SHORT
This is the AOC AGON Pro AG246FK, a 24-inch, 540Hz, 1080p monitor that can produce a super smooth image, and one that’s been especially designed for esports titles. Because of that high refresh rate, input latency can be kept to a minimum, and ghosting is almost non-existent here thanks to its overdrive settings. It does mean though that you’re going to need a high-specced PC to be able to run this monitor at the full 540Hz. The screen uses TN technology; although sharp, colours can look a little washed out, and viewing angles are not the best. It’s got adaptive sync technology, it’s HDR compatible, and has a whole host of blur reduction settings within the OSD. It costs right now up to around £600 here in the UK and although not for everybody, it would suit people who mainly play esports games down to a tee.
Full Review
This is the AOC AGON Pro AG246FK, an eSports focused monitor with a huge 540Hz refresh attached to it for smooth competitive gameplay. Now the last time I checked out something like this was the Zowie monitor, card in the corner, and that thing was SUUUUPER expensive. But prices for this AGON Pro screen start from £600 on the AOC website, which to me sounds pretty good seeing as it’s half price over the Zowie I looked at a few months ago. But is it any good? Let’s check it out.
As you may imagine, the AGON Pro AG246FK is a TN panel that is 24 inches in size, it has an anti-glare treatment on there, not that it made much difference in my darkened room, and can produce a 1080p image. It’s nothing special really when it comes to how sharp or how vibrant the monitor is, TN technology as a screen is pretty limited, but that’s not the overall aim here. Its biggest selling point is that 540Hz refresh rate that is going to appeal to those eSports gamers out there. It can hit 400 nits of max brightness and it’s VESA Certified DisplayHDR 400 compatible, but I wouldn’t bother with turning that on, it didn’t make much of a difference for me no scream about.
Looks wise this thing does look quite smart actually,. and far superior to that Zowie panel we had on the desk not too long ago/ It comes in a dark grey colour, has some nice and slim bezels around the three edges, though the bottom bezel leaves a little ot be desired. It’s branded heavily in the front with the AGON logo. I’m not keen but it’s certainly not an eyesore and you know they’ve done it for live eSports events so their logo will be front and centre on the screens the competitors are using. The stand it sits on unfortunately is a lighter grey than the bottom bezel, making it look as if AOC had some stands lying around and needed to get rid of them to paired them with the AG246FK. The stand is large and looks like a metal slab though everything here I assure you is very much plastic. But again, it does keep the cost down and really focuses on what’s important. The rear arm has a tiny clip for cable management on there which is a bit of a shame if you’re plugging multiple devices in this thing and it does have a pullout headphone arm on the back and side. In terms of movement, the AGON Pro screen can tilt and swivel and also rotate if you want to use this screen in a vertical orientation.
Around back looks a little bit strange and off-kilter, and not quite symmetrical. The area where the monitor arm connects to has this strange pentagonal shape to it. I know that your monitor will probably be against a wall, which questions on whether it was worth designing it like this in the first place, but I suppose it’s got me talking about it. It does glow however and gives some ambient light against your wall, but it doesn’t react to what’s on screen. It reacts to audio, and you can have rainbow colour waves or solid colour settings though but no Philips Ambiglow-type features here. You can also find two HDMI 2.0 ports, a DisplayPort 1.4, 4 USB downstream ports which can produce USB 3.2 Gen1 speeds a kettle plug input for power and a headphone out port for audio. It’s all pretty basic back there and one that can happily produce a 540Hz image at 1080p if you’re using it with a PC or at least 120Hz at 1080p for console gamers. Of course, you have to set these in your respective menus. It’s got a little joystick which mimics the pentagonal shape but the menu is easy enough to navigate, and it’s also got a little puck which has a few buttons for housing picture profile settings and navigating menus included too if that’s your thing.
Talking about resolutions and framerates though the AG246FK is compatible with Adaptive Sync technology, and has a range of 48-540Hz to work with. However, bare in mind that if you are a Windows 10 user, you will be capped at 500Hz on your refresh rate. Not the end of the world losing 40Hz by not upgrading to Windows 11. Of course, DisplayPort offers the best way to connect a device to the monitor in terms of its frequency, and you can find that if you use HDMI, the Adaptive Sync will only work between 60-240Hz on a vertical refresh. Not the end of the world though as you console gamers are pretty much capped with your refresh rates, and if you’re gaming on a PC you really should be using DisplayPort where possible.
When I first plugged in the monitor, it chose my AOC 27G4X ICC colour profile from a previous review. For the sake of transparency and for testing purposes I changed this to the default sRGB IEC61966-2.1 ICC profile before running colour tests on the monitor. I also turned on the sRGB mode under Colour Setup in the OSD. There is an option called Panel Native here where you can change the colour temp from warm to cool and a user profile you can manually set up, but for testing purposes, I stuck with the default. Having your panel colour gamut set to sRGB also locks you out of some Game Mode features like Shadow Control and Game Colour and also MBR Sync. However, if you have sRGB mode switched on, you can also turn on Game Mode to one of the preset profiles and change these settings again.
Running through my first tests before the monitor was colour calibrated, and with a brightness setting of 70, which the sRGB mode gave me, I saw my colour gamut come back at at 91% sRGB, 66% AdobeRGB. 70% P3 and finally 63% NTSC colour gamuts, which I must say isn’t really too bad. However, after a colour calibration using my Datacolor Spyder Elite, I found that my sRGB was raised to 96% while my AdobeRGB was now at 71%, my P3 at 71% and finally my NTSC at 66%. So I saw a small increase there. Moving on to brightness a contrast, Datacolor gave me a reading of 980:1 contrast ratio at 100% brightness, and a 990:1 at 50% brightness. The white point did unfortunately suffer coming in at 6200 at 100% brightness and lower than that at lower brightness levels.
Colour uniformity at 100% brightness didn’t perform too badly, but I did see a hotspot in the top middle and a darker spot towards the bottom corners. Overall though not too bad. And when I went down to 50% brightness things improved somewhat but we still saw the top middle perform the worst. Luminance uniformity again fell down and at 100% brightness, the biggest difference was down the left-hand side, but at 50% brightness things got way worse on that left.
Colour accuracy though on this AOC panel was superb, coming in with an average of 1.69 Delta-E pre-calibration with a high of 6.26 and a low of 0.21. However, the high score was only achieved by a single blue colour which threw off the average somewhat, but still a great score overall. This only got better with a calibration where I saw the average Delta-E score drop to 0.89. So a small improvement but a welcome one. I decided to keep the monitor in the sRGB mode for the remainder of my testing, as this provided the best results for me and my usage with games and workflow on things like Premiere Pro for video editing. All scores can be found below in the gallery.
So talking about gaming on this panel there are a couple of settings that I feel you need to decide on inside of the OSD menu. The first is the Adaptive Sync toggle, of which I was able to use G-Sync with my 4070Ti though only at the range outlined before. Though if you do turn this on you remove the ability to toggle on your motion blur reduction technology and also a Low Input Lag setting. Also bear in mind that HDR switched on will also knock out your Low Input Lag setting too. However, on another note here, the input lag on this monitor, in part thanks to the high refresh rate makes it extremely hard to even notice a difference between the two types of settings anyway which in my eyes in a bonus. Next though is your four-stage Overdrive setting which again is there to reduce response times, and I found that the medium setting worked best in my case as it produced the least amount of blurring on a UFO Ghosting Test. Saying that though, the first test I ran where everything was switched off also looked pretty decent too. Running the monitor in the Gamer 1 picture profile, opting for MBR which was set to 20, Adaptive Focus switched off and my Overdrive setting on Boost, it gave me a pretty blurry result with a lot of inverse ghosting going on. Similarly to that with Overdrive set to Strong, it gave a similar ghosting effect.
Turning Adaptive Sync on and running the tests again with Overdrive set to Medium and Strong saw a similar effect with the inverse ghosting, but then my final test with Adaptive Sync On. MBR Sync switched on and my Overdrive setting on Medium, it worked really well, and even in real-time gaming with these settings, I found that playing some Overwatch 2 worked really well. Though admittedly I am on Windows 10 still because I’m living in the past. But even still, Overwatch 2 at 500Hz was a pretty amazing thing to experience. Now unfortunately I think this monitor does fall down with its TN panel, but I must say even though on paper this thing performed exceptionally well when it came to its benchmarks, unfortunately to the eye, it does look a bit washed out and viewing angles are okay but not great, especially on the tilt. You’ve got to be straight on to this monitor which is definitely how it’s meant to be used. Sitting close and immersed in the action. It just means that it’s not really built for media consumption and watching something like John Wick 4 that’s just released on Netflix, it relies heavily on a lot of colour, and here it just looks a little washed out.
But still, you can’t take away the fact that this monitor costs half of the Zowie we saw a little while ago, and while even at this price tag of £600 I can’t recommend it to everybody, certainly if you’re heavily into your eSports games, this is the screen for you. But if you’re more casual and like to play single-player titles and watch a series on Netflix or YouTube videos then £600 for this is a little hard to swallow. It’s a decent monitor, it’s got a nice sharp image and I know I’m a bit of a fan of AOC at this point but they do produce some decent screens. It’s a shame about the MBR mode being a little finicky with its ghosting, and the colours being a bit washed out when watching media. It would have been a bit unstoppable if these were sorted. For me, Adaptive Sync worked well with the MBR Sync switched on too so they’re the settings I’m sticking with for now. And I must say, it’s going to be hard going back to 165Hz on Overwatch 2 after using this.
