Setup & General Usage on the Gigabyte AORUS CO49DQ
Getting the AORUS CO49DQ setup is extremely easy. Using the included power and display cables go ahead and connect the display to power and then to either your PC or console. If you are connecting to a PC I would also suggest you connect the USB-B cable to your PC so you get access to the two USB ports on the monitor. As I mentioned I did mount this monitor on a monitor arm and even with routing my cables they did hang down a bit and are visible, which definitely kills a clean look. I think this is because the connections are so far on each side of the display you sort of have to route them back to the center of the display and they just hang a bit. I really wish there was some cable management on the back of the monitor to route the cables to the center so you really don’t see any of the cable mess.
When you turn your PC on you are going to want to go into your display settings and make sure the display is running at its highest possible settings. Our system uses an NVIDIA graphics card so we go into the NVIDIA Settings and make sure we are running at 5120 x 1440 at 144 Hz. Using the DisplayPort cable we have options for 60, 100, 120, and 144 Hz. You also might want to enable HDR. You can do this in Windows (Display settings) and the NVIDIA settings (under Adjust video image settings). With HDR enabled you can calibrate your display using the Windows HDR calibration tool.
This is a super-ultrawide so it is going to be amazing for productivity work. The 32:9 aspect ratio means that you essentially have two 27-inch monitors, but the best part is that there are no bezels. You can run two windows side-by-side easily, but for me I really prefer three windows side-by-side. I honestly don’t think I could go back to a monitor that is not this wide for productivity work. Also editing video on this display is so awesome as we have such a wide space for our timeline.
Text clarity has been something people have been pointing out on OLED displays. Basically if you have black text on a white background you may notice a red glare around the text. For some this makes an OLED unusable and can even cause headaches. The first day I used this monitor I sort of noticed this and it was a bit weird, but 2-3 days in I did not notice it at all.
The menu-system for the monitor can be accessed by pressing in on the joystick. Here you can access quite a lot, but below are the main settings. The menu system looks quite nice and is not clunky at all.
Gigabyte also offers their Sidekick software that allows you to change many of the settings on the monitor, but many settings are missing in it. Most notably the OLED Care settings and a lot of the tactical settings.
