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- Dual mode: 4K 165Hz and 1080P 330Hz
- Glossy WOLED panel looks sumptuous
- Great build quality
- 165Hz not as clear as faster panels
- Glossy finish attracts reflections
The Asus ROG Strix XG32UCWG is one of the new breed of dual-mode gaming monitors. At first glance, it looks like any other premium-priced gaming display. On the face of it, it takes a gloriously glossy 32in WOLED panel with a 4K resolution, 165Hz refresh rate and typically low 0.03ms response time. For many gaming enthusiasts, those specifications alone – and the fancy ROG branding – would probably earn a place on the wishlist.
The XG32UCWG’s dual-mode party trick, however, is that it can slash its resolution to Full HD and boost refresh rates up to 330Hz. Sadly, there’s no party hat included in the package, but you do get all the usual essentials, including some thoughtful gaming-centric features, an adjustable stand, dual HDMI 2.1 inputs and stunning image quality.
What do you get for the money?
As the XG32UCWG belongs to Asus’ premium Republic of Gamers family of products, you can expect a combination of flashy looks, upmarket features and rugged build to come in at a suitably premium price. Believe it or not, the monitor I’m reviewing here (the XG32UCWG) is the cheaper of Asus’s two 32in WOLED models: the pricier £1,049 XG32UCWMG ups the 4K refresh rate to 240Hz and 480Hz in Full HD.
Both models utilise an LG WOLED panel with a glossy TrueBlack coating. Asus claims this new coating provides radically improved black depth under any lighting. In normal lighting conditions, the coating on normal glossy WOLED monitors tends to look slightly grey, robbing them of that perfectly inky blackness OLED is famous for.
QD-OLED screens fare even worse: the added quantum dot layer means ambient light causes both greyish black levels and a reddish tint. The result for most panels is that you just have to shut the curtains and dim the lights – Asus’ TrueBlack panel, on the other hand, lets you leave the lights on, as I’ll discuss in more detail a little later.
Given the ROG branding, it’s no surprise that the XG32UCWG is typically extroverted in its design. You get the usual super slim bezels thanks to the borderless panel design, a small backlit ROG logo juts out from the monitor’s chin, and around the rear the super slim panel looks like it has a giant Asus ROG gaming laptop clamped to its back. On the left-hand side, a large RGB-backlit ROG logo shimmers as obtrusively or unobtrusively as you prefer – you can turn both it and the front-facing chin logo lighting off completely.
The sturdy feeling metal stand has ample adjustability. There’s 80mm of height adjustment, plenty of front to back tilt and a small amount of side to side swivel. There’s no portrait mode, but that’s no great loss on a gaming monitor. Perhaps more useful for the target audience is the presence of a 01/4in tripod mount at the top of the stand – screw in a camera mount, and it’ll poke helpfully over the top of the monitor. There’s also a large cut out for cables in the rear. Where many rivals make the cutout just a tad too small to comfortably accommodate a full house of cables, Asus has been more sensible.
Connectivity is pretty well covered. You get DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.1 inputs and a USB-C port, which supports DisplayPort Alt, data and 15W of power delivery. There’s also get a pair of USB-A downstream ports providing USB 3.2 5Gbts/sec transfers with the old-school upstream USB-B port.
It’s also nice to find that there are auto KVM and picture-in-picture features for those wanting to share the screen between a console and PC. The only disappointment at this price is the lack of DisplayPort 2.1. That would have opened the door to maximal refresh rates without the need for DSC.
Another nod to the XG32UCWG’s gaming focus is that Asus supplies a cordura-style carry case in the box. All the supplied cables – HDMI, DisplayPort and USB – are zipped away in here; a nice touch for anyone who transports their gaming PC to gaming meets or events.
Asus has also added a proximity sensor. This is the kind of feature more commonly found on business displays to maximise office-wide energy savings, but here it serves a dual purpose: to save energy and the WOLED panel from potential burn in. For a gaming monitor that will end up being used for long periods and then left idle on a static menu, it’s a good choice. You can select the sensitivity of the sensor, and then this will automatically blank the display when you leave your desk for more than a couple of minutes.
Asus’ OLED Care Suite also does its bit to keep the panel in tip top condition, automatically running panel refresh cycles after a set amount of use and allowing users to manually activate refresh cycles as and when they want to.
The XG32UCWG uses Asus’ usual on-screen display. Naturally, it’s had a suitably moody red makeover – this is a gaming monitor, after all – but the menu layout is sensible and easy to navigate with a four way joystick hidden under the monitor’s chin. There’s a dedicated power button alongside the joystick and the shortcut button on the other side can be configured to launch whichever feature you want, too.
As you’d expect, you get a variety of game-centric features to choose from – or leave disabled, if you prefer. There are crosshair options for shooters, a sniper mode for cheating – sorry, I mean helping – to improve your shot accuracy and a range of GameVisual profiles that provide optimised presets for every major gaming genre.
As per usual, you could argue whether any of these are actually likely to give you a competitive edge. The Night Vision mode, for instance, simply tints the entire screen in a green monochrome to emulate night vision goggles. In all honesty, the most useful feature is Shadow Boost as this brightens shadow detail to stop enemies disappearing into the inky OLED blackness.
How good is the image quality?
Asus’ TrueBlack glossy coating really lives up to its name. Even with multiple spotlights and two skylights leaking in a dreary grey UK daylight, the Asus’ WOLED panel handled light sources far better than recent QD-OLED and WOLED models I’ve tested.
I placed the Asus alongside two QD-OLED monitors: the glossy Dell S3225QC and the fully matte Samsung M90SF. Side by side, the differences were obvious even under quite dim ambient lighting. With the monitors displaying an all-black screen, the Asus’ panel looked rich, glossy and perfectly black. By contrast, the Dell’s panel looked slightly grey and exhibited a subtle red tint. The Samsung, on the other hand, looked even more washed out, with a stronger purplish red tint.
Black levels remain strong even with an overhead skylight, and direct artificial lighting doesn’t raise black levels or cause the panel to exhibit a subtle red or purple tint. The glossy coating does create a perfect, mirror like reflection but it’s sufficiently muted to not be particularly intrusive. It’s far more noticeable in my photos than it is in real life, as these have been artificially brightened.
The result is that games just look incredible from the off. The gloss panel combines beautifully with the OLED panel’s perfect blacks, vast colour palette and respectable brightness levels. In SDR, games look punchy, crisp and vivid in all the ways you could hope for. Turn HDR on, however, and the panel’s ability to hit even higher peak brightness for highlights – Asus claims up to 1,300cd/m2 – makes games look even more vivid and three-dimensional. I’ve tested a lot of monitors in recent months, and this was definitely one of the biggest immediate wow-factors I’ve experienced.
Indeed, the XG32UCWG’s talents combine to create some stunning imagery. The 32in panel is much more immersive than the 27in QD-OLED panels I’ve had on the test desk in recent weeks, and the 4K resolution looks dramatically sharper, too. The higher pixel density has multiple benefits: games look vastly sharper and more detailed, and – as long as your GPU can handle it – this combines with the 165Hz refresh rate and near instantaneous response times to provide impressively sharp visuals in even the most fast-moving action.
The improved pixel density is also a huge benefit back on the Windows desktop, too, with much improved text clarity over and above other OLED panels we’ve seen recently. There is still a hint of fuzz and some colour fringing to text, but this can be dramatically reduced by disabling ClearType in Windows. Clarity can be improved even further by installing MacType, but this doesn’t work with every app.
QD-OLED panels often have the edge for colour gamut, but the Asus’ WOLED panel touts some impressive numbers: Asus promises ~99% DCI-P3 coverage with true 10-bit colour processing, and out-of-the-box colour accuracy that keeps the average Delta E below 2. And it’s fair to say the Asus mostly lived up to its claims.
Colour fidelity is very respectable. For some reason, the default picture mode is Racing Mode and this achieved a relatively low DCI-P3 coverage of 89% and 83% coverage of Adobe RGB. It’s quite colour accurate, however. Tested against a Display P3 target, the Asus achieved a low average Delta E of 1.55 and a 6,315k white point.
Switching the picture mode to the panel’s User mode improves things. The DCI-P3 coverage expands to 94.8%, Adobe RGB to 91.8% and, tested against a Display P3 target, colour accuracy improves slightly to an average Delta E of 1.41, while the white point hits 6,380k. It’s good to see there’s also a calibrated sRGB mode and this successfully clamped the colour gamut to 99.8% of sRGB with an average Delta E of 1.75 and a white point of 6,351k, which is again a good result.
The only mild issues here are that gamma tracking is a touch wayward. It’s a little too high in darker tones which means dark greys tend to get crushed into black with default settings, and it’s a touch too low at the other end of the scale, with detail getting lost in the lightest tones.
As for SDR (standard dynamic range) that sees a peak brightness of 268cd/m2 for full-screen white, reaching up to 434cd/m2 for a 2% window, which isn’t bad for a WOLED panel.
HDR performance is good, too. The default DisplayHDR True Black 400 mode limits HDR peak brightness to 440cd/m2 on a 2% window, as you’d expect it to. Enable Adjustable HDR, however, and bumping the brightness setting to 100 sees the figure leap up to 1,042cd/m2 on a 2% window. This tails off pretty quickly, though, with brightness dropping down to just over 700cd/m2 on a 5% window and falling off rapidly after.
If you want to get anywhere near the quoted 1,300cd/m2 peak brightness levels, you’ll need to switch to the Gaming or Cinema HDR modes, and enable both Adjustable HDR and Dynamic Brightness Boost. You’ll sacrifice accuracy in the process, but the result in our tests was a peak brightness of over 1,200cd/m2 on a 2% window.
Motion clarity is very good at the XG32UCWG’s 4K native resolution and 165Hz refresh rate, but after testing 240Hz and 280Hz monitors back to back, it’s very noticeable how much clarity you lose on moving objects due to the lower refresh rate.
Of course, this only matters if your GPU can keep framerates maxed out; achieving 150fps or more framerates at 4K with modern, Ray Tracing-enabled titles is unrealistic with anything less than the fastest GPUs. For games that are less demanding, or where you’re happy to sacrifice maximum settings for maximal framerates, you may however start to wish for a faster panel.
And as if by magic, the Asus’ Full HD 330Hz mode shows you exactly what you’re missing. Pixel density at this resolution is a very low 60 ppi, so text looks rough and fine detail is non-existent, but it’s surprising how little this matters for fast-paced shooters.
The vastly reduced input lag and doubled refresh rate has a huge effect on responsiveness; it’s far easier to track fast-moving enemies than in the 4K 165Hz mode.
For well optimised titles that benefit from easily achievable, sky-high framerates this is an interesting option for really competitive gamers. For mere mortals, the benefit will be less pronounced – and in some scenarios the huge drop in visual fidelity may be more of a hindrance than the benefit of increased responsiveness.
As ever, the elephant in the room is VRR flicker. If framerates are unstable, you may find yourself distracted by an obvious shimmering in the dark greys. Again, it’s not something I encountered intrusively in actual gaming – not least because of the relatively short testing period – but the artificial VRR test made it painfully obvious. As ever, the only fix is to use in-game settings to prioritise stable framerates, and use a frame limiter where possible to avoid unpredictable fps spikes.
Should you buy the Asus ROG Strix XG32UCWG monitor?
The Asus ROG Strix XG32UCWG is a solid all-rounder. At its RRP of £879, it’s arguably overpriced for a 165Hz model, but given you can currently get it for £699 the price isn’t the barrier it could be.
Once you’ve experienced the motion clarity of the panel’s Full HD 330Hz mode, you might hanker after a faster 4K panel. In that case the 240Hz £925 XG32UCWMG, is an option, as is the £824 QD-OLED stablemate, the 240Hz ROG Swift PG32UCDM, although the latter does lack the superbly effective TrueBlack coating and doesn’t offer dual-mode operation.
That said, it can’t be understated how effective the XG32UCWG’s TrueBlack coating is. It quite literally shows OLED in its best light, allowing you to get the full benefit of all the best aspects of OLED without being forced to play in near-darkness. Factor in the sensible design and useful features – and the reassuring burn-in warranty – and the Asus ROG Strix XG32UCWG is one to keep on the wishlist. At the right price, it’d be a great buy.
