AOC 25.5″ 240Hz AG251FZ Gaming Monitor Review

End User Testing

Video

Video playback on this monitor is excellent, and the high refresh rate certainly has no issues with fast motion. Watching videos shot in 60FPS, such as those on sites like YouTube, is a joy and there are no issues with ghosting at all outside of what may have been captured in the source material. If you can find it, you can get some samples of 120fps+ video online, and it looks absolutely amazing, but unfortunately, there’s not much of it around.

Uncalibrated

Amazingly, this monitor delivered 99% of sRGB and 76% of the AdobeRGB colour gamut. That’s pretty damn good for a HD panel of this size, and more than good enough for consuming movies and games. Typically, overclocking your monitor can screw up colour reproduction, but since this monitor was designed to run fast, the 240Hz refresh rate delivers pretty consistent results in terms of gamma. grey ramp and luminance. Colour accuracy is pretty average, but again more than good enough for consumer use.

Calibrated

Calibration of the display had very little in the way of improvements for this monitor, which is a nice way of saying it was giving close to its best right out of the box. The calibration tool was able to improve the colour accuracy a bit, but not much in the way that a day-to-day gamer would even notice. This came at a small cost of dropping the luminance uniformity a little but had no impact on the overall rating of 4 out of 5. The difference is subjective, so it’s safe to say that AOC has done their calibration work to find the optimal results already, and I’d be more than happy to leave this monitor at default (not often I say that!).

Sound

There are 2 x 3W speakers build in, which are more than enough for general OS use and maybe even a little bit of gaming or YouTube, but they leave a lot to be desired. Of course, the real perk of this monitor is the headset connections right on the side, meaning you can quickly hook up your headset to get much better audio performance. I would suggest using your own speakers or headset with this monitor. However, it’s nice to have these built-in speakers are a temporary or backup solution if needed.

Game Testing

I’m a big fan of 4K and 21:9 gaming, and personally have long favoured the higher resolutions that are on the market. I was sceptical of going back to full-HD for a few days with this monitor, but I have to admit defeat when it comes to gaming. The sheer level of clarity that a 240Hz refresh rate can deliver is in many ways comparable to a 4K panel, which sounds weird to say, but if you’ve never used a high refresh rate display, it’s hard to explain. Perfectly fluid motion adds incredible amounts of detail to the game world, as you’re not losing any frames, you don’t have any ghosting, literally at all! The side effect is that it makes 60Hz panels look “blurry” and it’s honestly something that has to be seen to be believed.

The biggest issue is getting games to use that full refresh rate. Most modern games I tested, such as Borderlands Pre-Sequel, Just Cause 3, CS:GO, etc. They all run around 100-200 FPS on a GTX 1080, with high settings. A blazing fast card and a dial down the graphics settings go a long way to getting you into that 200+ playground. Honestly, though, by the time the FPS was above 120FPS in most games, it became harder to see the improvements. Between FreeSync and that fast refresh rate, however, it’s nice to know that when you see something on screen, that’s exactly where it should be – bye bye lag!