Review on AOC CQ27G3S Frameless 2560X1440 FreeSync 165Hz Gaming G3 Series Monitor with Adjustable Height and Adaptive Sync Technology by Kevin Seaton

This is an amazing monitor for my Mac mini m1 (34 inch IPS AOC U34G3X). First, it comes with an HDMI and DP cable. I used an HDMI cable to connect to my m1 mini and it gets a 100Hz refresh rate which is great. I tried 3 other cables to see if the frequency could be increased and none of them worked above 100Hz. If you want to use this with HDMI just use the cable that came with it or one you already have. I also bought a USB-C to DisplayPort cable that gets me up to 144Hz just fine. It's not ideal if you have to remove a Thunderbolt port to do so, but the included USB-C ports on the monitor partially make up for that. Love the fact that it has 4 USB ports, 2 are labeled Fast Charge. I have found that I can plug two unpowered USB hubs into the fast charge ports and they work well with low power devices such as a keyboard, mouse, webcam, security keys, etc. I haven't tried connecting to anything like a hard drive. The two additional ports appear to be faster than the fast charge ports. I ended up plugging in my 1TB SSD, which delivers about 9XX MB/s read and write speeds when connected to my Thunderbolt via USB-C. With a monitor connected, read and write speeds are around 38MB/s, which is decent if not as fast as the Flash. When I tried the fast charge ports for SSDs, they were so slow that they couldn't be used, so I'll use them for devices that don't need speed. All other ports on my computer are occupied and at best I could hook it up to a USB hub plugged into the USB-A port, but because of this the hard drive write speed is around 250MB/s and the read speed is 200 , so connecting to a monitor was the best choice. Even testing removing the hub and plugging the drive directly into a Mac USB-A gives the same speed, so it's oddly faster through my monitor than a Mac USB-A. The stand impresses with the number of degrees. Freedom allows you to move the monitor and switch to use even though you have one hand working with that monitor. Image quality is amazing, although colors look poor in certain situations with HDR enabled, but overall I appreciate how this mode colors everything compared to Normal mode. I use an app called BetterDisplay to tweak my monitor settings further than MacOS X allows, including custom HIDPI modes that scale everything to the perfect size that's not too small or too big. It also comes with monitor quality speakers, which as usual are low quality but at least loud enough not to worry about being too quiet.