Acer Predator X34 34-Inch G-Sync Monitor Review

End User Testing

This monitor has a lot of presence, it looks stunning even when powered off and is sure to be a compliment to any desktop environment.

The stand looks great on the desktop too; it’s very stylish and incredibly stable.

Powered on, the colours on this panel are stunning to look at. What’s cool is that there’s an adjustable RGB lightbar built very stealthily into the bottom edge, allowing for some ambient lighting and effects.

4K Video

The IPS panel does an excellent job of giving deep blacks with virtually no noticeable light bleed, even on the corners or edges of the panel. Watching 4K content on this screen isn’t possible as the panel only has 1440 pixels vertical, while 4K is 2160 pixels tall, but it’s still a big step up from 1080, and the extra detail is immediately apparent. Of course, 16:9 content is displayed with black borders on the sides, but if you’ve got any movies shot in 21:9 you can get your player to use the full panel, giving it a very excellent cinematic vibe that simply cannot be beaten. Motion is silky smooth, no judder and no noticeable ghosting bar that which may have been captured in the source material.

Uncalibrated

The stock profile looks very good, easily one of the best out of the box profiles I’ve ever seen. If you setup the screen and don’t make any changes, I think you’re still going to get a very pleasant experience. The tone response is excellent, and the 2.2 Gamma clocked in at 2.1, which is still very good and the overall brightness isn’t too shabby either. The gray ramp ranged from 6370 to 6480, but was a bit of a rollercoaster throughout the test, although the calibration fixed that up nicely, it is otherwise hard to notice in day-to-day usage. The 740-770:1 contrast ratio is pretty good too, much better than I expected. Overall, a solid score, with just the luminance uniformity letting things down, but again, the picture looks stunning to the human eye regardless.

Calibrated

The calibration was a bit of a mixed bag, overall, the actual visual impact in day to day usage was minimal and the output was already very close to a desirable result. The main things that changed are the now much more stable grey ramp, which settled at 7050-7810. The contrast ratio dropped a little, and we lost just 1% on the colour coverage. However, the overall colour uniformity and brightness uniformity increased significantly, giving the display a much more consistent colour grading over the full width of the panel. What’s interesting is that the overall rating from Spyder was unchanged. It lost points by reducing the luminance uniformity while gaining points in colour uniformity. Basically, the display was already doing a very good job, but the calibration was trying to fix a problem that is likely best left alone or tweaked through the monitors built-in calibration settings slightly.

Sound

Monitor speakers for gaming? I usually shudder at the thought! However don’t count the X34 out yet, as it does feature some pretty powerful speakers, for a monitor. They’re punchy and enjoyable to use, and that’s a good thing as this monitor doesn’t leave a lot of room for standard speakers on some desks. Personally, I’m not ditching my speakers anytime soon, but I would at least suggest you try the built-in speakers for a while as they may be more than enough for your day-to-day needs.

Game Testing

3440 x 1440 is a big step up from 1080P gaming, but still a lot easier to render than 4K. Put simply, 4K is almost 8.3M pixels, 3440 x 1440 21:9 is just 5M pixels. This means that a high-end card can not only fill the screen with gorgeous graphics, but it should also be hitting relatively high frame rates. I used the GTX 1080 Ti for testing, which meant I had pretty solid frame rates even with Ultra settings in Far Cry Primal, Borderlands 2 and a half dozen other games. the addition of G-SYNC is still welcome, however, as the monitor deals with any spikes or dips in the rendering of the game, changing the monitors refresh rate on-the-fly, and ensuring you get a smooth picture, free from tearing. The monitor is blazing fast in general, and there was no noticeable ghosting or input lag, although at this price, I should freaking hope not.