Gigabyte AORUS MO34WQC2 34″ Ultrawide 240Hz OLED Gaming Monitor Review

Performance

OLED panels are always a marvel to behold, and while a compressed website photo in SDR is never going to do justice to an HDR monitor, you can take my word for it that the black levels on this monitor are absolutely zero.

What does confuse me is that they said the panel has HDR400 and HDR1000 support, but I see no clear option to take advantage of both, as turning on HDR locks the monitor to an “HDR” mode in the OSD with no other information. If you go into the OLED Care menu and set the APL to High you get more brightness, and this is said to be HDR1000 mode, but there’s no clear menu indication that this is the case. However, from my own testing, it’s most certainly very bright for an OLED, and personally, I’m leaving it in HDR400 TrueBlack mode as that was plenty bright for me.

The colours are jaw-dropping though, with it reaching 99 of DCI-P3 colour, and since it’s a true 10-bit panel, and it can still operate at full 10-bit when set to the full 240Hz mode, the colour reproduction and gradients are truly awesome.

One thing I never thought to try on previous OLEDs I’ve reviewed is black-and-white content. I sat and watched Citizen Kane, and in a darker room, it’s amazing to see the sides of the screen just vanish into the dark, as OLED pixels put out no light when showing black.

Unlike my IPS that I’m using to write this review, which now feels like the blacks are all a glowing grey pile of garbage… OLED, you have ruined my perception of other monitors… again! But still, the black and white content does look stunning on OLED, the level of contrast puts new life into this 82-year-old movie.

For something more modern, I threw on Furiosa 4K Blu-Ray, which is shot in 21:9 aspect ratio, so it fills every pixel of this lovely ultrawide format. Jaw on the floor time with this one, it looked absolutely staggering. As I said, an SDR photo of HDR does it no justice, but even still you can tell this is a striking level of colour and image quality. The absolute blacks of the shadows of the car, with the vibrant blue sky in the background.

Bright scenes are certainly bright too, with excellent sun glare highlights, while still retaining the detail in the scene.

And when things get colourful, oh my, did it look good. And yes, Gigabyte, if you’re wondering why I took a little longer testing this monitor than promised, it may be because I watched a couple of movies on it… can you blame me? I think not.

…Just one more. Again, a lot of films feature black bars on the top and bottom of 16:9 displays, so watching a movie on ultrawide means the full frame fits on the display, making your movie feel so much more immersive; the Shire looks its absolute best here!

Gaming

It’s unsurprising that gaming is pretty incredible on the MO34WQC2, colours and contrast are fantastic throughout. However, the implementation of HDR in some games is better than others, I found Final Fantasy XVI took a fair bit more fettling than most, but it was worth it. Alas, maxing this game out on an RTX 4090 I was getting around 120 FPS with a little DLSS, and it played silky smooth.

240 FPS Factorio with Auto HDR anyone? Yes, please. Plus, having a wider display means I can fit more of the map on screen and take my conveyer spaghetti to the next level (if you’ve played it, you’ll know).

Gaming at night, with HDR on, what a treat, but honestly, all that aside, it’s the input latency that really sells it for competitive gaming. 240Hz is obviously an advantage too, but 0.03ms GTG makes mouse movement to on-screen action feel telepathically fast. You wouldn’t think dropping from a quality 1ms panel to 0.03ms would be that noticeable, but it absolutely is, it just feels instant.

Again pushing 240Hz is not easy, even for the best of the best gaming hardware. Of course, if you play less graphically demanding games like Counter-Strike or the like, you’ll be absolutely able to use every bit of that, and the higher your FPS, the lower your gaming latency. Personally, I’m happy with anything at or above 120 FPS, I’m not too competitive, and smooth gameplay is good enough for me.

There’s native support for consoles too, with the PlayStation 5 supporting a 16:9 2560×1440 mode, as well as VRR and ALLM. The monitor will also drop into a dedicated 120/144Hz mode for devices that output that rate too, which is great.

Of course, the PS5 can use the HDR feature too, and the quick built-in calibration tools mean you can get set up for a good quality image pretty fast. Plus, it was only at this point I realised the monitor had speakers built in, and they’re actually pretty decent. OK, they still sound like monitor speakers, but they’re quite loud and have a bit of punch to them, so if you’re in a pinch, they’re usable.

Overall, this monitor just soaks up any gaming experience I through at it, from console to PC, it passes with flying colours all around.

And so did I, with yet more evidence I “tested” this monitor for longer than most, whoops.

Daily Usage

Being an ultrawide 3440×1440 monitor, it has a lot of clear advantages, and being able to simply fit more on screen is the most obvious one. For daily work, it’s a joy to use, and while OLED burn-in has been a concern for a lot of people, modern panels and their multitude of protective features have gone a long way to make this an issue of the past. It certainly helps that there’s a 3-year warrant too.

The pixel scaling and text clarity are superb too, some older OLED panels had a weird sub-pixel design that make text look fuzzy, but that’s certainly not the case here.

And viewing angles are, well, any damn angle you like, the image looks just as good regardless.