After recently looking at the Predator X34P, Acer'southward new 34" ultrawide gaming brandish, we take to say that while it'southward a pretty awesome product, the high price tag of $one,300 puts it out of reach of budget-oriented buyers. Today we're looking at a monitor from Asus that brings a similar experience for a lot less coin.

At present when I say less money, I don't mean we're of a sudden talking nigh a $200 monitor. However the Asus ROG Strix XG35VQ does come in at $800, which is an enormous $500 divergence.

And we still get a lot of the same features: a 35-inch 3440 x 1440 VA panel with a 1800R curve, a 100Hz refresh rate, and FreeSync support. Information technology doesn't have the marginally higher 120Hz refresh of the X34P, nor does it have M-Sync, but otherwise we're looking at a similar experience for gaming.

And if you oasis't gamed on a 21:9 ultrawide monitor, I reckon yous're missing out as this sort of brandish is my personal favorite. Throw in the 1440p-course resolution and 100Hz refresh, and provided you have a powerful enough arrangement, you truly get a high-end visual experience with something like the XG35VQ.

Let'south have a closer look at this monitor...

Asus does a lot of box-ticking here with the blueprint and features. The stand supports a broad range of motion including height, swivel and tilt, and there's VESA mount compatibility. The on-screen display is controlled through a directional toggle on the rear, which makes navigation like shooting fish in a barrel.

There's plenty of connectivity, including HDMI 2.0, a separate HDMI 1.iv port, DisplayPort ane.2, and a ii-port USB hub.

I could give or accept the aesthetics here; Asus tends to use fairly aggressive gamer manner on their ROG monitors, with cherry-red highlights on the stand and an… interesting pattern on the dorsum. There'southward fifty-fifty an RGB ring on the dorsum with Aureola Sync support, which doesn't make a lot of sense on a monitor, but Asus is merely hitting all those marketing buzzwords. I judge the RGB display itself isn't enough RGB for monitors these days.

The bezel size here is quite good, under 9mm on the peak and sides, along with a fairly chunky 29mm bottom bezel which seems normal for these sort of ultrawide displays. And the 1800R curve is noticeable, though it does aid make the edges of the brandish appear slightly more in your field of view when gaming. On a 16:nine display I prefer a flat panel, merely on a 21:ix brandish I think the curve works.

I'm non going to spend a lot of time on the on-screen display features, because if you've used an Asus monitor or really whatsoever gaming monitor made in the final few years, a lot of the stuff here is very familiar. There's the crook features like crosshairs, which Asus sneakily calls a "practice mode", along with things similar depression blue light modes, adaptive dissimilarity, and picture in picture.

One of the more useful additions is ELMB, or Extreme Depression Motion Blur, which strobes the backlight to match the refresh rate, reducing motion blur. Turning on this feature causes a massive hit to display brightness and picture quality, only the extra clarity and credible sharpness could help in fast paced shooters. Turning on ELMB will disable FreeSync too, so it'due south non for everyone.

Speaking of FreeSync, obviously one of the reasons this monitor is more affordable is it uses FreeSync over G-Sync, and then it'southward better suited to AMD GPU owners or those who don't care about adaptive sync. While FreeSync monitors tin be a flake hit-or-miss as FreeSync lacks the vigorous certification of G-Sync, this item FreeSync brandish supports key features like low framerate compensation as the refresh charge per unit range is large enough.

So let'due south wait at some of the specs Asus lists for this monitor, and how shut the console really gets. When it comes to effulgence, Asus lists 300 nits, and in my testing information technology quite comfortably hits this with a height level of 358 nits in my testing. In that location'due south no local dimming or HDR back up here, then the maximum brightness is consequent no affair how much white is on the console at whatsoever one time.

Asus lists a contrast ratio of 2500:1, which is standard for a VA panel and ane of the key advantages of this engineering over IPS or TN. In my testing I measured 2239:1 by default, which falls a little short hither but is notwithstanding decent for an LCD. And this contrast ratio is well held throughout the brightness range, all the manner down to 62 nits, the everyman brightness supported.

The one downside to VA panels tend to exist their response times, which Asus rate at 4ms gray-to-gray. On the other manus, you lot practise go great viewing angles, just again non quite equally good equally the IPS-based alternatives though.

Every bit for uniformity, the XG35VQ falls into the aforementioned subclass as a lot of curved displays: it's reasonably poor in this area. With a new 7x5 examination grid for uniformity, nosotros can clearly run across the edges of the panel deviate significantly from the center, with deltaE values over 5.0 in some cases. When viewing solid colors or all-white backgrounds, these problems are somewhat noticeable, but it's not unique to this console: almost every curved display I've tested suffers in the same way.

Power consumption is decent, when calibrated to 200 nits of effulgence the console uses merely 45W of juice, though that increases to over 60W at maximum effulgence levels.