Xiaomi 34″ UltraWide QHD 144Hz FreeSync Curved Gaming Monitor Review

Performance

The VA panel is pretty impressive, of course, it’s size dominates every other aspect, but that’s to be expected. You can’t beat the thrill of a MASSIVE gaming monitor. However, the addition of that 1500R curve is certainly welcome, and it helps keep the corners in your peripheral vision but isn’t so pronounced that it makes reading websites look unnatural.

It’s plenty bright at 300 nits, especially for something that’s touted as a gaming monitor. Perhaps those working in an extremely brightly lit office would want a little more peak brightness, but honestly, it’s still brighter than a lot of standard office monitors anyway. Plus the matte finish just mutes any reflections on the screen and help give it better contrast and colour reproduction.

At 144hz and 3440 x 1440, you’ll be wanting a pretty powerful graphics card to get the most out of this monitor. That being said, less demanding games still benefit too, but modern AAA titles may see you lowering the quality a touch so you can get the frame rate North of 100. Furthermore, you could also enable FreeSync if you’re running an AMD graphics card. It may work with Nvidia too, but that could vary from card to card.

Of course, for movies, the monitor throws black bars on the sides. You would think this would be annoying, but you quickly adjust to it as you do viewing black bars at the top and bottom for most movies these days… but wait, there’s more. In a darker room, I can’t really see the extra monitor. Of course, that means the backlight performance is solid too; leaving me to enjoy a live Devin Townsend DVD, oh yeah.

For movies that are typically in a cinematic ultrawide format, you can actually view them in their correct aspect ratio, or very close to it with some formats. Enjoying the latest blockbuster with the screen filled is honestly pretty epic; why aren’t all TVs 21:9 yet!?! This is the Top Gun: Maverick trailer if you’re wondering.

The same is true for gaming, but honestly, most games either have been designed to work in this format or at least the community has created a workaround. For immersion though, ultrawide is pretty damn hard to beat and so far, the Xiaomi has been a blast to use. The game here is Flight Simulator 2020, not another scene from Top Gun, if you’re wondering.