The Gigabyte G32QC is a great budget gaming monitor with good dark room performance. It delivers an immersive experience with its large 32 inch screen and 1440p resolution, as well as good picture quality with its high contrast ratio and good color accuracy. Its low input lag and 165Hz refresh rate make gaming feel incredibly responsive, and it has native FreeSync support and G-SYNC compatibility. Response time is great; however, its slower dark scene transitions can result in some motion artifacts. Also, its VA panel has sub-par viewing angles and the stand lacks swivel adjustment, making it less suitable for sharing content or for playing co-op games. It supports HDR10 and delivers an okay HDR experience despite the absence of local dimming. It comes with a couple of USB ports and some extra gaming features, and its Picture-by-Picture mode is a nice addition for multitaskers and streamers.
The Gigabyte G32QC is an overall good monitor. It has a large high-resolution screen that makes it suitable for gaming, working, or viewing content. It has great motion handling, FreeSync support, and it can display a wide color gamut to deliver an alright HDR experience. Unfortunately, it has sub-par viewing angles and bad ergonomics, making it harder to share work, content, or play co-op games.
The Gigabyte G32QC is a decent monitor for office use. Its large screen size allows you to have multiple windows opened side-by-side, it has good text clarity, and it gets bright enough for use in most lighting conditions. Unfortunately, its VA panel has sub-par viewing angles and its ergonomics are bad, making it difficult to share work with colleagues.
The Gigabyte G32QC is a great gaming monitor. It has great motion handling thanks to its fast response time and high refresh rate, and it has native FreeSync support and G-SYNC compatibility. Sadly, its narrow viewing angles and bad ergonomics make it less ideal for co-op gaming, and even though its high contrast ratio is well-suited for dark rooms, there's a lot of backlight bleed.
The Gigabyte G32QC is a decent monitor for media consumption. It has a large screen, a high resolution, and it delivers an okay HDR experience. Its high contrast ratio is great for dark room viewing, but black uniformity is an issue, as there's a lot of backlight bleed. Also, it isn't well-suited for sharing content due to its narrow viewing angles and bad ergonomics.
The Gigabyte G32QC is a decent monitor for content creators. Its 32 inch high-resolution screen is great for working with multiple windows opened at the same time, and it has an outstanding SDR color gamut. Unfortunately, it has narrow viewing angles and bad ergonomics, making it difficult to share your work with others.
The Gigabyte G32QC is an okay monitor for gaming in HDR. It has low input lag, fast response time, and native FreeSync support. It can display a wide color gamut and it gets decently bright in HDR; however, there's no local dimming and there's a lot of visible backlight bleed.
The Gigabyte G32QC has a simple design that doesn't stand out much. It has a curved screen with thin bezels on three sides and a slightly thicker bottom bezel. The V-shaped stand takes up a fair amount of desk space but supports the monitor very well.
The back of the monitor is fairly plain and mostly plastic. The stand has a small cutout that serves as cable management.
The Gigabyte G32QC's build quality is good. The top portion of the back feels well-built, but the bottom portion feels hollow and exhibits a lot of flex, although it could just be for cooling purposes. The stand and the plastic covering the tilt hinge feel pretty cheap; however, the hinge itself feels sturdy and the stand supports the monitor well.
Like most VA monitors, the Gigabyte G32QC has a good contrast ratio that makes blacks look deep, which is great for gaming in the dark. Note that although some other reviewers have measured a much higher contrast, our measurement is more in-line with Gigabyte's advertised 3000:1 contrast.
The Gigabyte G32QC doesn't have a local dimming feature. The video above is provided for reference only.
Great SDR peak brightness. The brightness is very consistent when displaying different scenes and it's bright enough for use in most lighting conditions. The calibration decreased the peak brightness slightly, as we were able to achieve 406.5 nits in the 10% window before calibration.
We measured the SDR peak after calibration, using the 'Custom 1' Picture Mode and with brightness set to max.
The Gigabyte G32QC has a decent HDR peak brightness. It's very consistent across different content. It's bright enough to deliver an okay experience in games, especially if you're in a dark room, but it isn't enough for HDR movies.
We measured the HDR peak brightness after calibration, using the 'Custom 1' Picture Mode and with brightness set to max.
Horizontal viewing angles are sub-par, which is typical for VA panels. This makes the image look washed out from the side, which isn't ideal for sharing content or for playing co-op games.
Sub-par vertical viewing angles. This makes images look inaccurate at the top and bottom of the screen if you sit very close to the screen or have the monitor mounted above eye level.
Gray uniformity on our Gigabyte G32QC is excellent. The edges of the screen are a bit darker and there's a very tiny amount of dirty screen effect in the center, which shouldn't be noticeable in most content. Uniformity is better in dark scenes.
Out-of-the-box, the Gigabyte G32QC has good color accuracy. There are inaccuracies with a few colors and white balance is off due to the warm color temperature. Gamma doesn't follow the target all that well, making most scenes look brighter than they should. The monitor has an sRGB mode; however, it isn't as accurate as the 'Movie' mode. It has a higher average color dE of 3.88, a white balance dE of 3.72, and the color temperature is much cooler at 6729K.
After calibration, the color accuracy is outstanding. The remaining inaccuracies shouldn't be visible to the naked eye. There are still inaccuracies with the color blue, which is typical for LCD screens.
You can download our ICC profile calibration here.
The Gigabyte G32QC has an outstanding SDR color gamut. It has near full coverage of the sRGB color space used in most content, and impressive coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, which is mainly used for professional photography.
Overdrive Setting | Response Time Chart | Response Time Tables | Motion Blur Photo |
Picture Quality | Chart | Table | Photo |
Balance | Chart | Table | Photo |
Speed | Chart | Table | Photo |
The Gigabyte G32QC's response time at max refresh rate is great; however, dark-scene transitions are quite slow, causing the appearance of black trails behind fast-moving objects. That being said, our test pattern emphasizes the issue and the artifacts aren't present in all content. The best overdrive setting is 'Balance', which provides the best performance with the least amount of overshoot.
Overdrive Setting | Response Time Chart | Response Time Tables | Motion Blur Photo |
Picture Quality | Chart | Table | Photo |
Balance | Chart | Table | Photo |
Speed | Chart | Table | Photo |
The response time at 60Hz is decent. It's slower than at max refresh rate, so there's more motion blur. The best overdrive setting is again 'Balance'; however, there's significantly more overshoot than when playing at max refresh rate.
The Gigabyte G32QC supports FreeSync natively and is also compatible with NVIDIA's G-SYNC; however, the latter only works over a DisplayPort connection. Over an HDMI connection, the maximum refresh rate is 144Hz, with a VRR range that also starts below 20Hz. Over a DisplayPort connection, only three refresh rate settings are available at 1440p: 60Hz, 120Hz, and 165Hz.
Input lag is exceptionally low and only rises a little bit with VRR enabled, which shouldn't be noticeable for most people. Since this monitor has an 8-bit panel, we weren't able to measure the input lag with 10-bit HDR. We were only able to achieve an 8-bit HDR @ 60Hz signal with an input lag of 8.5ms.