The Samsung Odyssey G5, one of the company’s latest 34-inch ultrawide monitors, is down to £337 at Samsung’s UK store when you redeem the code 25MONOFF at the register.
That’s an impressive price for a 3440×1440 gaming monitor with a 1000R curve, 165Hz refresh rate, FreeSync, and a VA panel with a 1ms response time.
It’s rare to find a comparable gaming monitor with these sorts of specs anywhere near this price – the only thing I have in my memory banks of offers is the Huawei MateView GT, which costs £350 but can’t -not be the same kind of brand cachet as Samsung despite being a solid monitor in its own right.
Samsung is one of the few companies that has been able to produce good results with a VA panel, with most other examples suffering from relatively poor pixel response times and a blurry look in fast motion. Samsung’s panels tend to be more like IPS in terms of motion handling, while still providing the excellent contrast that VA panels are known for. This, combined with decent viewing angles and good color accuracy, makes the Odyssey G5 a good all-around choice.
On a similar theme, the G5 is also suitable for a wide range of computers, with even mid-weight gaming PCs having enough grunt to use the higher resolution in slower-paced games or the higher refresh rate in esports titles – and obviously if you have a PC a bit beyond mid-range you can take advantage of both resolution and refresh rate.
1440p ultra-wide resolution falls between standard 1440p and 4K when it comes to total pixel count, so you can look at the benchmark results for your CPU/GPU combination and average the 1440p and 4K results to get an estimate. approximate type of frame-rates you would expect when using this monitor.
Either way, it’s on point – this is a solid monitor available at a very reasonable price, so well worth buying if the specs are your thing!