We’ve seen some big displays here at Computex 2023, such as ASRock’s 55-inch 8K model, but Asus’ new widescreen gaming panel stands out with its eye-popping colors, fluid motion, and massive curves. I was really surprised. At 49 inches wide, the ROG Swift OLED PG49WCD feels comfortable at your desk and surrounded by the action thanks to its steep 1800R curve. It also features a smooth 144Hz refresh rate not found on regular panels. The resolution is 5120 × 1440.
At the Asus booth, the PG49WCD was seen running racing games at the highest refresh rate. The action was smooth and immersive, and the colors were really vivid, like the light blue and red markings on the back of the car and the reddish-brown dirt on the ground. Colors remained true with only a small amount of reflection when standing to the left of the monitor.
Asus says the PG49WCD’s QD-OLED panel can reproduce 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, the gold standard for monitor vividness. It uses 10-bit color and delivers up to 1,000 nits of eye-melting brightness.
Most OLED panels vary in brightness depending on how many white or light-colored pixels are displayed, which can be annoying. However, Asus offers a uniform brightness setting that promises to keep levels consistent as you change the amount of white pixels on your screen.
The company has also added two special cooling features designed to prevent seizing and other damage. There is a graphene film behind the panel to absorb the heat from the pixels and a huge heatsink to dissipate the heat away from the monitor’s mainboard.
ROG Swift PG49WCD also has built-in KVM, so you can connect two different computers to share a monitor or peripherals connected to the USB port. The monitor has 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) Type-A ports and 1 Type-C port that provides 90W power delivery for charging the monitor. It has both a DisplayPort 1.4 port and an HDMI 2.1 port for video output.
Pricing and availability of the PG49WCD have not yet been announced, but given its impressive feature set, it is expected to be expensive. I can’t wait to see if it can be one of the best gaming monitors out there.
