AOC CU34G2X monitor review - Menu and controls

Menu and controls

The reviewed monitor is controlled by 5 mechanical buttons (which are very small and recessed), one of which is the power button (the one on the right side). The OSD menu is user-friendly, but navigating through it with the four small hotkeys beneath the bottom bezel is not that pleasant; we’d prefer a joystick there.

The first button on the left calls up video inputs, so you can manually switch between the four options.

The next button calls up the quick menu for the Game modes. These include FPS, RTS, Racing, and three user-configurable options.

The third button lets you enable an onscreen hardware crosshair.

The fourth button takes you to the main menu, which sits along the bottom of the screen rather than being in the middle like the quick menu option. The last one is for powering on/off. The OSD is pretty standard for the AOC brand.

The Gaming mode allows faster response times and boosts it from 100 Hz to the maximum 144 Hz.

You have full control of colour temp, gamma, and levels, allowing more in-depth calibration. The first section to appear is Luminance, which includes controls for contrast and brightness.

The next menu section is Color Setup. Here, you can choose Warm, Normal, Cool, sRGB, and User Color Temperatures.

Next is PictureBoost, AOC’s feature that includes Bright Frame, where you can select a rectangular portion of the screen to apply separate brightness and contrast settings.

OSD Setup options include language selection, timeout, positioning, and transparency for the OSD. 

Since the panel is ultra-wide, it also offers a comprehensive set of PIP/PAP modes, allowing you to show two inputs on one display. The PIP Setting section lets you choose between picture-in-picture or picture-by-picture. 

The Extra section lets you choose the video input manually, turn the screen off after a pre-set time, select an image ratio for a non-native input, toggle DDC/CI control, and reset everything to default. You can also get information about the current video signal there.