AOC Agon Pro PD32M Gaming Monitor Review

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Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

AOC Agon Pro has once again collaborated with the luxury car company Porsche to create a new gaming monitor. This kind of brand mash-up might seem strange to some, but luxury brands working with gaming companies is actually more common than people might think. Herman Miller has worked with Logitech to make a high-end gaming chair, Louis Vuitton has a League of Legends line and Gucci even made a designer Xbox Series X. The previous joint design between AOC and Porsche resulted in a 27” curved gaming monitor called the PD27. Now they’re going even bigger, with the AOC Agon Pro PD32M Gaming Monitor.

AOC and Porsche have just sent us one of these new monitors; a high-end display made with gamers, streamers and graphic designers in mind. This is going to be a less conventional review on our part, since the product itself is anything but conventional. Here’s what we found.

Features

The PD32M’s resolution, refresh rate, and response time are all on par with some of the best monitors on the market. 144Hz might not be the fastest refresh rate out there anymore when it comes to competitive gaming, but it’s incredibly speedy when it comes to refreshing the image in graphically-intensive games that utilize its more detail-oriented 4K resolution. This is a monitor that was made for giving players with suitably high-end graphics cards the ultimate visual experience — which is a long way of saying that it’s very, very pretty.

In addition to the basic image specs, this monitor also has several tricks under the hood. To start, the display is incredibly bright and comes with a wide color space of 97% DCI-P3, and DisplayHDR 1400. This is one of the few areas where it truly exceeds many of its cheaper competitors. It makes for a distinctly vibrant display that is capable of showcasing newer visual features in games, such as ray-tracing, exceptionally well.

Users can also tinker around in the settings in order to create up to three different image profiles. That way, those who would like to can easily switch between a dimmer and less vibrant display for productivity and one that takes advantage of all this screen’s luminosity and color for gaming. All the monitor’s various settings can easily be navigated using an included wireless remote, which is designed to sit on the user’s desk.

The built-in 8-watt speakers are a bit disappointing compared to the rest of the design, but then again, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who is spending this kind of money on a monitor is still relying on internal monitor speakers.

Design

There’s no denying that the PD32M is an exquisitely built display, but nothing on the specs list really merits that $1,799 price tag. There are other, similarly specced gaming monitors on sale from Acer, Samsung, Asus, and several other brands that can be had for as little as one third the cost. So, what might possess someone to spend two or even three times as much money on a monitor?

In a word — style.

The PD32M is a luxury item. Peak performance is expected, but so is superior design. The monitor itself has a modern, streamlined look to it. It has a gunmetal gray metallic housing, with its main adornment being RGB that is built into the various vents on the back. There are also retractable headset holders on either side of the display, though they aren’t especially sturdy.

But one of the key features is the stand. The display sits on a heavy, trapezoidal aluminum base that was designed to replicate the appearance of a Porsche steering wheel. The monitor can pivot forward and back or side to side. It can rotate ninety from a landscape position to a portrait one, and it can also be raised and lowered to adjust its height. It even has a projector built into the arch in the center that can either display the Agon Logo or the Porsche logo on the base of the stand.