Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed I'm super excited to review the monitor I have with me for testing today the pick 0px 329 because I think it's a really good value product I'm just gonna say it right at the top this monitor is available for just 450 US dollars and for what it brings to the table that's a very tasty price point so the PX 329 is the first monitor I've reviewed from Pixy oh another one of those budget brands like biotech that's I guess you have to say less commonly known than your LG's Samsung's D'Souza's and so on the PX 329 is also the first monitor I've tested that is using a new for 2018 panel from a you Optronics the first to offer a high refresh 1440p experience at 32 inches without a curve we've had 32 inch 1440p 144 hertz displays for a little while now but all available models were using an 1800 our curved panel so if you wanted this great combination of refresh rate and resolution and size you were stuck with only curved options I personally prefer flat 16:9 displays and I suspect many of you do as well so it's great that a you Optronics have developed a flat alternative that's being used in the PX 329 not only is this a 32 inch 1440p 144 hertz display it's actually capable of pushing its refresh up to 165 Hertz matching what is possible with 27-inch 1440p high refresh monitors it uses VA technology and it supports free sync to of course with low framerate compensation and at four hundred and fifty dollars it's the cheapest display and I guess one of the only displays with these specs as well as being price competitive with the curved options but anyone can read off the spec sheet let's take a look at whether the px 329 is actually any good starting with the design I think was only a couple of weeks ago I was calling a different monitor the best monitor designer looked at in a while but I think this pixel monitor might take that crown the px 329 is basic as you'd expect from a price sensitive display but it looks fantastic and takes most of the boxes I look for in monitor design the front is simple and leaves all the talking to the panel itself the bezels of reasonably slim around all four edges and the bottom edge doesn't dominate for once there's practically no gamer design elements and on the front there isn't even pic co-branding with the simple px 329 mojo seen in the bottom left corner the stand is also simple and elegant crafted from what appears to be entire pieces of metal with a powder-coated finish the only complaint I have about the stand and the monitor as a whole I guess is they lack of highs adjustability the stand only supports tilt adjust that said you can visa mounted and picture also offers a different stand you can purchase separately that adds height to swivel and pivot adjustments the great news for those that want to mount this monitor is it's very slim and reasonably light for a 32 inch display the entire upper section of the rears basically just panel and protective plastic with their components and other electronics all placed within a section towards the bottom similar to many modern TVs inputs we get two HDMI 2.0 ports two DisplayPort 1.2 ports and an audio output jack to pass through either HDMI or DP audio to an external speaker the OSD is controlled through a directional toggle which is great to see although navigation is a little unconventional though most typical features are included at this point of the review it is crucial to talk about the refresh rate of the monitor the px 329 does push up to 165 Hertz which previously I guess was restricted to a small collection of 1440p g-sync monitors aside from this one MSI model so you might be thinking great the PX 329 is another freesync monitor that features a 165 Hertz refresh rate unfortunately there is a catch the maximum refresh rate supported in this monitors freesync mode is a hundred and forty-four Hertz you actually have to disable free sync to get the monitor running at 165 Hertz so this presents an interesting choice between adaptive sync & top-end refresh rate obviously for NVIDIA GPU I lose the choice is simple you can't use free sync anyway so set the monitor to 165 Hertz but for AMD GPU on his own recommend keeping free sync enabled and capping the monitor to 144 Hertz is honestly the difference between 144 and 165 Hertz isn't that large while having free sync enabled can make a large difference to the playing experience let's move on to see how this power performs because there's a few interesting things to note here firstly the panel isn't that bright I recorded a maximum brightness of just 223 nits which admittedly is brighter than I would normally use but still falls well short of peak series 300 net claim if you need a monitor for a bright environment 223 nits might not cut it I also found the contrast ratio pretty interesting this is a V a panel with the rated 3000 to 1 contrast ratio however in my testing the actual ratio hovered between 1700 and 1750 to 1 which is obviously well short of what I guess you'd expect for a V a display this is actually the first V a display I reviewed that fell below a 2020 on trust ratio and when I asked Pixar if this was normal for the px 329 they gave me no indication it was a defect or other issues so I assume this is within normal tolerances for the panel with that said I don't think the contrast ratio is a major issue either consuming the PX 329 still performs ahead of IPS and TN panels in this regard with a superior black level it's not as good as I'd have liked to see and not up there with the best VA panels but at least there was no noticeable backlight bleed issues or random glow let's look at out of the box color performance and it's no surprise that the px 3 of 29 isn't that amazing in this regard considering pics Europe well they make no claims about color accuracy the CCT curve looks a little strange with blue intensity dropping right away at a hundred percent white but gamma is decent however on average Delta e of four point eight zero with most of the upper intensity white it's pushing above a Delta e of 6.0 isn't great this mediocre performance continues looking at saturation swoops as well as our color checker test both of which produce average deltas around four point five suffice to say this isn't a well calibrated panel out of the box however it's easy to write off a display from its out-of-the-box performance the key indicator I look for is good performance after making a few tweaks using the on-screen settings as we're not messing around with full calibration or software profiles just yet plus it's the best indicator of what a typical user can achieve with this despite just use the settings you see here and you should get similar performance to what you're about to see without the need for any expensive calibration tools and as you can see here the pH 329 is very receptive to OSD tweaks particularly thanks to its adjustable saturation slider I actually think there's a few weird setting choices by default including saturation set to 60 and too low contrast though I should note that increasing the contrast slider only pushes up overall contrast to around 1800 to one so not a major improvement there anyway with a few tweaks we're getting a much better CCT curve and a far better grayscale delta-e average of 1.37 with every value below 2.0 I consider this a success for OSD calibration is honestly this should be fine for most creators saturation delta-e average improves to one point for one with a few loose values but still a great result while color checkers average of one point to one is also excellent as far as OSD calibration results go this is the best result I've seen outside of monitors that specify a certain level of color accuracy usually those are professional-grade displays and this is all achievable really by anyone that purchases this monitor which is an excellent result then of course you can tighten up performance even further through a full calibration pass using spectra Cal's Cal man 5 not a lot to see here fairly standard results outside of 100% blue though srgb coverage remains north of 96% uniformity is one area where this new flat panel brings an advantage over the older curve models the px 329 performs well in this regard though the outer right side of the display does deviate noticeably from the center that said this result is noticeably better than curve displays in particularly the competing 32 inch curve variant of this panel used in the vo-tech G and 32 L d which as you can see here has a serious y-axis uniformity issue in terms of power consumption this flat panel does consume more power when calibrated compared to the curved 32 inch variant at 74 watts compared to 60 watts with the G own 32 LD final thing to discuss are the response times the px 329 reports it with an average greater gray response time of 8.2 seven milliseconds which is typical for a VA panel and actually quite close to the eight point one seven milliseconds are recorded for the similar but curved variant the difference to note here is rise times and fall times are much more similar with the flat model whereas the curve model has rise times almost twice as slow as fall times still around that eight millisecond mark is typical for VA pick Co does claim five millisecond response times which seems more in line with some of the faster transitions rather than an average I should also mention I'm using the H overdrive setting which is the highest available however as tends to be the case with high refresh va displays the average transition time is actually longer than the refresh window in the case of this 165 Hertz display the image is updated every six point zero six milliseconds except transitions take on average eight point two seven milliseconds so it's not really a true 165 Hertz display instead ghosting and smearing of the limiting factors and that prevents the panel from providing a true 165 Hertz or even 144 Hertz experience in practice this is more like a 120 Hertz panel in how it performs though again this is no different to the curve variance the good news is the px 329 exhibits elite input latency of just a few milliseconds in fact the panel is so fast to respond I had to adjust the normalization factor for our measurements because it was faster than any other display it actually tested up until this point and of course I made sure to calibrate this result against several other monitors to ensure I was really seeing this sort of performance also it's worth mentioning that enabling free sync had no real impact to input latency all tests were conducted using the monitors 165 Hertz mode which disables free sync about switching precinct on and capping the Refresh to 144 Hertz didn't affect this result in any meaningful way so all things considered I'm pretty easily recommend the pick 0px 329 short it's not perfect there are a few issues brightness and contrast ratio are low for a VA panel typical VA response times mean it's not really a 165 Hertz display and then there is that free sync refresh rate oddity but when you look at the field of 32-inch 1440 pay high refresh monitors the pay co 329 is going to give you the best bang for your buck for as low as 440 u.s. dollars through a new wake the PX 329 is the cheapest monitor with this panel inside though admittedly there aren't many options on the market right now there should be a few more coming soon but crucially it's only about forty to fifty dollars more expensive than the cheapest curved equivalents personally I'd spend the extra cash just to get a flat screen anyway rather than curves but that price increase is also justified due to the flat-panel superior uniformity and the PX 329 excellent color results from just a few small tweaks so pic Co may not be the most well known brand out there but they're getting on the front foot through utilizing brand new panels and producing excellent budget monitors this is one I'm pretty easily recommend I don't think buyers will be disappointed with their purchase for just four hundred and fifty dollars plus I'm really diggin the 32 inch size at the moment that's it for this one if you're interested in the calibrated monitor profile created for this display during the review process that's available for our patrons link to that in the description below and if you sign up to our patreon you also get access to our exclusive discord chat which is bit of fun happening in there as always subscribe for more monitor reviews and I'll catch you next time