AOC AGON Gaming 16G3 144Hz Portable Gaming Monitor Review
Peter Donnell / 1 year ago
Daily Performance
The monitor comes with a pair of Type-C inputs, as well as a mini-HDMI input. If your device such as a phone or compatible PC supports power and display over a single Type-C you can do that, if not, the second USB port can be used to provide additional power, which is also required if you’re connecting via HDMI.
There’s a headphone jack down here too, making it very versatile for those connecting a console, Blu-Ray player, laptop or anything else.
The panel looks great, it’s surprisingly bright. The colours look a bit washed out in this picture, and while it’s not as vibrant as my PC monitor, it’s a lot better than the photos imply.
It gets better if you tinker with the settings though, with a plethora of gaming modes, and other profiles such as office, text, internet, movie, etc, so you can find a colour profile that suits your taste.
I dialed in the warm setting, tinkered with the gamma and the brightness and the IPS panel really came to life with very good black levels and colours.
The OSD is identical to the usual AOC monitor one, but I did find the four-button configuration made it tricky to control. For example, you have to press menu, right right, menu, right, right right, menu, then left or right, and then power, and power again to open the menu, find the volume setting, adjust the volume and then exit, as it’s not on a hotkey.
But there is a full range of colour calibration, native and sRGB modes, FreeSync, low blue light, and everything else you would find on a monitor, which is great.
Viewing angles are really good, from above or below it looks as good as it does head-on.
Even off to the side, it’s very usable, so if you were sat with a few friends beside you, everyone gets a good view from the screen.
Some L-shaped USB cables may not be a bad upgrade though, as they are quite thick cables, and can be a bit bothersome to route properly.
Setting up on Windows was easy enough though, but keep in mind Windows 11 defaults to 60Hz, and if you want to use 144Hz you need to go into display settings and configure this in your OS. However, if you’re connecting your Xbox or PS5, set them to 120Hz performance modes for the best experience.
As a second display, it’s really pretty fantastic, I can keep Discord, YouTube, my email or whatever on the display and it’s very easy to read thanks to its 1920 x 1080 resolution. Plus, at 144Hz, it’s just utterly smooth when scrolling through reddit all day rather than actually doing any work.
The black levels, white, and colours all look great, making it very easy on the eyes to read websites such as eTeknix.com.
Media consumption is good too, the speakers are decent enough to listen to some YouTube or watch some old Top Gear on, other shows could be watched on it too, I’m sure.