Great Monitor
by ronald orourkeFirst off it's a budget monitor that punches way above it's weight. Start off with the positives - Response time and input lag both very good. I would use the monitor with low input lag option switched on and overdrive on the strong level if online competitive gaming is your thing. Very little over shooting or blur when using the strong overdrive option which is great. I have come from a monitor that was 100 pounds more and I see no difference in my gaming scores in COD etc. This monitor actually looks better than the one I used to have so I can game at high refresh rates with low input and fast response times with great colours and vibrancy. In fact you could very easily just use monitor straight out the box without any calibration as it only requires very slight tweaks to colour and as a tip I would personally turn the brightness down to below 50 from the default 90. This monitor has a better than average contrast ratio for an IPS monitor, somewher around 50% higher than average so best of both worlds with the colour popping of IPS and the deeper blacks of a good contrast. Obviously wont compete with a VA panelled monitor for contrast but thats not what IPS ecels at so it's a trade off but this monitor pretty much excels in every department. Build is pretty damn good for a budget monitor, mostly plastic but very sturdy, legs of monitor well designed and don't take up much space on desktop. Thin bezels on monitor and well designed over all. Now the cons - Button layout for the menus is pretty terrible in my opinion, you can live with it and it does get easier with use but if your trying to adjust the options in menu in the dark it's difficult as buttons are very small and close together so keep hitting wrong one or having to feel your way around bottom of monitor blindly searching for the correct button to press. Menu does have a lot of options to tweak etc but the layout although fine is hampered by the button combos you have to press to do stuff. Not as bad in daylight but at night it's a real pain navigating menus. Luckily there is an app you can download from AOC to have onscreen to make this much easier. Speakers are rubbish but for me this isn't a con because pretty much all monitor speakers are rubbish. They should just take the price of them off monitor and do without them. Is suppose the fact that this monitor can't be overclocked could be considered a con but even with my much more expensive previous Samsung monitor all I got was an extra 5 fps so hardly a big deal. You can't get change the free sync frequency to widen it with a custom Resolution Utility for example, It's range is 48 to 144 and this is actually pretty good, lot of monitors don't even have that range. I would have liked to be able to get the low end down to maybe 35 but it's really nit picking like any cons you can find for this monitor. Freesync works great by the way either using an AMD or NVIDIA graphics card. So to conclude I love this monitor and especially for the price it really is a no brainier to get it.