Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box another week another monitor review today's focus is on the brand-new asus rog Strix XG 32 vqr this gaming monitor has just launched onto the market after being announced at the end of last year it's currently available in Australia and I suspect it will hit other countries in the next few weeks the XG 32 bqr is the successor to the well-received XG 32 BQ with the are essentially standing for HDR this new variant keeps most of the original specs including its 32 inch 1440p 144 hertz VA panel 1800 hour curvature and freesync support but then adds in HDR functionality with display HDR 400 certification 94% DCI p3 coverage and free sync - as a result it's around 140 ozzie dollars more expensive if you've been watching some of my monitor of using the past you probably already know my thoughts on display HDR 400 certification and how I think it's kind of useless but I'll talk more about how this monitor performs in HDR content a bit later in the review before that let's take a closer look at the design for those that have a new suit ROG monitor or have seen them before the XG 32 vqr will be familiar in fact it's basically the same as other modern ROG displays in every way we're talking heavy gamer style with a weird pattern on the rear a ring of RGB LED lighting around the stand connection logo projection at the base of the stand red highlights you know all the usual stuff personally I don't like this sort of design I prefer more understated look but if you like the whole game aesthetic then this thing will be right up your alley the good news is that despite the gamer design the Zeus does pack in a number of good features the stand is puli height adjustable and can both tilt and swivel the build quality is good using metal for the stand legs and plastic for the rest of the display data and recovery is standard for this sort of panel again whether you like it will be a personal preference thing the on screen display not going to rehash a lot of what is found here given once again it's the same as other asus rog monitors i like that it can be controlled through a directional toggle and there's a few quick access buttons for features you get a standard range of functionality like reading modes shadow boosting crosshairs FPS counters and so on a soos has a good suite of features here mostly designed towards gaming although a few other OEMs are catching up these days ports as well standard stuff two HDMI 2.0 ports DisplayPort a few USB ports and 3.5 no audio jack the cable management hole in the stand is handy as well to keep everything looking neat prior let's talk performance and here is where things don't look as great for the x3 32 vqr the first thing I noticed was something wrong with either the coating or the sub pixel structure I can't quite tell either way there is some issue here causing what appears to be horizontal lines through solid coats particularly Gray's it's not a color banding issue or lines like you might get with a broken GPU it's just a subtle horizontal pattern it's also very difficult to capture on camera so I don't have a great visual for you here unfortunately it's not a gamebreaking issue and it's very hard to notice in moving content like games or videos but if you're reading web pages or editing documents which often have large blocks of solid colors something just doesn't look quite right I've reviewed a few other 32-inch 1440p 144 Hertz curved vias and they haven't presented this problem so it was surprising to see this crop up normally these types of issues only appear with basic entry-level displays as for response times we're seeing all the usual issues with high refresh ba panels despite boosting a 144 Hertz refresh rate the average grata gray response time I recorded was seven point two nine milliseconds which is actually a little better than average for a VA however refreshing at 144 Hertz means are a fresh window of six point nine four milliseconds so with the XG 32 V QR and it's seven point two nine millisecond response time were only able to update the image on the screen inside that window around half the time in other words the response times are bottlenecking the display from achieving a true 144 Hertz refresh rate this result isn't awful for this sort of display the extra 32 V QR is still easily able to produce a 120 Hertz refresh rate which not all high refresh vias can do super reality is that VA technology isn't particularly fast and often fails to reach the levels required for true 144 Hertz so that you need to be looking at IPS or and displays instead not a deal-breaker for most people aside from the usual amounts of ghosting and blur you get from VA displays input lag though is excellent at under two milliseconds so the overall latency for this monitor is very good not quite a TN level but suitable for most gamers brightness is strong for this monitor with its supposedly HDR capable backlight hitting over 500 nits out of the box which puts it ahead of most VA monitors contrast ratio is also decent at 2700 to 1 not quite at the top end of what I've seen from V ace but good enough and certainly well above other monitor technologies color performance out of the box is typical of a gaming class display with not much attention paid to accuracy grayscale performance is impacted by an incorrect white point which gives the display a slight green tint it's unusual to see a green tint but that's where I saw out of the box color performance is impacted by the monitor sporting a wide gamut which leads to over saturation and inaccuracies when viewing srgb content which is the majority of what you'll be viewing most of my thoughts on Kyle performers here could be taken from any other wide gamut gaming monitor review the srgb mode here is not good at all and there's no other way to clamp the display to an sRGB gamut so you stuck with over saturation unless you use a calibrated profile and by using color managed apps a simple srgb gama toggle would be great for everyday use you can correct the white point using the onscreen control so it's fairly easy to fix the green tint measuring against srgb I was able to get an excellent 1.05 Delta II average in our gross scale tests but again the gamut was left on clamps so we're still looking at color Delta is north of 2.0 however we are only slightly above 2.0 which is better than usual performance I feel an sRGB clamp would give me accuracy here luckily for those interested in the wide gamut performance after fixing the white point I achieved Sub 2.0 Delta averages in our saturation and color checker tests as well as 90% DCI p3 coverage I didn't quite hit the 94 percent that I Suz claims nor did I achieve the same coverage as IPS displays but overall I'd say the DCI p3 performance out of the box with only some slight tweaks is very good you can achieve great performance with a software profile generator through a full calibration no sir they're the downsides being not all apps recognize or support software ICC profiles which is why I advocate for sRGB clamp modes and the contrast ratio does drop a fair bit to just 2300 to one better than other display types but not the three thousand to one you usually get from a VA unfortunately uniformity is poor the bottom right corner of my review sample was noticeably darker than the top left which you can see here in these uniformity Delta is of above 4.0 in that area code vias tend to be the least uniform of any monitor technology and that's the case here with the extra 32 vqr I was hoping for a better result but I left a bit disappointed even more disappointing is the fattest monitor is advertised as HDR capable the best I can say this monitors HDR performance is that it supports HDR input so technically it can show HDR content however you aren't getting a true HD experience because like a lot of display HDR 400 certified displays the XG 32 vqr only delivers in one of the 3k HDR metrics the one area it does deliver in is color gamut no surprises here this is a wide gamut display so we are getting a wide of an SDR color experience however peak brightness of only 500 nits which drops to the mid 400s when calibrated is below the 600 nits peak that I personally recommend and of course below the 1000 it's that most hgr content is mastered for but the biggest issue is the lack of local dimming this means the monitor really isn't capable of delivering the high dynamic range the term HD is referring to that's because without local dimming the monitor can't show both dark details and bright highlights on the screen at the same time which is essential for viewing HDR content in essence without local dimming the contrast ratio remains stuck at around 2500 to one which is far lower than the recommended 20,000 to one or more for HDR when you add all this up the HDR experience isn't very HDR playing games in the HDR mode ends up looking quite close to just running an SDR monitor at a high brightness level with a bit of extra saturation thrown in I really don't think you were getting much at all from playing games with HDR enabled on this monitor which makes the mode a bit of a bust and that's the crux of the issue with the asou sex g32 vqr this is a monitor that has been released because it supports HDR it's the key feature the key selling point that's tempting you into spending more money than the older non HDR model but it doesn't deliver when it comes to HDR performance which makes it impossible to recommend over other cheaper SDR gaming monitors I'm not a hundred percent sure what the price difference between this and the XG 32 V Q will end up as in the United States but in Australia it's a hundred and forty dollars or so if the HDR experience was good then yeah I guess you could justify that price increase quite easily but given the HDR and SDR mode a very similar there's no way I'd be paying over $100 on the newer model it's essentially just wasting your cash on top of that the XG 32 vqr doesn't even deliver the best SDR performance in its class the weird horizontal line issue with the coding unclamped wide gamut and poor uniformity are all issues that work against this monitor it's disappointing given I've been largely impressed with the sources are the monitors especially in there roj line and while I wouldn't recommend the extra 32 vqr I'd find it hard to recommend the non HDR model the XG 32 VQ as well it's currently on sale for six hundred and sixty-five dollars in the US and seven hundred and sixty dollars in Australia which is far too expensive for this sort of display in 2019 North Americans can buy the vo-tech G + 32 DB which is almost the same honor in terms of its performance for just three hundred and fifty dollars it lacks a few extra features like a height adjustable stand and some on screen options but considering its $300 cheaper which is nearly half the price it is a much better option Aziz have monitors like the aoc AG 322 QC for for around $600 which again is a very similar display and even supports HDR and freesync - i'll be it with the same HDR performance issues as this a sous display so yeah not the best monitor from a sous and one I can't see myself recommending this fake HDR stuff really is a concern for the market right now I hope not too many people have been duped into buying a display HDR 400 monitor thinking they're getting something good but I certainly can see how this would happen so just be warned about hgr because I feel a few companies are taking advantage certain labels like display HDR to create new products that really aren't any better than what we've already got that's it for this one subscribe for more monitor coverage give this review I like if you learn something consider supporting us on patreon we're in the last week we've posted to behind the scenes videos for you guys and we'll catch you in the next one