Gigabyte G34WQC - 1440p ultrawide

Rymix said:
I've had this monitor for a couple of weeks and here are my thoughts:

  1. It's definitely entry-level, so keep your expectations in check
  2. Colour contrast/calibration is a little odd. I can't quite put my finger on it, but my old Dell monitor colour space looked 'nicer'. Seems like it's always either bit washed out or over-saturated. I can't quite hit the sweet spot. (That's what she said.) I'll keep playing with the settings
  3. HDR is barely present. Don't expect to be awed by deep, brooding darks, or blinding highlights
  4. Monitor height adjustment is of limited range. I could do with it going a little bit higher in my setup
  5. There is no swivel - this might be normal for ultrawides (i.e. more likely to become unbalanced due to the screen width/weight)
  6. The monitor stand footprint is rather larger than I was expecting. Looks a bit unwieldy and takes up a lot of desk space - wall mount recommended
  7. Bezels are quite small. Looks rather nice. I've seen smaller, but this is fine
  8. The plastic case/chassis looks and feels cheap. Not the most consistent finish or of the highest quality. The Gigabyte logo at the bottom is pretty ugly, too
  9. The claimed 1ms response rate is being pretty damn generous. There be ghosts, be under no illusion
  10. I have some borderline unacceptable backlight bleed at the top left of the screen. It's only really noticeable in dark conditions and on fairly solid, dark colours. It is occasionally noticeable when gaming, but it is very noticeable when watching a 16:9 film as the solid black vertical border stands out a mile
  11. Flickering is more a function of the machine/use case than the monitor, I've found. I was able extend the sync range using CRU https://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-Custom-Resolution-Utility-CRU. I'm running a 1650 at the moment whilst waiting for my RTX 3080 to arrive. I expect most of the issues to go away at higher fps (wishful thinking?)
  12. My control joystick stopped working this morning, which is how I found this thread in the first place. I actually started a return request, but just now in frustration I gave the joystick a proper push (much harder than you would during normal operation) and it has started working again. Something is sticky back there. The microswitches are clearly still functioning but not always registering. Were I to guess, I'd suggest that a switch got stuck to on rather than stopped responding. I dunno
  13. The audio is absolute *****, but then nobody actually uses monitor speakers, do they?
  14. No USB hub or port is very surprising to me. It's a little frustrating as I now need to plug my low-value peripherals in elsewhere, taking up space. I mean fitbit dongle, that sort of thing.
  15. And how will firmware ever be updated without a USB port? Is Gigabyte hoping never to have to update this thing? I assume you can't send an update data signal over display port?
  16. No dead pixels that I can see. They're probably there somewhere, but I haven't spotted them yet
  17. It looks absolutely lovely in games. Super-fast-paces games: definitely some ghosting. I tested with Unreal Tournament GOTY 1999 (don't laugh) as I can get like 300fps on that. It has crisp visuals and no software effects that might make things look softer. It's proper rapid and looks good to my eye, but there is definitely unwanted motion blur. It's fine for me, but is you're a twitch gamer: look elsewhere. I mainly play car and flight simulators and adventure games. Not online competitive stuff
  18. It doesn't have G-Sync, nor is it officially G-Sync Compatible. It was advertised as such both by Overclockers and by Gigabyte themselves when I bought mine, but this has since been redacted. You can still make it work in synchronous mode with Nvidia cards, but it's on the very bottom verge of the spec.
  19. If this monitor were around £300 I'd call it an absolute steal. At £400, think a little harder. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not RTX3080 good. If money is tight then there's little to fault here, but you will get far superior results with a better brand, higher spec (and much more expensive) option
Hope this helps someone to decide whether to buy or not.
Click to expand...

Comprehensive list thank you. I will be using mine purely for gaming purposes.
 
Rymix said:
I've had this monitor for a couple of weeks and here are my thoughts:

  1. It's definitely entry-level, so keep your expectations in check
  2. Colour contrast/calibration is a little odd. I can't quite put my finger on it, but my old Dell monitor colour space looked 'nicer'. Seems like it's always either bit washed out or over-saturated. I can't quite hit the sweet spot. (That's what she said.) I'll keep playing with the settings
  3. HDR is barely present. Don't expect to be awed by deep, brooding darks, or blinding highlights
  4. Monitor height adjustment is of limited range. I could do with it going a little bit higher in my setup
  5. There is no swivel - this might be normal for ultrawides (i.e. more likely to become unbalanced due to the screen width/weight)
  6. The monitor stand footprint is rather larger than I was expecting. Looks a bit unwieldy and takes up a lot of desk space - wall mount recommended
  7. Bezels are quite small. Looks rather nice. I've seen smaller, but this is fine
  8. The plastic case/chassis looks and feels cheap. Not the most consistent finish or of the highest quality. The Gigabyte logo at the bottom is pretty ugly, too
  9. The claimed 1ms response rate is being pretty damn generous. There be ghosts, be under no illusion
  10. I have some borderline unacceptable backlight bleed at the top left of the screen. It's only really noticeable in dark conditions and on fairly solid, dark colours. It is occasionally noticeable when gaming, but it is very noticeable when watching a 16:9 film as the solid black vertical border stands out a mile
  11. Flickering is more a function of the machine/use case than the monitor, I've found. I was able extend the sync range using CRU https://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-Custom-Resolution-Utility-CRU. I'm running a 1650 at the moment whilst waiting for my RTX 3080 to arrive. I expect most of the issues to go away at higher fps (wishful thinking?)
  12. My control joystick stopped working this morning, which is how I found this thread in the first place. I actually started a return request, but just now in frustration I gave the joystick a proper push (much harder than you would during normal operation) and it has started working again. Something is sticky back there. The microswitches are clearly still functioning but not always registering. Were I to guess, I'd suggest that a switch got stuck to on rather than stopped responding. I dunno
  13. The audio is absolute *****, but then nobody actually uses monitor speakers, do they?
  14. No USB hub or port is very surprising to me. It's a little frustrating as I now need to plug my low-value peripherals in elsewhere, taking up space. I mean fitbit dongle, that sort of thing.
  15. And how will firmware ever be updated without a USB port? Is Gigabyte hoping never to have to update this thing? I assume you can't send an update data signal over display port?
  16. No dead pixels that I can see. They're probably there somewhere, but I haven't spotted them yet
  17. It looks absolutely lovely in games. Super-fast-paces games: definitely some ghosting. I tested with Unreal Tournament GOTY 1999 (don't laugh) as I can get like 300fps on that. It has crisp visuals and no software effects that might make things look softer. It's proper rapid and looks good to my eye, but there is definitely unwanted motion blur. It's fine for me, but is you're a twitch gamer: look elsewhere. I mainly play car and flight simulators and adventure games. Not online competitive stuff
  18. It doesn't have G-Sync, nor is it officially G-Sync Compatible. It was advertised as such both by Overclockers and by Gigabyte themselves when I bought mine, but this has since been redacted. You can still make it work in synchronous mode with Nvidia cards, but it's on the very bottom verge of the spec.
  19. If this monitor were around £300 I'd call it an absolute steal. At £400, think a little harder. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not RTX3080 good. If money is tight then there's little to fault here, but you will get far superior results with a better brand, higher spec (and much more expensive) option
Hope this helps someone to decide whether to buy or not.
Click to expand...


I think this is a fair summary. It's by no means perfect, and the reply I got from Gigabyte support about the flickering issue and the removal of the reference to G-sync compatibility was atrocious, but I decided to keep it - mainly because of point 17! When it's working well it looks great.

For what it's worth I'm using it with the sRGB setting which I think looks best. Using that it seems to have better colour and contrast than my old Dell S2716DG, although the Dell never had the flickering issue.

I don't see a great deal of blur (using 2080ti), but I have noticed it a bit in Elite - sometimes the dimmer stars noticeably dim further when you move and then sort of snap back into focus when you stop moving.

It does have the flickering issue when from time to time when G-sync is enabled, but as Rymix says it seems to be dependant on usage and can be minimised if not eliminated completely. I actually wasn't able to get CRU to make much difference - the changes were applied as far as I know, but I still saw the flickering in affected games. I was noticing it most on the loading screens for SOTTR. I assumed FPS was dropping below 48 at that point, but in fact when I check the FPS at these point it was fairly high (100+) In game my FPS hovers about 60-90, so I have just capped frame rate at 90 and the flickering has essentially gone away.

With Elite I saw some flickering on the galaxy map where the FPS was again fairly high. I use TrackIR for Elite and I've found that seems smoothest with frames capped at 120 anyway, and applying this also minimises flickering on that game.

Going forward I guess I'll check for flickering in games and adapt the max fps as required, but we'll see.

My guess is these c£400 34 widescreen VA monitors are all going to come with these sort of issues at the moment. At this price I'm prepared to put up with a few work arounds. I'd pay and expect more for the perfect monitor, but I'm not sure that exists!
 
Martin Smith said:
I think this is a fair summary. It's by no means perfect, and the reply I got from Gigabyte support about the flickering issue and the removal of the reference to G-sync compatibility was atrocious, but I decided to keep it - mainly because of point 17! When it's working well it looks great.

For what it's worth I'm using it with the sRGB setting which I think looks best. Using that it seems to have better colour and contrast than my old Dell S2716DG, although the Dell never had the flickering issue.

I don't see a great deal of blur (using 2080ti), but I have noticed it a bit in Elite - sometimes the dimmer stars noticeably dim further when you move and then sort of snap back into focus when you stop moving.

It does have the flickering issue when from time to time when G-sync is enabled, but as Rymix says it seems to be dependant on usage and can be minimised if not eliminated completely. I actually wasn't able to get CRU to make much difference - the changes were applied as far as I know, but I still saw the flickering in affected games. I was noticing it most on the loading screens for SOTTR. I assumed FPS was dropping below 48 at that point, but in fact when I check the FPS at these point it was fairly high (100+) In game my FPS hovers about 60-90, so I have just capped frame rate at 90 and the flickering has essentially gone away.

With Elite I saw some flickering on the galaxy map where the FPS was again fairly high. I use TrackIR for Elite and I've found that seems smoothest with frames capped at 120 anyway, and applying this also minimises flickering on that game.

Going forward I guess I'll check for flickering in games and adapt the max fps as required, but we'll see.

My guess is these c£400 34 widescreen VA monitors are all going to come with these sort of issues at the moment. At this price I'm prepared to put up with a few work arounds. I'd pay and expect more for the perfect monitor, but I'm not sure that exists!
Click to expand...

Yes, sRGB looks best to my eye, too. A few tweaks for me and it's lush.

I can't quite work out what's going on with the flickering. I do still get it, but (almost) never during the gameplay part of games. It's usually in a menu system or FMV or something like that. I have a decent machine but a crappy GPU, so my frame rates very often dip below 40 or 30. I assume the additional reach I configured is having some sort of positive impact. I dunno. I don't have the inclination to get into that much detail.

The ghosting for me is most prevalent when pixels are switching from light to dark. (I thought the issues were more common the other way around?) Any time I see a sharp, bright image moving across a dark background (night sky stars or scrolling text), it kind of goes smudgy brown.

Regarding blur, this looks to me like a slightly different artefact. It's the classic blur trails. Not a big deal for me personally. In fact, it even looks better in racing sims or flight sims etc.

Definitely worth a punt, so long as you know what you're getting. It's a stop-gap monitor for while you're saving for that £1700 39 inch super-ultrawide IPS you'll never get :)
 
Great user summaries, thanks. I'm moving from a fairly good Asus 1440p 144Hz gaming monitor (MG278Q), so I think I'll have to reset my expectations a little.

The price-point here's the main selling point. There seem to be around 3-4 different 34" VA models doing the rounds in Youtube reviews (but disappointingly, a couple don't seem to be available in the UK), and they all have some compromises.

The post about delivery of 80 units of the G34WQC this week turned out to be incorrect - checked with OCUK admin yesterday, and was told they don't even have any ETA info from Gigabyte yet, for the remainder of the batch they expected in September.
 
gwishy said:
Great user summaries, thanks. I'm moving from a fairly good Asus 1440p 144Hz gaming monitor (MG278Q), so I think I'll have to reset my expectations a little.

The price-point here's the main selling point. There seem to be around 3-4 different 34" VA models doing the rounds in Youtube reviews (but disappointingly, a couple don't seem to be available in the UK), and they all have some compromises.

The post about delivery of 80 units of the G34WQC this week turned out to be incorrect - checked with OCUK admin yesterday, and was told they don't even have any ETA info from Gigabyte yet, for the remainder of the batch they expected in September.
Click to expand...

They must have had some stock recently as my friend received his from OC only 4 days ago, he ordered his 21st September
 
Latest from OCUK on the supply of G34WQC, is that there are problems with panel production, and OCUK may be waiting around 3-4 weeks before delivery. I'm going to look for something else.
 
gwishy said:
Great user summaries, thanks. I'm moving from a fairly good Asus 1440p 144Hz gaming monitor (MG278Q), so I think I'll have to reset my expectations a little.

The price-point here's the main selling point. There seem to be around 3-4 different 34" VA models doing the rounds in Youtube reviews (but disappointingly, a couple don't seem to be available in the UK), and they all have some compromises.

The post about delivery of 80 units of the G34WQC this week turned out to be incorrect - checked with OCUK admin yesterday, and was told they don't even have any ETA info from Gigabyte yet, for the remainder of the batch they expected in September.
Click to expand...

strange as I also spoke to them directly, the guy said they have stock coming in this week for 2 purchaser orders, which totalled 80 units. Seems like they are coming as per the post above.
 
@Gelly54 - how did you manage to get one today? Every time I speak to OCUK, they keep telling me they've no word on deliveries and nothing's arrived for weeks. Be good to get a straight story from them, as this is really frustrating.

Be good to know if you have the issue with screen flickering when FreeSync/G-Sync's enabled at 144Hz please.

Thanks
 
gwishy said:
@Gelly54 - how did you manage to get one today? Every time I speak to OCUK, they keep telling me they've no word on deliveries and nothing's arrived for weeks. Be good to get a straight story from them, as this is really frustrating.

Be good to know if you have the issue with screen flickering when FreeSync/G-Sync's enabled at 144Hz please.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Only managed to play a couple of games of Warzone earlier but first impressions are pretty good.
Enabled Gsync on a 1070ti felt silky smooth with NO flickering, surprised with the performance tbh.
No dead pixels but noticed a little BLB on dark loading screens ONLY.
If there was one criticism, it feels a little washed out but I am coming from a 55" LG OLED C9
 
gwishy said:
@Gelly54 - how did you manage to get one today? Every time I speak to OCUK, they keep telling me they've no word on deliveries and nothing's arrived for weeks. Be good to get a straight story from them, as this is really frustrating.

Be good to know if you have the issue with screen flickering when FreeSync/G-Sync's enabled at 144Hz please.

Thanks
Click to expand...

they told me it was a 4 week wait about a week ago. I couldn’t wait that long so went with the iiyama. Not disappointed, great monitor.
 
I mentioned in my rambling post the other day that I was having troubles with the menu joystick on my G34WQC. Here's a little more information about the problem with my unit. I've read several similar reports online, but never a diagnosis or solution.

My joystick stopped registering Up and Right commands. I gave it a day or so to see if it would right itself. It didn't, so I raised an RMA request. Overclockers were rapid and quite clear: return it now and they will test it and replace, or wait and I will be outside of my RMA window and would instead need to deal with Gigabyte directly.

I opted for the former. Of course, if Overclockers could not identify a fault then I would be liable for the non-trivial shipping costs, so I checked it one last time before boxing up and...the joystick was working fine.

Fast forward another two weeks and I'm outside of the RMA window, and the joystick failed again. Same symptoms again.

I gave it another few days to see if it would right itself again. It didn't, so I contacted Gigabyte to start a repair process. Then this morning I thought: what actually is going on here. My gut feeling is that the Up microswitch gets stuck in the 'on' position from time to time. I tried waggling the joystick to see if it would shift it. No luck. I tried pressing the buttons far harder than you would normally. Still no luck.

Then I tried tapping the rear of the monitor in the joystick area. It instantly sprang back to life. Then I tried the joystick in all directions again and it's stuck.

It's a right pain. I rarely need to access the menu, but when you do, you do, right?

This is the thing. If I return it there's a pretty good chance it will be operating fine when tested, then I'm left with the inconvenience of no monitor for a couple of weeks, plus I pay for shipping costs. Then it will stop functioning again when it's on my desk.

Cautionary tale: decent monitor, lots of rough edges. Be warned.
 
If you don’t want to put up with it I would record a video and include that in the returns process.

Otherwise if you’re not that bothered you could make use of the OSD sidekick tool maybe
 
ceaton88 said:
If you don’t want to put up with it I would record a video and include that in the returns process.

Otherwise if you’re not that bothered you could make use of the OSD sidekick tool maybe
Click to expand...

There's no USB port on this monitor. I've no idea why this was omitted, but there you go. Overclockers have washed their hands of it now, so I'll have to deal with Gigabyte. In the past ten minutes I've seen the joystick sticking, working, then sticking again twice. It's fooked.
 
That's not good. Wait forever for a delivery, then dodgy build quality? Sounds like the kind of thing you'd get from Glorious (Model O and Model O- mice anyone?)...

Still no shipment ETA, so will wait and see what happens. If it eventually arrives, will check the joystick setup closely - thanks for the heads up.
 
It's ok. If it works, and you're willing to spend some time setting it up, it's fine. I'm happy with mine, really. Just spent a couple of hours lapping the Nordschleife in the pitch darkness in my pretend Porsche 911 RSR. When all is said and done, I was lost in there. Very immersive in the ultrawide screen. And I didn't need to touch the joystick even once. So yeah, it's at the low end of the spectrum, but it absolutely does the job.
 
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