Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed a couple of weeks ago I looked at the predator x34 P aces new top-end 34 inch ultra wide display a while it's pretty awesome the super high price tag of $1,300 didn't make it all that attractive to most of you guys out there well today I'm looking at a similar monitor from a soos that brings a very similar experience for a lot less money now when I say less money I don't mean we're suddenly talking about $200 monitor however the Asuza ROG Strix XG 35 VQ does come in at $800 which is a pretty enormous $500 difference compared to the x34 P and we still get a lot of the same features a 35 inch 34 40 by 1440 VA panel with an 1800 R curve a 100 Hertz refresh rate and free sync support it doesn't have the slightly higher 120 Hertz refresh of the x34 P nor does it have G sync but otherwise we're looking at a similar experience for gaming and if you haven't gained on a 21:9 ultra-wide monitor I reckon you're missing out is this sort of display is my personal favorite throw in the 1440p class resolution and a hundred Hertz refresh and provided you have a powerful enough system you truly get a high end visual experience with something like the XG 35 V Q anyway enough about ultra wide gaming let's take a closer look at this monitor a sous does a lot of box-ticking here with the design and features the stand supports a wide range of motion including height swivel and tilt adjust and there's visa mount compatibility for those of you that like to wall mount your monitors the on-screen display is controlled through a directional toggle on the rear as well which makes navigation easy there's plenty of connectivity - including hdmi 2.0 a separate hdmi 1.4 port DisplayPort 1.2 and a 2 port USB hub I could give or take the aesthetics here a soos tends to use fairly aggressive gamer style on the rog monitors with red highlights on the stand and an interesting pattern and back to say the least there's even an RGB ring on the back with Aurra sing support which doesn't make a lot of sense on the monitor but a soos is just hitting all those marketing buzzwords and I guess the RGB display on the front isn't enough RGB four monitors these days the bezel size here is quite good under nine millimeters on the top and sides along with a fairly chunky twenty nine mil bezel on the bottom which seems normal for these sort of ultra wide displays and the 1800 R curve is noticeable though it does help make the edges of the display appear slightly more in your field of view when gaming on a 16:9 display I do prefer a flat panel but on a 21-9 display I think the curve works I'm not going to spend a lot of time the on screen display features you've probably seen it all before especially if you've used in a sous minor or really any gaming monitor made in the last few years on one of the stuff is very familiar there are cheap features like crosshairs included here which is soos neatly caused a practice mode along with things like low blue light modes adaptive contrast and even picture-in-picture one of the more useful additions is a LMB or extreme low motion blur which strobes the backlight to match the refresh rate reducing motion blur toning on this feature causes a massive hit to display brightness and picture quality but the extra clarity and apparent sharpness you know it could help in those fast paced shooters turning on a LMB will disable free sync though so it's not for everyone speaking of free sync obviously one of the reasons this mono is more affordable is it uses free sync over g-sync so it's better suited to AMD GPU owners or those who don't care about adaptive sync our free sync monitors can be a bit hit or miss as free sync lacks the vigorous certifications to gsync this particular free sleep display supports key features like low framerate compensation as the refresh rate range is large enough so let's look at some of these specs our soos list for this model and how close the panel actually gets when it comes to brightness a soos lists 300 nits and in my testing it quite comfortably hits this with the peak level of 358 nits in my testing there's no local dimming or HDR support here so the maximum brightness is consistent no matter how much white is on the panel at any time soos lists a contrast ratio of 2,500 to one which is standard for aviary a panel are one of the key advantages of this technology over to IPS or TN in my testing I measured twenty to thirty nine to one by default which falls a little short here but is decent enough for an LCD and this contrast ratio is well held throughout the brightness range all the way down to sixty tuned it's the lowest brightness supported the one downside to VI panels tend to be their response times which are soos rate that formula second grade to gray well I don't have the gear to test response times just yet it's definitely something I'm looking into the wonderful guys over at EFT central suggest the XG 35 EQ is slightly slower on average than IPS based ultra wise with similar specs definitely not by a huge amount but it's something to keep in mind if you really value your response times on the other hand you do get great viewing angles but again not quite as good as the IPS based alternatives as for uniformly the actually 35 v/q unfortunately falls into the same bracket as a lot of other curve displays and that it's reasonably poor in this area with the new seven by five test grid for uniformity we can clearly see the edges of the panel's deviate significantly from the center with Delta e values over five point zero in some cases when viewing solid colors are an all white background these problems are somewhat noticeable but it's not unique to this panel almost every curve display I've tested suffers in the same way power consumption as a brief note is decent when calibrated to 200 nits of brightness the panel uses just 45 watts of juice though that does increase to over 60 watt at maximum brightness levels so let's talk about color performance by default the XG 35 EQ is set to 314 it's of brightness so it's pretty high for normal usage grayscale performance is good though with a default Delta a average of 2.25 and an okay though not fantastic CCT average of seven 140k and gamma Joshua of 2.1 I've seen better grayscale calibration out of the box but this isn't a bad result from a gaming display saturation results are good with a delta a of one point eight eight and this follows through to the color checker with a delta a of two point three one for the best results I'd be looking for sub 1.0 results as always but anything around that 2.0 mark is still classified as good and as advertised the hg 35 vq does support basically a hundred percent srgb coverage which is the bare minimum for displays these days as always a few OSD tweaks can improve the experience I'd ignore the garbage sRGB mode entirely and stick purely to manual tweak see the changes I made you can see here and it's all fairly standard stuff though of course there is natural variance between displays you know the settings I'm listening here might not be the best for everyone aside from correcting the brightness these changes only made a minor difference to performance with most of the improvements coming in grayscale and that's you know fairly standard stuff for OSD only calibration the Delta II average is now down at one point eight zero and the CCT is fixed somewhat though you can see in the curve of the graph that this is never going to be fully sold without proper calibration saturation and color checker results are largely unchanged as a result however you can achieve excellent performance with the full display calibration through spectra Cal's Kalman 5 with only a small hit of the contrast ratio now 2098 2:1 grayscale performance improved to an excellent Delta II under 0.5 and a CC T average basically dead accurate gamma as well sits at a very solid level so when looking at the saturation and color checker results you can see that calibration is pulled in these figures to a sub 1.0 Delta e and even a maximum Delta of just one point six seven which is really good here of course for color accurate usage the uniformity of this display does hold it back from being suitable for professional work and software calibration profiles aren't an ideal way to solve accuracy issues but for a gaming focus monitor a few tweaks can really lead to excellent results and that's always great to see however this really is a killer for this display my review unit of this monitor did ship with a single dead pixel in the middle of the panel I have no idea how common this is among all extra 35v cues out there but it's rare for me to buy or even review a monitor with a dead pixel so make of that what you will assuming you don't get an extra 35 VQ with the dead pixel I think this model is a pretty solid buy it packs nearly all the features you'd want from a high-end monitor of this shape and size at a price that's among the cheapest from a major brand for the specs the build quality is great if the design is a little too game of my tastes while the performance is solid with acceptable out-of-the-box colors and plenty of room for elite calibration the only real complaint I have is with the display uniformity which is a problem with a lot of curve - and obviously the dead pixel was a problem as well but I hope almost all buyers wouldn't have to face that problem so in general I would think that you should keep this more in mind if 34 40 by 1440 ultra wide gaming is your thing particularly if you have an AMD graphics card if you're interested in grabbing an extra 35 V Q or interested in exploring similar monitors we'll have links to that in the description below consider supporting us through patreon as well so we can continue to expand and monitor testing with more things and I'll catch you next time