AOC CQ27G2S 165Hz Gaming Monitor Review

Performance

This is a pretty well-equipped monitor despite its reasonable price tag, and from first using it, it’s got a great-looking image. The panel isn’t hyper-bright, with a rated peak brightness of around 250 nits, which is decent enough for a well-lit room during the day but will certainly look its best with some ambient light control.

Black levels look good, with a rated contrast ratio of 4000:1 and the fact that it’s a VA panel, which usually have nice contrast ratios anyway. Despite being edge-lit, the overall brightness and contrast do look good though.

The monitor sports a HDR10 support mode, but combined with the edge-lit panel and peak brightness, it isn’t much to shout about as it just pins the backlight to 100% and enables a wider colour gamut at the cost of poorer black levels, so like many more affordable monitors, I wouldn’t bother using it personally.

Colour reproduction looks decent though, with 121% of the sRGB colour space and around 90% of DCI-P3, it’s pretty vibrant with reds, blues and greens all having a lot of depth to them, and if my learned eye isn’t deceiving me, it looks pretty accurate too, but we’ll put that to the test on the next page.

For daily work and procrastination, this monitor hits a nice sweet spot thanks to the 27″ panel and the 2560×1440 resolution. It means you can fit a lot of information on screen while still retaining the detail, so having multiple windows side by side isn’t a problem at all.

For media consumption, the same holds true and the great colours put life into your favourite YouTube videos or the occasional bit of Netflix, etc. Again, sticking with SDR mode, as the HDR performance is a bit pants, but that’s true of every other monitor in this price range, so I won’t hold it against AOC.

For gaming, however, that’s where this monitor comes into its own. At 165Hz, it’s plenty fast, and that’s going to be a real benefit for competitive gaming. I’ve been playing Helldivers 2 and Fortnite on it this week, and the fast refresh rate makes the action look silky smooth.

The resolution is great too, and while 4K may be appealing, on a 27″ monitor, 2K offers up a decent pixel density providing a nice and clear image that’s not going to be as demanding on your PC hardware, allowing you to put your hardware to better uses, such as reaching the higher refresh rate.

I’m not an eSports gamer and I’m getting too old to have an edge in online gaming anyway, so the 4ms response time feels more than good enough to me, especially when combined with the high refresh rate of the panel. However, with MPRT mode enabled you can get that down to 1ms, but since it uses a backlight strobing technology it pretty much halves the perceived peak brightness, so is only usable in a light-controlled room for the best experience.