MSI MPG321CURX QD-OLED Gaming Monitor Review

Look at what has just landed on my desk. It’s the MSI MPG321CURX, a 32-inch 240Hz QD-OLED gaming panel that we did a YouTube Short on during CES 2025, and they’ve just asked us if we wanted to take a look and yes, of course I said absolutely, get this thing to my desk now! And here it is! In all its glory, sitting pretty next to my 27-inch screen here, and yes I know I haven’t got enough space to mount the 32-inch screen on the wall, so I’ve opted to put it on its lovely stand for now, but we move. Let’s talk about it.

I mean look, this thing is an absolute beast and as soon as I could I got it onto the desk and was zipping around some Overwatch 2 and just basking in colour. Well, tell a lie, I tried to launch Indiana Jones but that failed miserably as that game is a little bit finicky to run. Its 240Hz refresh rate and VRR tech gave me some nice smooth images, and the fact it’s G-Sync compatible too helps, though it’s still only activated within that minimum 48Hz and upwards range, so it’s not technically a G-Sync monitor. I’ve played some Hollow Knight on here too and my gosh, the contrast on that game with the inky blacks and the bright character and effects, it looked really wonderful. The image is super sharp and really when either gaming or watching media I couldn’t really fault it, and again, content on Netflix, though not in HDR or I’m not watching in HDR anyway, is still nice and sharp and vivid and colourful. It’s just and all-round amazing experience and OLED gaming is just so good, and whether it’s here on a 16:9 panel or ultrawide I just love it. And the fact the panel is curved too gave me a bit of immersion, but at the very least it’s good for the peripherals if you’re looking at the centre of the screen.

Testing the monitor brought back a range of results depending on the monitor settings I decided to use., and the biggest disparity was with its colour gamut and colour accuracy. In its default Premium Color Game Mode, the monitor achieved a colour gamut of 100% sRGB, 95% AdobeRGB, 98% P3 gamuts and an average Delta-E score of 3.65 and a maximum of 7.46 on its colour accuracy. However, within this Game Mode you are getting a much more saturated image, like the ones you see being used inside of games like Warzone, and Overwatch 2 which helps with enemy placement as the red looks a lot more saturated to the eye.

Moving on to testing the User game, it garnered much better results when it came to colour accuracy, with an average Delta-E of 1.26 and a maximum of 1.92, and I must say I did it on this setting for the duration of my testing as it gave the most accurate colour results. However, the other image settings were not too far off this figure. The colour gamut however still sat at 100% sRGB though AdobeRGB slipped to 94% which is negligible and the P3 gamut still sat at 96%.

However in the sRGB mode, colour gamuts took a turn for the worse because of course they did because this mode is all about making your image best for sRGB gamuts, so that sat at 100% though AdobeRGB sunk to 75% and P3 down to 77%. Colour accuracy remained strong though with an average Delta-E of 0.98 and a maximum of 4.6 which was close to the User profile tested.

The last test I ran was for the AdobeRGB profile, which saw 100% coverage of sRGB and 95% coverage of AdobeRGB, 95% P3 coverage and 91% NTSC. Colour accuracy also remained on point too with an average Delta-E of 1.26 and an average of 1.26 and a maximum of 1.92. This is pretty much on par with the User profile, so between the two, you’re not going to really get much difference.

Moving on to brightness and contrast, at 100% brightness I achieved a 16,000:1 contrast ratio with a white point at 6,200. It’s DisplayHDR 400 compatible, and unfortunately, I’ve only measured half that here at 100% brightness. Turning on HDR inside of Windows too meant that my brightness setting was messed up, and although contrast looked great inside of games and also watching a bit of media on YouTube, I couldn’t get using the equipment here an accurate reading as I was locked out of all settings. So take that as you will. However I did just want to say that despite me not really ever being too much of a fan of HDR, this is by far the best implementation of HDR I have seen on a gaming panel, thinking about it it’s probably down to that 1000 nit brightness setting you can select inside of your settings, but when watching HDR content it was just so contrasty and just such a lovely experience.

Colour uniformity at both 50% and 100% brightness was decent, though there was a bit of a hotspot towards the bottom right hand side which was a little bit of a let down. Though the majority of the image was great. And when it came to Luminance uniformity, again at both brightness settings, it was flawless.

Using my OSRTT tool the results were as expected really, and inside of the 96.67 percent in window, I found the average initial grey-to-grey time to come in at 1.16 which is astounding but not outside of the realms of OLED and other panels that we’ve tested recently. And with little to no RGB overshoot, this panel is such a performer. And this even extended to a UFO Ghosting Test, where at 240Hz, I pretty much saw no ghosting to the naked eye. It’s ClearMR 1,300 rated which is decent and proves the monitor has gone through some pretty strict testing, but I will say that by dropping it down to 120Hz to match the types of refresh rates you’d get on a console, the monitor still managed to keep the ghosting almost non-existent really, but the little UFO characters did start to produce a little blur, but that’s to be expected. There was absolutely nothing wrong here with the way this monitor handled ghosting whatsoever.

The bezels are a bit chunky though and that’s all I’d really say about that. It’s bezel-less by design which is nice and premium looking but they’re just a bit chunky. It’s also a bit chunky around the back as well because it’s got a custom heat sync design to keep the screen from getting too hot. I get it, I really do as you see these TVs now with really thin screens with these chunky bits at the bottom. OLEDs must get hot, and the heat has to go somewhere. It means the monitor doesn’t need a cooling fan so I’m all for it. It does make wall mounting somewhat of an issue, and although it’s got a 100×100 VESA mount, the monitor can protrude a bit from the wall because of that chunky heat sync. It’s not a really skinny stand which looks great and very minimalist compared to the bulkiness of the screen and while yes it does take up some decent real estate on a desk, as you can see even though I’ve got it hooked to my gaming rig like this I can still fit my keyboard or my Stream Deck+ underneath it as it can be height adjusted and it can also be tilted and rotated too. The rear arm is pretty thick and looks great, but it is definitely hidden a lot of the time by this monitor.

Around the back you’ve got a pretty simple IO, with one Displayport 1.4a, two HDMI 2.1 ports capable of 4K at 240Hz. You’ve got a USB Type-B and two USB Type A ports as a small USB hub and a headphone out port. The monitor uses a kettle lead for power which I know is a bit silly to mention, but there’s no power bricks involved here so cable management can be kept to a minimum and there is a small hole on the monitor arm which can help feed the cables through to the back of your desk included. It’s got some RGB elements in the centre which works with MSI’s Mystic Light software so you can change its colour and effect, though it doesn’t really glow bright enough to fill your wall so I just left it.

I also quickly want to talk about the OLED panel care features here because while it’s got your pixel orbiting and refresh settings, it also does some very clever AI-esque features to do with taskbar detection and logo detection which will detect the shape of static images on your screen that have been there for a while and dim the pixels around that area to protect your panel from burn in. Of course I’ve not had this panel extremely long term to know if this works, but it’s great to see that MSI are taking into consideration problematic areas on screens. And apart from this, there are some gaming features you may like, like a sniper scope which puts a zoomed in area in the centre of the screen so it’s easier to headshot enemies, and even a built-in crosshair you can turn on and it automatically changes colour depending on the colour of the thing you’re aiming at. It’s got some console settings for auto low latency and VRR and things like that, so it does a good job of jumping on the gaming bandwagon with its features.

It’s a cracking monitor and I say this every time when I see an OLED panel, but I’m unsure on what else I can really say! It looked amazing, and for gaming especially, paired with that 240Hz refresh rate it’s super fast. Though it is 4K and 4K at the best times could be hard to consistently run at a decent frame rate, game dependant of course. But if you’re running through a game of Hollow Knight then it’ll look amazingly smooth. Red Dead Redemption 2 though? Maybe not so much. It’ll look stunning at 4K but the FPS will suffer. It’s a brand new monitor, as I said we looked at it as CES 2025, and it costs a small fortune coming in at £1,200 when I Googled it, so yeah it’s a pretty penny for sure. But as far as gaming panels go? Beautiful. Find more info here.