Xiaomi G34WQi review: A 180Hz FreeSync Premium 34" gaming ultrawide monitor for $246

Lately we've been spoiled by a slew of OLED and QD-OLED monitors boasting refresh rates of 240Hz and other high-end specs and features. It's not often we get something that appears decent at the budget end of the scale without some major sacrifices discovered when digging a little deeper.

Xiaomi aims to set the record straight by offering its latest gaming ultrawide, the G34WQi with FreeSync Premium/G-SYNC Compatibility and with a 3440x1440 resolution at 180Hz refresh rate.

Now I realise that as soon as I mention that this monitor has a VA panel some will immediately close the tab, and generally I wouldn't blame them. VA panels typically have noticeable ghosting and colour/contrast shifting unless you sit dead-centre to the display, and yes, the G34WQi is no different here.

But at the $246 Walmart asking price, can anyone really complain?

I've spent a little bit of time getting to know this monitor, and much like my MateView GT review from a while ago, some of the issues with that monitor also apply here given that both are VA panels, but the Xiaomi is half the price at launch, so some leeway can be given.

Specifications

Unboxing and Quality Control

The G34WQi is all plastic apart from the steel base of the stand. The stand itself offers height adjustment and vertical pivot only. There is no 180-degree rotation. The QC aspect of the stand could have been improved, as there is considerable wobble if I just gently tap the monitor at any edge. If your desk is not of sturdy build, then simply typing could result in the monitor wobbling back and forth from the vibrations inducted through the stand.

There is VESA arm/wall mounting support by means of 75mm x 75mm mounting holes. These holes are hidden behind the stand mounting bracket which locks in place easily.

Surrounding the bracket is an LED ring which can be customised through the OSD, but spoiler alert, it's not that bright and I honestly think it's a waste of materials due to it being not bright enough to provide any form of back-illumination when suing the monitor in the dark. There is a power LED which can be turned off as well.

I do like that the stand's base plate is very flat, this means a keyboard can be conveniently placed over it for those with a shallower desk. So, there is no worry of running short of depth to put a full-sized keyboard.

Many monitors of this size have stands with extending legs which consume a lot of desk space making it awkward to place things around them, it was nice to see Xiaomi had thought about this.

Vent holes circle the entire frame of the display, and this I discovered is very much needed as there's more heat being pumped out by this VA panel than my QD-OLED Alienware, and that has a built-in power supply with a G-SYNC module to boot.

All of the connections are downwards facing, there is a panel cover once all cables are connected, but I left this in the box.

A hole on the stand offers some cable routing to keep things neat and tidy.

The panel curve is 1500R, the higher the number, the flatter the panel curve is. For comparison, the QD-AW3423DW I have is an 1800R curve, and next to each other, here's how those curves matchup:

My personal view is that 1800R offers the most neutral curvature, perfect for a 34" ultrawide, not too flat that I need to move my head when looking at the far edges of the display, and not too curved to give the illusion of distortion on straight lines leading away from the centre.

I was surprised to see the OSD mention HDR, because nothing on the Xiaomi official product page mentions this. Digging a little deeper into Windows I noticed that there is no certification for HDR, but the G34WQi will still work with HDR content and games, just it's unclear to what degree this experience will be.

With no specs outlining local dimming zones (if any), or peak HDR brightness, it was not possible to fully test this out other than watching some HDR content and not really being impressed by the quality.

Perhaps this is why Xiaomi did not bother mentioning it, but I must ask then why bother putting it in the OSD in that case?

I also discovered that if you drop the refresh rate to 144Hz, that 10-bit colour becomes available. This is not going to be of much use given that the VA panel is only capable of 16.7 million colours anyway, so any extended range of colours or useful bandwidth watching HDR content is largely meaningless given there's no proper HDR certification.

For NVIDIA users, G-SYNC compatibility is there just like with nearly all FreeSync displays and vice versa since VRR displays operate on the Adaptive Sync standards.

Simply open the NVIDIA Control Panel and dive into the G-SYNC tab, then tick the box to enable the feature.

Delving deeper into the OSD, I found that there is quite a lot to customise to taste, rather than show endless screenshots of every menu, here's a 4K video running through them all:

The OSD is easy to navigate using the joystick behind the lower right corner at the back. The joystick doubles up as the power button, too. Long press to standby the monitor, single press to wake it back up.

Colour accuracy

I won't be going too far into calibration and tweaking for colour accuracy, this is a budget gaming monitor aimed at a specific target audience after all. Having said that, Xiaomi does include a useful calibration report that shows a factory calibration of a Delta-E below 2. In terms of sRGB, this was even more accurate at 0.8. Anything below a value of 2 is colour accurate generally speaking.

My AW3423DW QD-OLED is calibrated properly and I figured it would be a good visual test to put both side-by-side and slightly adjust the brightness and contrast only on the Xiaomi to get as close to the QD-OLED as possible, I think I nailed it, though I did have to change the OSD gamma to 2.4, and the colour mode to sRGB from the default 'Native' setting. The Windows OS gamma by default is 2.2, so it's interesting that the G34WQi needed an OSD value of 2.4 to get close to the QD-OLED.

Whilst visually both are now not too far off, as mentioned earlier, this is a VA panel, so you must be sat dead-centre to the area of focus to get that result, otherwise the colours/contrast start to shift about, a typical VA panel trait. IPS panels also have a similar trait, coined "IPS Glow", whereas it's "VA Tinge" here.

To demonstrate this, here's a GIF of the camera mimicking my head moving around the panel:

Colour accuracy is also affected by backlight bleed, since this is an LCD panel, backlight bleed is a common issue, and it is often a complete lottery on whether BLB on an LCD you buy will be moderate, severe or barely noticeable.

On this review unit I would class it as moderate, as it is noticeable on the lower edge of the panel only which then fades up towards the centre as shown above. It is completely unfair to compare a photo of it next to an OLED monitor, but it demonstrates the huge difference in panel technologies at play here. The VA panel has a half decent contrast ratio of 4000:1, but because it's an LCD, the backlight diminishes some of that potential to really hit deep blacks.

Something like a Mini LED or IPS-Black panel would fare better of course, but they also cost more.

Performance

There is one feature that is important here to change in the OSD, Response Time. This changes how quickly pixels respond to display changes.

The result of this is that you can help reduce ghosting or motion issues that could cause headaches or a feeling of nausea in certain games. I found the default value of Fast still exhibit motion ghosting, whilst Fastest was noticeably better:

I also tested this using the famous UFO test where you can clearly see that Standard has additional capture ghosting frames of the UFO, although it's more obvious at lower framerates. These images were captured at 1/1000s using a DSLR for reference, and at 45fps you can clearly see the ghost frame trailing the UFO when Response Time is set to Standard:

There is some VRR flicker at 180Hz, but only in dark scenes in games. Cyberpunk 2077 is a prime example of this, at 144Hz the VRR flicker is greatly reduced to the point it's invisible to the eye, but at 180Hz, I found myself catching it more often than I would have liked.

This isn't a knock on the G34WQi, though, because the QD-OLED also has VRR flicker at its native refresh rate of 175Hz in the same games until I drop it down to 144Hz. Sadly, this is the generation we live in when using variable refresh rate tech on modern displays and I am hoping that the next gen of OLED monitors resolve this issue once and for all. Until then, 144Hz is the way forward, and you're not going to be noticing the difference dropping from 180 to 144 anyway, certainly not on an LCD based panel.

One last observation is that the VRR ranging when G-SYNC/FreeSync is active in a game. I noticed that the refresh rate range varied wildly on the G34WQi. Look at the below GIF, notice the actual framerate reported by RTSS is quite stable, yet the G34WQi's refresh rate VRR range reported by its OSD is all over the place with big variations in the lower and upper refresh rate range:

Meanwhile, on QD-OLED, the VRR range aligns with the actual framerate in-game which is exactly what I'd expect to see with a high performance VRR monitor:

It's like the G34WQi's overdrive circuitry is trying to keep up with the VRR range but just can't keep pace or something. Does this result in any noticeable downsides in motion in a game? Maybe, even with the fastest response time set in the OSD, there is still some hints of motion delay/blur.

Whether this is because of the above I can't say for sure. It could attribute to the VRR flicker, however. Maybe this is something Xiaomi could fix with a firmware update.

Conclusion

The G34WQi certainly has its flaws, then. It's also missing some features that are almost an expectation as a standard feature on a modern gaming monitor, such as a USB hub to plug in a mouse and keyboard or games controller conveniently rather than having to reach around to the PC case.

Having no speakers could impact some people too, as I know some do like to connect a console to their gaming monitors, and granted this means a 16:9 image only, at least desktop console gaming is possible this way. Not having speakers means you'd need to direct an audio cable from the console to an external DAC or amp or use the monitor's headphones out when console gaming or using another input source.

The issues might annoy some, but they also may not be an issue for others who just want a fast refresh rate monitor to play games on without a concern for much else. For that purpose, then, the G34WQi does the job well enough. At $246 it's cheap enough to be able to just write off some of the mentioned drawbacks perhaps.

At this price someone on a budget can enter high refresh rate gaming with a resolution of 3440x1440 that isn't quite 4K, but still good enough quality to be able to enjoy upscaling tech without the image quality traits that come with doing so at smaller resolutions due to having an even smaller internal render resolution when enabling those features in modern game engines.

It's worth noting that even though the price is budget orientated, the resolution does mean that you will need a more powerful GPU to push those framerates towards the upper end of that maximum refresh rate range in newer games.

I have an RTX 4090, and games like Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing won't even get to 144fps with Frame Generation enabled along with DLSS Quality. I'd have to reduce upscaling to Balanced or Performance to reach and then exceed 144fps if I left the monitor at 180Hz, and reducing upscaling render resolution means lower image quality. In terms of more recent titles, Hellblade 2, a game running on Unreal Engine 5.4, hits a nominal framerate of 136 fps, nowhere near the 180Hz/fps limit of the monitor's capabilities.

This poses an interesting question, for modern gaming is a budget but high refresh rate monitor a logical option? If you are on a budget, then will you be able to hit those framerates to then make use of that refresh rate range such a monitor offers.

The answer to questions like this will ultimately boil down to individual needs as always, but it's interesting to think about all the same.

Xiaomi has a well-priced monitor here, it is about as barebones as they come, but sometimes just the essentials is all that is desired, even if there are some compromises to either work around or simply tolerate.