My thoughts on the Acer Predator X34.
First of all, I will be adding to this review as I become more familiar with the monitor and hopefully adding some pictures as well.
The box it comes in is BIG! It is almost too big for one person to carry. It is just very awkward. There are two handles on the box but they are on the ends and the box is over a yard wide. This makes it difficult to carry.
The monitor comes pre-assembled and packaged very well with Styrofoam. I was not going to use the stand since I have an arm to mount it on. It was very easy to take the stand off with just 4 screws. There is a bracket included to use on a VESA mount but I didn’t need it since my arm fit perfectly. The stand is very sturdy and made of aluminum, but it does take up a lot of a desk top space. I have mine floating over my desk with an aftermarket arm. It comes with an HDMI cable, a USB cable and a DisplayPort cable. The DisplayPort cable is only about 4 feet long. I got another one from Newegg because I wanted a longer one. The USB ports are on the back of the left side which makes them inconvenient to use on a regular basis.
I was very excited at first to see how narrow the bezel is. It is only about 1/8
th of an inch wide. The thing is that when I turned on the monitor, it didn’t light up to the edge of the screen. There is about a 1/3 of an inch that is unlit. Overall it isn’t too bad and I am not planning on using it in a surround setup so it really doesn’t matter to me.
The screen is BIG. It has a subtle curve which is just about right. Some people think that there should be more of a curve but I am happy with it. I did notice that some pages and documents have a slight curve to them when they are on the screen so if you need things to be precise, this may not work for you. Out of the box I was a bit disappointed with the colors. They seemed a bit washed out compared to my Overlord X270 OC. More on this later. It took me a bit of fiddling to figure out the on screen menu but once I did, it was pretty easy. The first thing I did was overclock it to 100Hz. It was very easy to do. I then had to go into the NVidia control panel and overclock it there as well. Now for something I wasn’t initially aware about. I mostly play BF4 right now. I went into the game settings and discovered that there are several settings for the same resolution but each with different refresh rates. Make sure that you set the game for 3440 X 1440 @ 99 Hz. That is the highest refresh rate there is in the game. I then set the Gsync to on as well in the monitor. There is no way you can miss the Gsync indicator. It is a label that is on the screen in the middle far left that says G Sync on. It is a bit obtrusive at 1 inch tall and two and a half inches wide. A light on the bezel would have been better. ( EDIT: This is caused by the NVidia driver and NOT the monitor. It can be turned off)
One thing that was a pleasant surprise is that the monitor has three aiming reticles that you can put on the screen. I never had a monitor with one before and I never saw it mentioned in any of the reviews that I have read.
Gameplay is simply amazing! Very smooth with no tearing. I have two Titan X GPUs in SLI and had no problem maintaining very good framerates. There is a refresh rate indicator that you can turn on and off but it displays over the FPS indicator that the game gives you. There is no way that I know to move it so you either have one or the other but not both at the same time. But this is a minor quibble. The screen is simply wonderful! I have really enjoyed playing on it.
Now back to the color issue. When I first turned on the monitor my initial impression was that the blacks weren’t very dark and the colors were a bit washed out. I did get it a bit better by playing with the menu and adjusting things. I didn’t find much backlight bleeding or IPS glow. So I decided to bite the bullet and invest in a Datacolor Spyder 5 Elite
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UBSL3L6/ref=s9_simh_gw_p421_d14_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=desktop-1&pf_rd_r=1A8GRHJ2R8V8BCM1RW0M&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2079475242&pf_rd_i=desktop It was well worth it. I can’t describe the difference in this monitor once it was calibrated. The blacks are very dark and the colors are now very vibrant! What a difference!! I highly recommend getting a calibrator for this monitor. I am sure that you can achieve the same results if you know what you are doing when it comes to calibration but I am not well versed in that area. There are many, many settings both in the monitor and in the Nvidia control panel that you can adjust. I tried to do it manually and I did get the screen looking better on my own but the Spyder 5 really made a difference.
All in all, I am very happy with this monitor. It does have a few quirks but they are minor compared to the beauty of the picture and gameplay as a whole. If you are looking for one of these bad boys, I suggest keep trying Newegg several times a day. I just happen to look once when they were accepting preorders and I was able to lock in my order. I imagine that they will be more available as time goes by. It is pretty costly at $1300 but it really is an exceptional monitor. I would give it a 93 out of 100.
Feel ,free to either post a question here or PM me if you have a specific question that you would like answered.
post edited by Randolla - 2015/12/06 11:57:17