Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
OSD Setup & Calibration
The AG271QG surprised us with a menu more like what we see on other monitors. AOC’s usual bottom screen strip is absent here. The OSD is stripped of all non-essential options and includes only what you need for basic picture adjustments, refresh overclock, and ULMB.
There are just four submenus here starting with Luminance which has, in addition to brightness and contrast, three gamma presets, overdrive (weak, medium, strong), Game Color, which acts like a saturation control, and Shadow Control for bumping up low-end intensity when subtle details are hard to see. The overdrive works best on the medium setting and functions correctly when G-Sync is engaged.
Color Setup has three color temp options plus sRGB and a User mode. The former offers decent grayscale tracking, but its gamma curve is off the mark and that affects mid-tone color saturation. It also locks output at 340cd/m2 which is just short of the brightest level possible from the AG271QG. Our recommendation is the User mode with the adjustments we’ll detail below. You may have noticed there are no picture modes. AOC has dispensed with the usual presets in favor of a single memory. That’s fine with us, but some users may wish for a few more options. Our suggestion would be to add user-programmable memories. Three or four would be perfect.
OSD Setup offers multiple languages, timeout up to 120 seconds, plus position and transparency adjustments. Here also is the break reminder which pops up a warning on the screen after one hour.
If you’re looking for the overclock and ULMB controls, they’re in the Extras menu. ULMB works at speeds of 120Hz and below. You’ll have to turn off G-Sync in Nvidia Control Panel before the option is available. There is a pulse width adjustment with 100-step resolution. Honestly though, anything less than the maximum results in very low output. We recorded just 73.175cd/m2 with brightness on maximum. Overclock starts at 144Hz, the panel’s native rate, and goes up to 165Hz. Once you set it in the OSD, visit Nvidia Control Panel to select your new max value.
At the bottom of every panel is the resolution and refresh information plus mode, G-Sync, Normal, or ULMB. As with all monitors of this type, G-Sync and ULMB cannot be used simultaneously. We’ll show you the difference in output and contrast performance on the next page.
Calibration
The AG271QG needs a bit of help to realize maximum accuracy and image depth. Its out-of-box settings leave gamma askew and some highlight detail is clipped. Furthermore, color saturation targets are off in the all important middle brightness areas. To fix this, we calibrated the User color temp, taking care to keep the sliders below the center point. Going higher causes gamma shifts at the upper end of the brightness scale and affects saturation negatively. In addition, we selected the number 2 gamma preset. 1 is too dark and muddies the picture somewhat. Check out our recommended settings below.
| AOC AG271QG Calibration Settings | |
|---|---|
| Brightness 200cd/m2 | 68 |
| Brightness 120cd/m2 | 32 |
| Brightness 100cd/m2 | 25 |
| Brightness 80cd/m2 | 17 |
| Brightness 50cd/m2 | 7 |
| Contrast | 50 |
| Gamma | 2 |
| Color Temp User | Red 49, Green 47, Blue 49 |
Intel tempers expectations for next-gen Falcon Shores AI GPU — Gaudi 3 missed AI wave, Falcon will require fast iterations to be competitive
Minisforum's AM5 mini-PC gets Ryzen 9 9950X upgrade for $919 — adding 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD pushes the price tag to $1,199
Nvidia revives LAN party after 13 years to celebrate RTX 50-series GPU launch — GeForce LAN 50 is a 50-hour LAN party across four different cities
