With its spacious, tightly curved 49-inch screen, the AOC Agon AG493UCX is a formidable wide-screen monitor for playing the growing number of games that can be run on an ultra-wide screen. It has a higher native resolution (5,120 by 1,440 pixels, aka 5K) but a lower refresh rate (120Hz) than the similarly equipped Samsung CHG90. The Agon AG493UCX proved enjoyable for gaming (especially for driving, flight-sim, and other "enveloping" genres of game), video watching, and photo viewing. But its confusing menu system at times added an equal measure of frustration.
Dangerous Curves
A beast of a monitor, the AG493UCX measures 18.4 by 47 by 12.1 inches, and it weighs 31.7 pounds. Its 49-inch (measured diagonally) VA screen, set in a matte-black cabinet, has a native resolution of 5,120 by 1,440 pixels at an ultra-wide 32:9 aspect ratio. That's the equivalent of two 27-inch QHD (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) monitors placed side by side. This matches the screen size and resolution of several 49-inch business monitors, the Dell Ultrasharp 49 Curved Monitor, the Philips Brilliance 499P9H, and the LG 49WL95C-W. Its screen size is the same as the Samsung CHG90—the only other 49-inch gaming monitor we have reviewed—but the Samsung's native resolution is lower (3,840 by 1,080 pixels). The Agon AG493UCX is a good choice for multitasking, as you can open several spacious windows side by side on its screen.
The panel is highly curved, with an 1800R curvature rating. If you were to place enough AG493UCX monitors side by side to form a circle, it would have a radius of just 1,800mm, or 1.8 meters. We often see such tight curvature in ultra-wide monitors; among the displays we have tested, only the Samsung 34-Inch CF791 Curved Widescreen Monitor boasts an appreciably tighter (1500R) curvature measure. The pronounced curvature makes for a more immersive, enveloping gaming experience than you would get with a flat panel.
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The stand to which the cabinet is affixed rests on a sturdy, tripod-like metal base, with one short leg in back supporting the shaft and cabinet and two long, curved arms, which remind me of "longhorns," stabilizing the frame at the sides. It supports height, tilt, and swivel adjustment, and the rear of the cabinet has a square pattern of four holes spaced 100mm (3.9 inches) apart to support wall mounting with a VESA bracket. (No bracket comes included.)
Trouble at the Ports
Ports include two DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, two HDMI 2.0 ports, and one USB Type-C port that supports 65-watt power delivery as well as the DisplayPort over USB protocol, meaning that one USB cable can handle video or data at the same time it's powering your laptop. You also get an Ethernet port (which can ensure connectivity even if your laptop's Wi-Fi isn't enabled) and a 3.5mm audio-out port; the AG493UCX has two built-in 5-watt speakers, which provide reasonable volume and decent sound quality.
As is all too common with desktop monitors, all the ports are downward-facing in back, and hard to access. This is a minor issue on small monitors, but it is at the very least an annoyance with the already enormously wide and ungainly AG493UCX. When setting up this monitor, it's a good idea to plug in any cables you might need, even if you have no immediate use for them; otherwise, you may find yourself having to set the monitor gently on its back, or root around underneath it with little or no view of what you're doing, or tilt the monitor (in my experience, precariously) to get at the ports you need.
A Remote for Onscreen Menus
AOC provides two ways to access and control the AG493UCX's onscreen display (OSD): a handful of tiny buttons, better described as nubbins, on the bottom of the monitor near its right end (icons on the bottom bezel show their function) and an included handheld remote control. I found the remote—which has brightness and volume rockers, buttons to change input source and to call up the menu, and a four-way controller with a central button—much preferable. I would only use the on-monitor buttons if the remote were lost or out of reach.
The OSD, which appears as a portrait-oriented rectangle in the screen's lower right corner, has six main choices, each replete with name and icon: Game Setting, Luminance, Image Setup, Color Setup, Extra, and OSD Setup. Under Game Setting are items such as Game Mode (FPS, RTS, Racing, three programmable gamer modes, and Off), Overdrive, Adaptive Sync, Low Input Lag, and Frame Counter. Under Luminance, along with Contrast and Brightness, is an Eco Mode setting; hidden within Eco Mode are a set of picture modes (Standard, Text, Game, Internet, Movie, and Sports among them). But unless you look in the user manual, which is downloadable from the AOC site, or happen across them by opening Eco Mode, you would never know they were there.
The third main choice is Image Setup. It allows you to choose picture-by-picture (PBP) mode, in which you can display output from two different video sources side by side onscreen; you can select the sources from your various inputs, as well. Image Setup also has HDR settings. In the presence of an HDR signal, you will see a menu item titled HDR, from which you can choose DisplayHDR, HDR Picture, HDR Movie, HDR Game, or Off. When non-HDR content is displayed, the main menu choice is called HDR Mode, and you have the same choices except without DisplayHDR. This mode is presumably an HDR emulation, designed to resemble an HDR effect with a standard dynamic-range signal by increasing brightness and saturation and improving contrast. In our testing, it proved effective as such.
With Color Setup, you can select the Low Blue Light mode to reduce eyestrain. You can also alter the color temperature and make other tweaks. The Extra menu lets you set an input source, change the image's aspect ratio, and perform a factory reset (returning all settings to their defaults). Last, OSD Setup lets you set the language of the onscreen display, change its position on the screen, and set a length of time for it to be displayed.
The best thing about the AG493UCX's OSD is the aforementioned remote, which makes it a joy to navigate through the menu settings. The worst part is that its design is neither intuitive nor typical, with some settings placed in several (or unexpected) categories. I would have put the Eco Mode picture settings, the list of gaming modes, and the HDR options under one main category, for instance. Even when finding some settings, it could be unclear how to change them, as they were sometimes grayed out, and the downloadable user manual was not always helpful in explaining in what situations they could be activated. (See my account below of my experience trying to enable the Low Input Lag setting.)
Bright, With Good Color
I did our luminance, color, and contrast testing for the AG493UCX using a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, an X-Rite i1Basic Pro 2 color profiler, and Portrait Displays CalMAN 5 software.
The AG493UCX qualifies for DisplayHDR 400, VESA's lowest rung of HDR certification. Its rated luminance is 550 nits (candelas per meter squared); it turned in a very respectable 524 nits with HDR enabled. In Standard mode, with HDR turned off, brightness was a healthy 360 nits (candelas per meter squared), and with the two gaming modes we tested, FPS and Racing, it turned in a bright 427 and 429 nits, respectively.
Above is a color accuracy or chromaticity chart, which was generated when testing in Standard mode, showing that the AG493UCX covers 100 percent of the sRGB color space with room to spare. The area within the triangle represents all the colors that can be made by mixing the primary colors red, green, and blue. The circles, representing our measurements, lie on or outside the triangle and are fairly evenly spaced. In further testing, it covered 78.1 percent of the wider Adobe RGB color space, which is used in some photographic applications, and 82.6 percent of the digital-cinema-oriented DCI-P3 space.
AOC backs the AG493UCX with a generous four-year warranty. Most monitor manufacturers offer just three years, and a few cover their displays for only a single year.
Gaming in the Ultra-Wide Lane
As the widest of monitor screens have gotten ever wider, from widescreen (16:9) first to ultra-wide (21:9) and now on to even wider (32:9) monitors like the Agon AG493UCX and the Samsung CHG90, game manufacturers have been pressed to provide support for them. Fortunately, many recent games will run reasonably smoothly on a 32:9 screen. Racing games, flight simulators, and games with sci-fi settings or panoramic scenery are all a good fit for ultra-wide screens. An online search for ultra-wide games will bring up many good choices; if you have any doubts about their compatibility, check with the manufacturer.
I had an enjoyable time with Project Cars 2. We also played Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Far Cry 5, at full resolution and 120Hz with FreeSync enabled, with both an AMD Radeon RX 590 and a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. The experience was good, with minimal ghosting, although in both Counter Strike and Far Cry 5, when we were using either of the AMD cards, we noticed a slight yet annoying pulsation or flickering in the background while we were perusing the games' menus (though not while actually playing the games) when FreeSync was enabled.
As for its gaming specs, the AG493UCX has a maximum 120Hz refresh rate and supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro adaptive sync. The Samsung CHG90 has a higher (144Hz) refresh rate and employs the same FreeSync flavor. (Note: AMD's FreeSync Premium Pro was originally marketed as "FreeSync 2" and has undergone two changes in branding; before FreeSync Premium Pro it was "FreeSync 2 HDR.") Both monitors have a 1ms rated MPRT pixel response. Moving picture response time (MPRT), also known as "display persistence," measures the length of time a pixel is continuously visible, and is not directly comparable to the far more common gray-to-gray (GTG) response time spec most monitor makers supply. Most gaming monitors that use this standard have a 1ms MPRT; the Aorus KD25F, which I recently reviewed, had an even snappier 0.5ms MPRT.
We measured the AG493UCX's input lag, using the HDFury 4K Diva, at 15.6ms. This is unimpressive for a gaming monitor, although scores tend to be lower with large-screen monitors. The Agon does have a Low Input Lag setting—which disables the frame buffer to reduce the lag—but it was grayed out, and despite trying with two test computers and an Xbox, consulting the user manual, and changing numerous settings, we couldn't find a way to enable it.
Finally, AOC clued us in to a specific combination of settings to use (see the screen shots below; surprisingly, both Game Mode and Adaptive-Sync needed to be disabled) and we were able to get it to work.
Alas, we were unable to test it quantitatively—the HDFury tests input lag at 1080p, and the monitor requires a higher resolution to enable Low Input Lag—but we did play two rounds of Counter Strike with Low Input Lag enabled, and two rounds with it off, and noticed a slight improvement when it was enabled.
Some Entertainment Chops
Although the AG493UCX is at heart (and in its dimensions) a gaming monitor, it does a more-than-credible job as a display for entertainment consumption, as well. One downside is that, with its ultra-wide aspect ratio, much of the screen area goes to waste. With a normal widescreen movie, the image is bracketed between two huge black borders that together take up fully half the screen.
That said, it was an enjoyable experience to view HDR videos with HDR enabled in Windows on the AG493UCX with the monitor's HDR Movie mode turned on, which greatly improved contrast and dynamic range. The HDR Movie mode, which runs as an emulation rather than true HDR when handling standard-definition video, even had beneficial effects on decidedly non-HDR videos, such as a clip of an elevated train ride I uploaded to YouTube about a dozen years ago.
Photos from our test suite looked splendid: bright, with good contrast and dynamic range. As with video, the images took up only part of the screen—except for the few panoramas in our collection, which looked magnificent. With the ultra-wide screen, you could open up photos in two windows for side-by-side comparison. The AG493UCX is fine for photo editing, provided that you don't need to work in the Adobe RGB color space.
Good for Gaming and Media Viewing
The AOC Agon AG493UCX brings the thrill of ultra-wide gaming to the masses on a gigantic screen for a relatively modest price. It's best for providing an immersive experience with flight simulators, racing games, and other games in which a panoramic view is important. It's not ideal for multiplayer games, as the ultra-wide screen provides all the more screen room for enemies to come at you from the sides before you can draw a bead on them. In testing, it proved capable and fun to use (although its onscreen menu system proved frustrating, even when I navigated it with the included remote control). It did a decent job in handling video and photos as well.
It's a worthy alternative to the similarly equipped Samsung CHG90, offering a higher resolution but a lower refresh rate, and it's a good choice for casual ultra-wide gaming. That said, although the MSI Optix MPG34CQR has a smaller, not-as-wide screen (it's limited to a 21:9 aspect ratio), it offers a superior gaming experience (including a near-record-low input lag score in our testing) and remains our Editors' Choice among ultra-wide gaming monitors.
AOC's Agon AG493UCX is a 49-inch ultra-wide monitor that provides an enjoyable gaming experience and does a decent job handling multimedia content, as well.
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