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If you have the money, I think we found one of our favorite ultrawide Freesync gaming monitors. The Acer XR341CK has a 21:9 aspect ratio display, 34-inches diagonally. It has a resolution of 3440×1440, so it’s an incredibly high-resolution screen, about 30% more pixels than you get on a 2560×1440 – 1440p monitor. It is a 75Hz display, so it does have a maximum refresh rate of 75Hz which is great because that extends your free sync range. You don’t see any color degradation from that increase in refresh rate which is nice.

Let us take a look at the design of Acer XR341CK. First of all, the screen is a semi-matte finished, mostly matte not a lot of gloss to it, not a lot of reflection on which is great in my opinion that’s what I prefer. It has a very thin bezel. All the controls are on buttons on the side of it. It is easy to hit the wrong button accidentally; I turned the monitor off a couple of times while playing with the on-screen display. Speaking of the on-screen display, there is a ton of options in there for color correction, controlling overdrive and for setting a whole bunch of other stuff in there. On the back of it, it is the opposite of the front; it is very glossy on the back. The stand is nice regarding its design. I think it looks cool. It has got this minimalist style to it, flat chrome finish.

The display itself can height adjust as well as angle adjust. That is a big plus for a monitor this size to be able to get it in the position you want. It does have a VESA monitor mount on the back. It has two 7-watt speakers on it which sound better than I expected them to. Maybe it is time for me to raise my expectations about what monitor speakers can do these days. For gaming purposes, you are probably going to use speakers or headphones anyway, but for standard video watching or regular kind of productivity, the speakers on it are pretty decent.

The monitor has accent lights that are, LED strips underneath the screen that can change colors. You can do red, green, blue, white and you can change it to a breathing pattern, a flashing pattern or a kind of alternating pattern where the LEDs go back and forth. I don’t know if it’s necessary for anything but it adds a little bit of style and touch to the display.
The colors are decent out of the box. The contrast was a little off, but after a calibration, it looks stunning. Acer claims it’s capable of 100% sRGB, and I have no reason to disagree with that especially after a proper calibration process is done. So designers and video editors, productivity users and entertainment users will enjoy the color aspect of this panel.

Acer XR341CK Gaming Perfromance with freesync

Now let us look at the most interesting aspect of this monitor, the gaming performance of course. It is a Freesync monitor, so it does support variable refresh between 33 frames per second and 75. I think they probably claim 30 to 75 but in our testing where we have the ability to step down in frame rates and look for tearing or stuttering, 32 or 33 was where the lower limit was. When you’re inside that range, the variable refresh experience is excellent. It worked flawlessly. When you are above that or below that, you start to get into complications. Although the range of 33 to 75 is good considering the last time, we saw a Free-Sync monitor of this aspect ratio it was 48 to 75. That is a pretty drastic improvement in that area. Also, necessary for gaming, this monitor has proper overdrive implementation if you have a Freesync configured setup; the settings are off, normal or extreme. Standard and extreme both kind of produced the same result. It improves the ghosting that you would see with overdrive disabled. The overdrive performs a little bit different with the jump from standard to the extreme, where you will start to see some negative ghosting and other issues.

For productivity users, 75Hz refresh rate is great and provides a much smoother experience. The fact that you get this huge amount of pixels here, 3440×1440, it gives you a ton of room to do stuff on. You can easily get three full-size vertical windows of browsers across this and still have a little bit room to spare. Productivity wise there is a lot of benefit to having an ultra wide display like this. It does support picture in picture, picture by picture modes through multiple inputs. If you want to hook up your PC to one side and your laptop to the other side you can do that. It can do picture in picture as well even with two 21:9 aspect ratio so you can have a smaller 21:9 aspect ratio in the corner.

Speaking of inputs, this does have quite a few of them. You have got your DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort, and two HDMI inputs. One of them capable of MHL. Pricing on this is $1039 as of today on Amazon; that’s obviously pretty expensive for display. It is very expensive comparing to other Freesync monitors and even other G-Sync monitors. The Acer XR341CK has a unique design; you get an ultra high-resolution 3440×1440, 75Hz refresh rate, Free-Sync capability, excellent color reproduction.