Acer Predator X35 Review
What do you look for in a gaming monitor? Sky-high refresh rates? An ultrawide aspect ratio? VESA DisplayHDR 1000 support? Nvidia G-Sync Ultimate? How about all four and a whole lot more? The $2,499 Acer Predator X35 is, without mincing words, the most tricked-out, feature-rich gaming display you can buy in 2019, with a price tag to match. While other over-the-top monitors like the HP Omen X Emperium 65 offer more screen real estate with a similar feature set, none prioritizes hardcore gamers quite like the Predator X35. It will cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’ve got the limbs to spare, there’s no better PC gaming experience to be had, earning the Acer an Editors’ Choice pick.
Mục Lục
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
Design-wise, nearly every aspect of the 3,440-by-1,440-pixel Predator X35 mirrors its predecessor, the Acer Predator X34, down to the stand (which is perfect for gamers like myself who prefer odd-angled keyboard placement), the form factor (1800R curved ultrawide), and the design accents on the back.
One thing that has changed ever so slightly is the size. While the Predator X34 measured 34 inches diagonally, the Predator X35 is, naturally, 35 inches corner to corner. Another change is the addition of four RGB LED strips to the back of the unit, which can be controlled via Acer’s Light Sense software (more on that in a minute).
At 29.5 pounds, the display is easily the heaviest Predator monitor to date, but given the amount of features packed inside, that’s to be expected (it takes a lot of hardware under the hood to run an HDR 1000 screen at 200Hz). If you plan on using the VESA mount in the back, make sure you have an arm or stand that’s capable of supporting its weight.
On the port side, which is really the stern (the rear, sorry, boat joke), we found just enough ports to keep most gamers happy, including one DisplayPort 1.4b—which you’ll need to use if you want to get even a fraction of the X35’s features working correctly—along with one HDMI 2.0 and five USB 3.0 Type-B ports.
As for audio performance, the X35, like the X34, has two 4-watt speakers on the back and also features a single headphone pass-through jack. The speakers proved tinny and lacking in bass, as is the case with virtually every gaming monitor I’ve tested, even though you might think the Predator’s price would buy you something slightly better.
Finally, an irksome issue of note: I discovered that if the monitor had spent too much time (say, a weekend) turned off, I’d actually need to unplug the power cord from the rear and plug it in again in order for the display to turn on properly. I can’t say whether this was just a glitch with my test unit, but certainly hope the problem is isolated from the production chain.
The Sense to Light Things Up
Despite being (in my opinion) one of today’s top monitor manufacturers, Acer still lags behind a few of its rivals in providing a software-based onscreen display (OSD) that lets you tweak settings from the desktop. This means you must configure the monitor via the hardware OSD, controlled by four buttons and a five-way joystick mounted on the right rear of the unit. And oh, what a bevy of settings there are.
As a premium gaming monitor, the Predator X35 lets you control every aspect of how the panel behaves, including activating features like Dark Boost (a contrast-enhancing tool useful for multiplayer gamers), turning on one of six different hardware-based crosshairs, sending the response time into overdrive, fine-tuning the color profile, and more.
The one piece of software Acer does offer is its RGB Light Sense(Opens in a new window) utility, which lets you control the four LED panels attached to the back of the unit. You can cycle through standard fare such as breathing patterns, change the colors to anything you like in the color wheel, sync them to your music, or turn things off entirely if you’re like me and believe that even a little RGB on a monitor is too much, given its tendency to wash out the action on screen.
Made for Gamers Only
With 512 local dimming zones backed by quantum dot technology and DisplayHDR 1000, it’s no surprise that the Predator’s overall clarity and picture quality during gaming and movie-watching was top-notch. Its true color reproduction, however, was a bit lacking for any content creators who might be considering this display as a dual-purpose option.
First, I checked out the sRGB gamut using Portrait’s CalMAN(Opens in a new window) calibration software, a Klein K10-A(Opens in a new window) colorimeter, and an X-Rite Pro 3 Plus(Opens in a new window) spectrometer. In this test, the Acer scraped the top of the leaderboard with a result of 99.9 percent coverage. In general, though, this is usually the easiest spec for a monitor to max out, so let’s dig further into our chromaticity testing.
In the Adobe RGB measurement, which generally tells you how a display will do when handling content-creation tasks such as photo or video editing or 3D modeling, the X35’s score of 80 percent fell well under the norm for creative-minded monitors, and even hit the low end of the curve for gaming monitors. (The Acer Nitro XV3, for instance, managed 85.7 percent in the same test.)
After that came the DCI-P3 test, which measures how accurately a monitor can display movie and TV content in creative editing apps. Again, the Predator X35’s coverage was underwhelming considering its price—just 84.9 percent, whereas our Editors’ Choice Razer Raptor 27 scored 94 percent.
On the other hand, the X35 rebounded to make huge gains—and also set a few records—in my luminance and contrast testing. Since it’s a DisplayHDR 1000 monitor, it wasn’t shocking to see the Acer post an HDR brightness level of 1,038.9 nits, but the SDR result was surprising if not blinding at 550.4 nits. The only monitor to beat those results in PCMag testing is the HP Omen X Emperium 65, which delivered 1,177 nits in HDR and 863 in SDR. The Predator’s brightness levels also obviously yielded a great contrast ratio of 5,771:1, against a peak black level of 0.18.
Finally, using an HDFury 4K Diva(Opens in a new window), I recorded a fast but not super-fast input lag of 2.4 milliseconds. This is plenty quick for 99 percent of gamers out there, but those who are looking for the absolute speed king of gaming monitors (ultrawide or otherwise) might want to consider the MSI Optix MPG341CQR instead.
Anecdotal Testing
Until the Predator X35 came out, there was always a compromise to be had when buying a gaming monitor—fast refresh, but not ultrawide; HDR, but slow refresh; and so on and so forth. But this Acer doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “compromise,” and it showed in all of my casual testing.
With every major gaming monitor feature (and even most HDTV features) represented in full, all aspects of the gaming and movie-watching experience are at their acme. The only possible gripe might be the visibly apparent ghosting exacerbated by the 512 local dimming zones. Local dimming, the process of creating contrast in images through specified LED controls, is in general used to help darken parts of the scene that need it while highlighting others that don’t. It’s been a staple in HDTVs for some time, but since it’s pricey to implement and can result in some ghosting issues, very few gaming monitors have it.
But for most media, the tradeoff of throwing local dimming and HDR 1000 in the mix is worth it. HDR videos and movies looked incredible, especially those shot in the cinematic 2.37:1 aspect ratio, which fits the 21:9 aspect of the Predator perfectly.
Also, as a 200Hz G-Sync Ultimate screen, it should be no surprise that the X35 turns gaming into an experience unlike anything I’ve seen or felt before. Snapshot head shots in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive were easy and quick to line up with no tearing or ghosting. And while I’ve played on 240Hz monitors that felt a bit quicker than the Acer, the perceived difference between 200Hz and 240Hz is much smaller than that between, say, 60Hz and 144Hz.
Single-player games like Destiny 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider that support HDR at a 21:9 aspect ratio were truly a sight to behold. Though there aren’t a ton of HDR-ready games on shelves right now, the few that do exist will look their absolute best on a beast of a monitor like this.
The Predator Claims More Prey
I’ve been a fan of Acer’s Predator ultrawide monitors since they made their debut over four years ago, and the $2,499 Predator X35 truly feels like the peak Predator experience available today. If you’re not a fan of the ultrawide gaming format there probably isn’t a lot here that will convert you, but for ultrawide lovers like myself, there simply isn’t another monitor that can do what the X35 does.
That said, if you’re merely looking to game in an ultrawide format at a high refresh rate, there are more economical options available, such as the $799 MSI Optix MPGCQR341, which does nearly everything the Predator X35 can—up to 144Hz, anyway.
But for hardcore gamers, this Predator packs just about every juicy feature in the monitor market into a single unit. If you’ve got a high credit limit and have been waiting for ultrawide gaming displays to clear the 144Hz hurdle (and jump straight to 200Hz in the process), then don’t wait another second.
Acer Predator X35
4.0
Editors’ Choice
(Opens in a new window)
See It
$2,399.99
at Amazon
(Opens in a new window)
MSRP $2,499.00
Pros
Cons
The Bottom Line
The ultrawide, ultra-bright, ultra-fast Acer Predator X35 is a dream come true among gaming monitors, even if its price will make it just a dream for most gamers.
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