so the main panel that I used is pretty nice but it is starting to show its age a little bit it’s about 4 years old now so today I’ve got this curve 32 inch 1440p 144 hertz panel from BenQ that also offers HDR and free sink tooth we’re gonna put it through the paces and see how it stacks up you ready let’s go yeah I’m bright P you’re watching bad C Tech and today we’re checking out the e^x 3203 our curve gaming monitor from Ben Q for transparency this was sent out directly from Ben Q for the purposes of this review but as you should know by now doesn’t affect my review in any way so we’ve got a thirty-two inch curved 1440p panel with 144 hurts for millisecond graded gray freesync to HDR support by way of HDR 400 it’ll get you for just under six hundred dollars pretty much anywhere you find it direct from Ben Q at the time of this video it runs 538 dollars this is a VA panel and versus a TN it’s got some big advantages in terms of color saturation and really deep blacks in terms of color this thing really pops like they’re not the most accurate colors in the world it wouldn’t be my first choice for editing a video but in terms of gaming it’s really fun and you don’t get any of the backlight bleed issues normally associated with like an IPS panel either the main thing you
sacrifice if you could even call it that versus a TN panelist speed so this will have a four millisecond response time as opposed to a TN that normally comes in at one millisecond to me this is irrelevant a matter of fact I have yet to meet the person that can feel the difference between those two one potential drawback of the 32 inch size of 1440p is that you can’t see the individual pixels this all comes down to pixel density so like on a 24 inch panel you most likely won’t be able to see the individual pixels on 1080p you move to 27-inch now you can see the pixels at 1080p but you can’t in 1440 move up to 32 you can see them at 1440 and not at 4k that’s how the slide words if you sit far enough back from your display or especially like in something like a racing sim it’s not gonna make any difference physically it’s a gorgeous looking panel both the display and the overall presentation just a really class presentation overall there’s nothing gamer going on here at all and that’s a big win the stand looks nice but it does have some drawbacks for me I’m not a huge fan of the chrome base as it looks nice when it’s clean but it fingerprints up pretty bad if you move your display a lot it also has a couple areas in the stand that look stressed I don’t know it’s weird it has height adjust of 60
millimeters in front to back tilt of negative 5 to 15 degrees doesn’t have any kind of swivel and that’s fine that’s not mandatory but at this price point it is missing any kind of like side-to-side rotation and it’s not just that it won’t do portrait I wouldn’t expect a curved monitor to do that but it doesn’t have any degree of rotation at all so if you have an uneven floor or an uneven desk there’s really no way to write the monitor and that’s cool that’s fine I’ll just put it on a monitor arm except oh wait it doesn’t include any option for vase amounting either if you want to mount this monitor on an arm you’re gonna have to spring for an additional accessory part directly from BenQ the price of this part is 37 dollars that’s a big yikes for me at this price point moving on in terms of connections this thing is a beast in that department we’re talking two HDMI 2.0 DisplayPort and USB see never seen anything like it you also have a headphone jack in there and two USB 3.1 ports included cables are a standard display port HDMI 2.0 and a display port too many display ports also worth mentioning here that the power supply is an external
brick with a barrel connector as opposed to like a standard three prong power cable all the connections are behind this little removable panel and they’re situated vertically internal menus are really easy to navigate as well and they keep the lower bezel nice and clean by having them all
mounted under the front bezel there’s loads of presets to get you started and the power button actually shines down onto the desk to let you know you’ve got power on the curve is 1800 ORN it’s cool it doesn’t add a lot of immersion to the game for me and probably would if you had the money in the GPU power to handle like three of these side-by-side be pretty sick again for editing the curve is not my favorite but it’s not so bad that I can’t edit on it I just prefer a flat panel for editing it’s got some bells and whistles in terms of graphic stuff as well it has variable brightness and contrast which they call bi plus tech what this basically does kind of like your phone screen depending on the amount of light in the room whether it’s really bright or really dark the monitor will self adjust to give you the best display it can and it does work pretty well but most gamers I know get their panels set like just where they want it and then just leave it there it also has I care which is their blue light filters who can reduce eyestrain for long sessions and it’s got anti flicker technology it is a free sync to panel as well I’d love to tell you more about this but I actually don’t own an AMD card right now I know I know I should probably own at least one for testing but the big things about free Singh 2a1 that it works in conjunction with HDR into that it has a low framerate compensation for those times when your framerate dips below the threshold of where that free sink kicks in now what I can’t tell you is
that I really enjoy gaming on it if it had g-sync it would absolutely be on my main desk on an arm no question I was really hoping that because a couple dinky panels is certified for g-sync that this would be one of them sadly it’s not I was also hopeful that it may function great with g-sync even though it’s not officially supported it does not and it’s not just like an arrant menu screen thing the whole image has greatly reduced tearing with g-sync but it also exhibits like this really weird fullscreen jitter that’s either not too bad or really really bad depending on the title on pretty much all accounts if you’re on an nvidia card it’s just better to run with the g-sync off and i’m spoiled it’s still 144 hertz panels so with that level the tearing might not even bother you there’s an undocumented setting in the menu that allows you to switch between regular freesync and enhanced the first thing about this is it didn’t matter which setting I used it offered no tangible performance increase for g-sync compatibility the g-sync stuff is weird too because I can’t duplicate it every time it’s really sporadic like I’d get jitter in some titles sometimes the menu screens
would flicker whenever I hit a scape or tab or like in division 2 sometimes when you’re just running around or like especially when you go into the inventory screen sometimes the display it just blank out for a few seconds and then come back on but the big thing is that in trying to research this setting I found numerous complaints from people that were using AMD cards that had really bad issues with ghosting or smudging with this panel and it didn’t seem uncommon oh I can tell you about that is that I’ve used this panel very consistently for about three months time now you’ve actually seen gameplay footage from it in numerous videos I have not had any issues like that whatsoever with this panel but I’m not using AMD cards I’m using Nvidia cards so take that for what it’s worth let’s talk about this HD art in support because it’s a little murky on the PC side the panel has a max brightness of 400 nits with a full HD our protocol is 1000 nits so this is gonna be classified as HDR 400 which a lot of people will tell you it’s not true HDR and they’d be right what this basically does is ratchets up the brightness of the monitor as far as it can get it and then it decodes incoming HDR data so it’s not true full HDR even though it technically supports HDR I should say – they’re finding full 1000 nits brightness and computer monitors is very rare and even in TVs if you want to get it up that high you’re gonna be shelling out some
pretty solid money tech specs decide what really matters is what you see on the screen and sadly most games and Windows 10 in general just don’t do a very great job of presenting HDR on the PC side it’s really in consist if you’re on PC my best advice is to ignore HDR outside of HDR it’s still a very impressive looking display but on console this monitor unlocks a lot of options I test it on an Xbox one as my ps4 it’s not the pro version it’ll do variable refresh it’ll do 120 Hertz assuming that your console and whatever you’re playing can achieve anywhere close to that framerate it does HDR and the HDR on Forza horizon 4 off the Xbox actually looks really good the one weird thing is that the Xbox sees the monitor as UHD so I don’t know if it down scales or what but it still looks super good value eyes this monitor is a really strong contender for best all-rounder particularly if you’re on an AMD card you’ve probably seen this monitor in the background on my test desk for quite a while now that’s no accident colors pop big-time and I don’t think there’s any doubt that BenQ makes a quality monitor that you’ll own for a long time there are so many monitors out there now but I still didn’t find a lot when looking for this specific feature set there’s a samsung C 32 HD 7 TQ LED
display out there for like 500 bucks the rog swift XG 32 VG is out there you’re gonna get vase amounting with that but you are gonna give up one HDMI port in the free sink one that is only Gen 1 so if you know it’s something out there that’s a competitor at this price point or is a much better deal let me know in the comments but I feel strong enough about this panel that it gets a really solid recommendation for me I really wish this stand had some degree of rotation and it’s a real shame that there is no vase amount options included in the box but because of the numerous connection options it’s really versatile I could see this being a solid choice for a stream or two because it supports high refresh from the PC and you could have both consoles hooked up be a really nice main panel for a streaming setup it’s really solid for movie watching and I really can’t stress enough that this panel just looks great I’ve grown really attached to it in the time that I’ve had it like I said if this panel had g-sync this would be my main panel easy big things to bake you for sending this out I will leave a few different affiliate links in the description if you want to grab one for yourself any questions hit me up in the comments or drop by the discord and that’s it for this time I’m bright B thanks so much for watching don’t forget to hit that like button hit that sub button and until next time stay up
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