Gigabyte Aorus CO49DQ Super Ultrawide QD-OLED Review

Unboxing & Setup:

We’ll be unboxing the Orus F49 DQ unit, which was already pre-opened. The unboxing may be slightly different since it has already been opened. Here is the stand. Here it would be wrapped in this kind of plastic, but no worries, there’s a little bit of a design here.

With these linens that are kind of glossy, there’s glossiness here. We think it looks pretty good. It doesn’t look super expensive, but the price point here is actually amazing, 49in super ultra wides, and this is a QD OLED from Samsung or manufactured by Samsung for what it is.

It’s really not that much money now. On the bottom of this, it is all metal, it has a nice, high-quality thumb screw, uh, and lots of rubber here. It is quite a wide stand, so we’ll see how far this protrudes, but obviously, it’s a 49in super ultra wide, it’s going to be a wide stand now this actually has a colour calibration Factory calibration report which is cool they had it at a srgb Delta e of 1.67 so yeah we mean most of these have been pretty colour accurate all right now we’ve got the top part of the stand looks like maybe the reviewer.

Before me was not as careful with them. We’re usually pretty careful with our monitors, but we guess some people are not. There is an RS logo at the top of the stand, right there, which looks pretty good. The stand overall is built pretty well, as you can see someone actually did.

Kind of hit it there, there’s a little bit more glossiness here, and again, the plastic on the outside, well, it’s just your basic plastic, but it feels durable, and it’s metal throughout, so it is heavy to put these together. First, we’re going to take off this little plastic to show the little bit of glossiness there, and look at those big chunks of metal. You line those up together just like that and then screw in that high-quality thumb screw. Because this is a 49, the thumb screw is longer than your average one to give it a little bit more pull.

And strength, but yeah, it is a pretty heavy stand, honestly, but we actually like the design because it just has these coming out, so let’s put it on the desk, and as you can see, it actually takes up quite a bit of space. It’s curved, it’s got a 1,800 R curve, and it does have to come out a bit. We would always prefer it to go wider since it’s already going to be a wide monitor, but still not a bad stand. Also, in the box, we have the power cable, which has an integrated power supply, which is super nice. This is just a different region’s power.

Connection, we’ve got some paperwork and manuals. We’ve got an HDMI cable, a DisplayPortcable, a USB Type B to USB Type A cable, and then another region’s power connection. Let’s get to the panel itself. We’re going to lift this, and there is that huge panel.

We are surprised there’s not a little slit here, but maybe we can just pull this up. Yeah, we can just pull it up. The bottom of the stand is actually this way, so we’re going to take the stand, come over to this way, line up these pins on the top here, and this is just a clip-in stand so you just press down and there it’s locked in that’s a nice solid click and then lifting this out ooh that’s heavy heavy and let’s take off the plastic we love the way the 49 in look obviously this is a cutie OLED it is a glossy finish and it is glorious we love it.

When we see glossy finishes, all the Cutie OLS typically have the glossy finishes, but on a super ultra wide that looks insanely cool. Alright, let’s check out the back of the monitor first. This is a heavy monitor now. If you guys remember, we actually reviewed the Samsung variant.

The full Samsung panel, we believe, is this same panel or maybe a different version of a 49 in QD OLED, and it had a lot of problems, so we’re definitely going to be testing this one thoroughly to make sure this one doesn’t have any bugs, overheating, or anything like that, we can see on the top here we do have quite a bit of cooling these are all openings here for the cooling on the back here this is actually all plastic all of this is plastic here we thought it would be metal but maybe it’s metal underneath as far as height and tilt everything.
Pretty decent, yeah, great amount of height actually, um, and then it’s got tilt feels very solid actually, um, but it is a little firm, which you do want with this size, and swivel here, which is very nice to have on a 49 in the overall details look pretty good, but it is all plastic on the back there is this little strip right ooh check that out it’s like a rainbow design in it if you move up and down while looking at it that is really really cool now for your ports this is where you plug in power but on the other side is where you have all your ports. You have a 3.5 mm audio out, you have two HDMI display ports, USB Type B, USB Type C, this is your Upstream port, and you have two USB Type A’s, and then your joystick is in the middle. With that, let’s get it on the desk, do the initial Impressions gaming test, and do some ghosting.

Test all right, guys, with it on the desk first thing we don’t like is the power cable goes all the way over here, and there’s really like no way to get it to like stay up there, so you’ll have to do some cable management, which looks kind of it looks pretty bad to be honest with you. Maybe if we just push it, we just put it over the top, actually, so rather than actually putting it cuz this Cable Management hole is so low, we’re just going to put it over the top like that, that looks a lot better, so you’re just not using their Cable Management, not a big deal though.

We’re excited to turn on the panel. There’s a joystick right in the middle, which is actually kind of tilted back. It’s very comfortable, let’s turn it on, though there’s a little light down there, we will say whoever had this before damaged the screen slightly, which is super.

Annoying, that’s definitely like whoever had this review unit before me was not super careful with it.

First Impression :

Right up with this on the screen first thing is the curve is awesome, it’s not too curved, especially for a 49 in, you actually want your uh screen to curve in our opinion.

Let’s go into settings cuz this is not outputting full refresh rate let’s do 144 Hz this is not the higher end one we don’t actually know if orus uses that panel, but you can get a higher refresh rate although for most people 144 HZ is going to be pretty much as much as you want since you are going to have to be running a lot more pixels so it’ll be harder to hit those frames with that. Let’s go into the Nvidia control panel. Here we’re running full resolution at 5120 by 1440p, so it’s basically just 1440p height, and then it’s just longer so it can maintain those pixels then let’s see if we can output 10 bits of colour and we can expect that but with that let’s go into the menu system we have quick access to the gam assist power off and OLED care but let’s go up into the settings for this menu system.

They actually slightly changed the graphics, still a little pixelated, but it doesn’t look great, but it is very easy to read. We have a black equalizer super resolution, which is kind of just your oversharpening of things, you have your different aspect ratios, and then your freeing premium Pro, which this does have so obviously HDR with variable refresh rate which is super nice these are your different picture settings we have a super nice srgb clamp we have custom and then Eco we’re going to put this into custom brightness is at 85% uh but let’s turn it all the way up to 100%.

And it does get substantially brighter for an OLED, we’re assuming this is going to, you know, have essentially, we also have contrast. The menu system is very quick and responsive, which is nice, with 6-axis colour vibrancy. We’re also seeing the screen’s increased brightness.

And decrease brightness, we’re pretty sure because of this wallpaper that goes from kind of dark to light as it moves on, so there’s definitely a here we have our colour temperatures colour space, so beyond just sRGB we have Adobe DCI P3, which is a great display. We have a KVM switch here that’s why you have those Upstream ports, which is a super nice picture and picture by picture, which is very important for this display, all of your OSD settings, and then that’s pretty much it, not a ton of settings, but there it is, let’s test out the AL right away, one of.

The best way to test Al is to have the majority of your screen, so basically just use a wallpaper to either go brighter or darker while you keep, just a window of something that is typically white on screen, so you can literally just go in, we’ll open Firefox here, make it a smaller window, so let’s do it. Like that, which is you have white here, then switch the background to something that is primarily white now, if we change something dark, it should get brighter or change the brightness varying with that, and you’ll be able to see that in the whites now here we’re actually not seeing too much of that or maybe it’s happening slowly maybe it was just hard for me to see before, because of all of the lights in this room which do make it very difficult which is why we do full reviews obviously okay there is a variance there.

Definitely a variance when it dims with this right here, and then it goes back, so that is interesting with that. Let’s turn on HDR, that’s what this monitor is.

Bugs of Monitor :

About all right, we’re getting the same problem that we had with the last 49 in QD OED, where it’ll just randomly turn off. That’s really annoying, let’s continue the unboxing and hope that it doesn’t happen cuz if it continues to do the same problems that we did before. This is exactly what happened on the Samsung panel, which we did not recommend because of that. Now, okay, the screen keeps going black now and then, coming back on when you’re in game, it’s okay, it’s an HDR movie let’s change it to HDR game goes way brighter and very oversaturated even though it is oversaturated even though it is too much the just the fact that this can have such deep vibrant colours, which, yes they’re oversaturated but still it is quite cool.

But the cool thing is, in these settings, we still have a brightness we saw contrast light enhance, so that’s what makes it so much brighter, interesting to try that in game; we have colour enhance, which basically just oversaturates the colours. We also have a dark enhanced here that’s pretty cool to include that it’s not doing that switching back, turning the screen off, so we don’t know.

All right Let’s hop in the game, see how this thing does all right, so it’s been a little bit of time, and this is having the same glitches that the last panel we had that we bought ourselves.

For me, we just bought it because we wanted it for our office. We had to send it back, and it was a big deal because it was having so many glitches. This is having the IDE identical glitch, one of them, which is it, just randomly goes black screen every like 3 seconds, and it looks like with this panel that’s just an HDR so far it seems okay when it’s not an HDR so we don’t know we had to take it out of HDR literally cannot use it in HDR the last time we tested that with multiple PCS multip different cables all sorts of stuff it was having the same problem hopefully this is not that but it seems like it is. We mean all right with it up again. This is just an SDR. We mean it’s absolutely awesome, it looks beautiful, we’re actually going to turn the lights off so we can get the full black levels.

Because this is a QTI OLED panel and the colours here look vibrant and beautiful, we mean obviously this has 99% coverage of the DCI P3 colour gamut, so it’s really impressive, but really having that like peripheral view, especially in something like a racing game, like if we go into the cockpit here you know we have that out the window view and we just turned up the fov here so that we can actually get more out of the car here and with something like this with that extended fov. We mean that it is so cool, we really want to use this on our racing Sim downstairs.

And we might end up doing that just cuz we think it would look so cool. That’s one of the reasons we actually wanted that last panel, but it seems like this one is also having these issues, which is really unfortunate, but we’ll have to see if you can’t use this monitor in HDR that’s like the whole reason you get it although maybe we’re missing something so we’ll see however the panel itself glitches and bugs aside it’s beautiful. It’s not the brightest thing in the world; we believe this is the older Samsung panels, not the Gen 3.

The newest cutie OLED gen 3 panel, so it is not quite as bright as the newer ones, but in a dim room, again, we still have the lights on here, there are two windows back there, it still looks very, very pretty. Brights up here are nice and bright and putting this in HDR makes it significantly brighter however again it glitches out let’s try putting it in HDR again though okay we’ll see if that makes the same bug happen and we’ll keep the camera going this time when the bug happens this is going to be in real time we’re not going to edit anything.

Turn HDR on here, wait for it to come on, there we go, HDR is on, and let’s go back in-game, do the settings here, so let’s set it to HDR we think we’re going to have to restart the game actually which makes total sense and you can see there’s the black screen so there’s the black screen that started okay and it’s back on let’s start Forza up now and there’s another black screen.

That’s not the game booting on, that’s the black screen. Let’s see if it’ll come back on, and then that’s what it does, so it constantly comes back on. It’ll say display port HDR and then another black screen again, and then it comes back, and then another black screen again, so that’s the problem again.

We’ll try hooking this up. We don’t know it could be a lot of things, but we tried all of those things with the Samsung panel, but you just at some point, you just get completely locked out of the monitor. The display port won’t work with the last panel, and you see it’s back up here, and then it goes right back off. All right, the panel is really awesome, we love the panel, but it’s so weird that it glitches like the other one glitches, and we think overall, for that reason, we probably can’t recommend it.

We’re going to test this out; we’re not going to do a full review of this thing unless the glitches are fixed. However, we didn’t end up doing a review; that being said, we haven’t had a black screen for a little bit, so it just did like five black screens and then it was okay, so let’s see if we can get in game now, no black screen yet, it’s just oh okay, well now we’re here in game with hdr on it, just stopped doing the black screens. We mean it looks really, really good colours.

Look great, the width of this is just crazy awesome, guys. It’s just absolutely crazy awesome, especially with this view, it’s in HDR right now, and it’s not doing black screen, still really annoying that it does black screen like 12 times or more before it stops doing it, and we don’t know if it does stop doing it but it looks so good guys like this looks so good obviously we have to turn our settings down, we are going to get the new 5090 for this room so that we’ll be able to push these monitors further with higher refresh rate.

Which we’ve been needing to do for a long time, as we’ve had to switch to our other PC with a 40 90 in it, but this looks absolutely excellent, guys, it really does. We love this panel so much, we loved the Samsung panel so much, but the glitches just like they did not work everything.

Out here, the Samsung panel also had overheating problems; all these things happened that were just bugs and glitches. Why don’t you still not recommend it? Over just that was ridiculous; it was because multiple problems that should not have been linked together were linked. It’s very rare to have a monitor that has four problems that are all things that are quality control problems.

It’s just like it doesn’t happen, it’s not like a car, there aren’t that many moving parts to it, like we never have this problem, really like almost no monitors ever have this problem, and both of these panels, which are the same panels, have that problem, which you know it that’s very telling that these panels are not perfect and there’s bugs that it seems like the companies where Samsung is not working out and everyone else is just selling these panels which we think is pretty bad to do that to your customers when they’re paying you the price for this monitor.

However, it’s working okay now, and we don’t think we’re going to finish the review on this because look at the panel itself, QD OLEDs are excellent, the colour coverage is great, the accuracy is very good, especially with white balance. We can tell you that, just visually, the colour accuracy parts of it look oversaturated, but it’s very pretty, and you have pretty good adjustment in HDR, which we think is impressive, while it is, you know, contrast light in here, so you can turn the brightness up one probably looks the best to us, and then you have colour enhance so you can make it more vibrant you have some adjustment over how it visually looks in HDR and if you’re just playing games that’s all you really need the brightness here in a room that’s dimly lit like this but we still have some bright lights on looks.

Good black levels are excellent when you’re in a dim room, and the overall experience of this is so amazing, we absolutely love it; however, expect bugs to happen, expect what happened here, and potentially expect overheating. We can’t say that for sure, but that might be a problem. We don’t think these panels are really ready for the mass market. We think you have to go in knowing that there might be a big problem. We’re not going to recommend it. We’re not going to recommend it. I’m going to say do your own research, be ready for our there’s a problem if you really want this panel. If we’re just talking about the screen itself, it is absolutely excellent, it is absolutely amazing, but the implementation may not be perfect.

If it continues to do well, and maybe that was just like out of the box, it was doing that, but there are the tag reviews, and we’ll see you soon.
Till then, Stay Healthy, Stay Safe. Bye