips.com is awesome forum you guys should go check it out
this is supposed to be pretty much white white and it's
kind of a gray and it's not like we're at a very very low brightness even
actually the brightness is cranked 100 already
actually before we do that i wanted to play around with the overdrive settings
a little bit off is clearly terrible like you guys i'm sure you can see these
comet trails behind icons as i'm dragging this around on the desktop here
but as usual strong also yields a really
kind of over sharpened uh visual artifact-y type
look and our best bet does once again appear to be medium overdrive in
fairness white to dark is a very challenging
scenario so let's actually get that game fired up now
so this is a little bit more fair uh
and it's not great and coming out here into the the daytime
arabic freaking sun here um i've been
informed from off camera this is a 250
knit peak brightness display and i believe it because while the
blacks are deep and that was impressive
it's a lot less impressive to have deep
blacks when your monitor is just
dark i mean maybe this would be the monitor
for you if you're trying to game at night and be stealthy
and while you're at it you can grab a hoodie like the one i'm wearing it's the
LTT stealth hoodie LTT Store.com now to give credit to the strength of this
monitor the 1440p resolution does look
a lot clearer than what we were dealing with with those 1080p monitors but
something that you guys have got to consider is that there is more to the
perceived sharpness of an image than just the number of pixels and contrast
is actually a big part of what makes an
image look clear and sharp and crisp
so yeah the lines are fine
but the image doesn't look great so it just feels like the monitor is a little
self-defeating because it's key feature is that it manages 144 hertz and higher
resolution but it gives up so much contrast that you lose a lot of the
perceived image quality and that's not a problem just for like
scenic games it's it's a problem in general like it's noticeably bland this
is a bland looking game in the first place but it's really bland like can you
tell on camera how bland this is you know what no hold on i think what we
need to do is grab another monitor and swap it out for you guys so david hold
as still as you can i mean put the camera on sticks put the camera on sticks now this monitor costs about
twice as much and actually you might have noticed that especially
in terms of brightness it looks pretty similar except
funny story this is actually the monitor that we use for b-roll shots so it has
its brightness turned down to 20 out of
a hundred in order to make it appear
um not too bright for certain shots that we do so putting it up at something more
reasonable like around 80.
wow that is a really really different
experience back to our aoc
the difference is very clear and i'm just going to double check yes we are at
100 brightness on this thing that's a little unfortunate
this looks a little bit more palatable right i think that's why all the gamer modes
have this game color option turned up because it might hurt
the accuracy of your color but it'll certainly make your games as long as you
don't go too far like their FPS and their rts modes it'll certainly make
your game look a little bit more vibrant you can
see i've overdone it a little bit here so i'd probably say that if it's purely
for gaming use knowing that you're giving up some of the um the color
accuracy that you might have gotten in the native profile going to a game color
of somewhere in the 11 to 13 range improves the playability a lot like it
makes it not look like i'm looking at a super cheap you know washed out monitor and
what's interesting you saw that flashbang wasn't even bright what's
interesting is part of the reason for that is that the way that humans
perceive brightness is affected by the saturation of the color so looking at a
more saturated color makes you think that you're looking at something
brighter even though the panel itself is not particularly bright and if we were
to alt tab out of the game you can see things like my icons look way overdone
here so this is a monitor that
you're definitely giving something up at the price point but if you're willing to
fidget around with your on-screen menu which to their credit is quite usable
actually has workarounds that work
if you're willing to go around them so bringing our ad27qd back up on the table
this is a clearly better display it looks great not only in games when you
adjust this dial or on the desktop if you adjust it the
other way but in both all the time thanks to its 10-bit ips panel and it's
much higher brightness but
if you think about it as paying yourself
250 dollars to adjust a knob every once
in a while i still think there's a very compelling value argument to be made for
aoc's display here even if it does
give up some of the creature comforts that you might get
with a higher end panel so guys let us know
does this look like a great option or do you want us to explore some of the other
1440p 144hz monitors on the market they are a bit more expensive but there's
options from votech rocksol dell has one it's a fair bit more
expensive make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it if you do leave a comment about
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watching guys and we will see you in our next budget monitor video which i guess
we're kind of committed to now hey
we'll find something