Gigabyte G34WQC 34” 144Hz Curved Gaming Monitor Review

Final thoughts & Conclusion

Gigabyte’s G34WQC provides great value for the cost-conscious gamer. We’ll start with the bad as it’s a shortlist. HDR or High Dynamic Range just isn’t worth your time. We’re not really sure why it’s such a downgrade in image quality rather than a boost, but it’s extremely noticeable, even if you don’t deal with color accuracy full time. The other downside is, out of the box, the calibration is pretty rough. The G34WQC is skewed heavily towards the cool end of the spectrum and isn’t very bright. The good news is, this last bit is easily fixable in seconds with a trip into the on-screen settings. There are several presets tailored towards a wide range of scenarios, but we used one of the configurable presets to tweak the settings to the liking of our calibration software, which looks great to the eye as well.

The good news is, with a quick manual calibration, the G34WQC does a very respectable job at color reproduction. The colors are rich and saturated and it looks amazing gaming and watching movies. If you have a way to do a full digital calibration, it can actually turn out shockingly good accuracy. With an average DeltaE of 1.4 after calibration, it rivals many extremely expensive color-accurate monitors that cost thousands of dollars.  If you figure the $400 price of the monitor and a couple hundred more for a consumer monitor calibration system, you can get an awesome gaming monitor with photo grade color accuracy for less out of pocket than most ‘gaming’ oriented monitors cost anyway.

On the Gaming side of things, The G34WQC does support AMD’s FreeSync Premium and is fully compatible with Nvidia’s G-sync and coupled with a 144Hz refresh makes for a buttery smooth experience. The built-in speakers are pretty decent for monitor-based speakers and should handle anything where you don’t need highly directional audio or audiophile quality. The 32:9 aspect ratio is pretty well supported in most games and the 30% larger viewing area is very immersive. Some of the gaming features might interest you as well depending on your preferences.

We used the black equalizer to good effect running around underground in Minecraft without torches. Overdrive certainly helps limit ghosting, but we didn’t see much difference subjectively between balanced and the highest setting, so we left it at default. Aim Stabilizer strobes the backlight to reduce blur but requires variable sync to be off, which we felt wasn’t a great compromise and ended up not really using it. this is entirely subjective though and your own gaming habits may dictate otherwise.

If you are in the market for a new monitor, want a great experience that comes from variable sync, ultra-widescreen format, and a high refresh rate, but don’t want to break the bank, Gigabyte’s G34WQC should be the first monitor you check out.

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