Acer ‎Predator X32 Fpbmiiiiphuzx Monitor Review

The Acer X32 FP has a heavy gamer aesthetic with a robust stand and a plastic body. It also has a removable headphone rack on the stand so you can easily store your headphones when you aren't gaming. Despite its gamer-friendly design, it doesn't feature RGB lighting to complement your gaming setup.

The build quality is okay. While it's built with a thick plastic casing, it doesn't feel premium. The bottom bezel isn't perfectly flush with the screen either, and dust can easily get stuck between the bezel and the screen. The best part of the monitor is its solid stand that holds the screen very well, so there isn't any wobble.

The stand offers okay ergonomics as you can adjust it in any way except to rotate it into portrait mode. There's only a small cutout in the stand for cable management, but it at least keeps all your cables coming out through the center of the stand.

The tripod stand takes up a lot of space, so you need a deep desk to place it on. Luckily, it holds the screen very well, as there's hardly any wobble.

There are three buttons and a joystick to control the on-screen display, and there's also a power button.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• USB-C cable
• Power cable
• Power supply
• User guides

The Acer X32 FP has an alright contrast ratio. While its native contrast is limited, the Mini LED local dimming feature helps improve the black levels next to bright highlights, which makes it a great choice for watching content in dark rooms.

While the white balance is still off after calibration, the red tint in the photo is caused by an issue with the interaction between the camera and the monitor. The red tint isn't as noticeable in person.

The full-array Mini LED local dimming feature is decent, and it has 576 dimming zones. You can set Adaptive Dimming to 'Low', 'Average', or 'Fast', which performs the best. It helps improve the black levels in dark scenes, but this also comes at the cost of some black crush, meaning it loses details in dark areas. Small highlights are also muted, which is worse than other Mini LED monitors like the Cooler Master Tempest GP27U or the INNOCN 27M2V, but this monitor also has a lot less blooming than the Cooler Master and INNOCN. Even when viewing from the sides, there isn't any visible blooming, which is great if you like watching content with subtitles on or if the content has bright objects against dark backgrounds. The local dimming algorithm also keeps up with fast-moving objects well, and it isn't very obvious when an object transitions between dimming zones.

The Acer Predator X32 FP has impressive SDR peak brightness. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare in a well-lit room, and besides some dimmed small windows, it keeps its brightness consistent across different scenes. These results are from after calibration in the 'User' Mode with the Brightness at its max, Adaptive Dimming on 'Fast', and Max Brightness on, which is the setting that lets the screen get its brightest. While the image is slightly brighter with local dimming disabled, particularly in smaller highlights, it isn't a significant difference, and disabling it results in worse picture quality in dark scenes.

The HDR brightness is amazing. While small highlights are dimmer than the rest, most highlights pop and stand out against the rest of the image. The EOTF is slightly dimmer than the target curve, but because there's a sharp cut-off at its peak brightness, it lets highlights reach their max brightness before your source does any tone mapping. These results are with HDR enabled, the Brightness at its max, Adaptive Dimming on 'Fast', and Max Brightness enabled, which is always on in HDR.

The Acer X32 FP has an alright horizontal viewing angle. Despite having an IPS panel, the colors shift much quicker than other IPS panels, and the image is inconsistent from the sides. It's fine if someone is sitting directly next to you, but viewing the screen from a wide angle is problematic.

The Acer X32 FP has a good vertical viewing angle. Unlike the horizontal viewing angle, colors don't shift as early when viewed from the top or bottom, so there won't be any issues if someone stands up next to you and looks down at the screen.

The gray uniformity is great. While the edges of the screen look a bit darker, it isn't distracting. There isn't any noticeable dirty screen effect in the center, which is great when viewing full-screen documents or webpages.

While the white balance is still off after calibration, the red tint in the photo is caused by an issue with the interaction between the camera and the monitor. The red tint isn't as noticeable in person.

The black uniformity is incredible when using the local dimming feature. There isn't any blooming around bright objects, but disabling local dimming results in noticeable backlight bleed and blacks that look blue due to the low contrast.

The Acer Predator X32 FP has good accuracy before calibration in the sRGB mode. While this mode limits colors to the sRGB color space well, not all colors are perfectly accurate, and the white balance is noticeably off. The color temperature is also on the cool side, giving the image a blue tint. The sRGB mode also locks some picture settings, so if you want to adjust those, you need to use another mode with oversaturated colors, as you can see here. If you want better accuracy before calibration, check out the Acer Nitro XV275K P3biipruzx.

The accuracy after calibration is good, but there are some issues calibrating it. Calibrating it with local dimming on causes the colors to be clamped way too much, as you can see here. To fix this, you need to calibrate with local dimming off, which results in the most accurate image, as you can see here, but that also means the screen doesn't get as bright as with it on. If you calibrate it with local dimming off, turning local dimming on again causes the white balance and gamma to be worse, which is what you see in the results. We chose to use these results because we expect most people to use local dimming, even after calibrating with it off.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. It displays all the colors needed in the sRGB and Adobe RGB color spaces. However, it oversaturates colors in Adobe RGB, which isn't ideal if you need to use that color space for professional photo editing. These results are from after calibrating with local dimming off and then turning it on, which results in a wider color gamut than if you were to calibrate it with local dimming on, which you can see here.

The Acer X32 FP has a remarkable SDR color volume, as it doesn't have any trouble displaying colors at a wide range of luminance levels.

The Acer X32 FP has an excellent HDR color gamut. While it displays a wide range of colors in the DCI-P3 and Rec. 2020 color spaces, tone mapping is off with each, meaning it doesn't accurately display most colors.

The HDR color volume is excellent. Although it displays most colors nearly as dark as pure black and nearly as bright as pure white, it's limited by its incomplete color gamut.

The Acer X32 FP has decent reflection handling. It struggles to diffuse glare from really strong light sources, like a window. Still, it also gets bright enough to fight glare in most well-lit rooms.

While the white balance is still off after calibration, an issue with the interaction between the camera and the monitor causes the red tint in the photo. The red tint isn't as noticeable in person.

Although it has a high pixel density, the text clarity is just good because it doesn't display text extremely well with Windows ClearType enabled. As you can see in the top photo, there's color fringing in straight lines. While this isn't noticeable unless you're sitting very close to the monitor, it isn't as good as other 32-inch, 4k monitors. The photos above are with Windows 10, and you can also see it in Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off. Even though Windows 11 has a better implementation of ClearType, there's still color fringing.

The gradient handling is incredible. You won't notice any banding in scenes with shades of similar colors, like a sunset.

While the white balance is still off after calibration, the red tint in the photo is caused by an issue with the interaction between the camera and the monitor, and the red tint isn't as noticeable in person.

Both FreeSync and G-SYNC compatibility work over the Acer X32 FP's entire refresh rate range via HDMI and DisplayPort. It also supports Low Framerate Compensation (LFC), which helps the VRR to continue working even when the frame rate of your source is very low.

The response time at the max refresh rate is great. With firmware update 2.00.015 released in June 2023, you can now adjust the Over Drive settings with VRR enabled, but leaving the overdrive setting off still results in the best performance as there's more overshoot with 'Normal' and 'Extreme'. If you haven't updated your monitor to the latest firmware and can't adjust the overdrive setting, you'll get overshoot with VRR enabled, which is the case with the entire refresh rate range. If it bothers you, try updating the firmware.

The Acer X32 FP has a great response time even at 120Hz. Like at its max refresh rate, it's best to leave Over Drive disabled as the other settings have more overshoot.

The response time at 60Hz is good. It's similar to higher refresh rates as leaving Over Drive off results in the least amount of overshoot, but there's still some motion blur with fast-moving objects.

The Acer X32 FP doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

The backlight remains flicker-free on all brightness levels, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker.

The Acer Predator X32 FP has very low input lag for a quick and responsive feel.

The Acer X32 FP supports all signals from the PS5 thanks to its HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. However, there are some issues with HDR, as the image looks very dim. You can try using the console's HDR calibration settings to make the image brighter, but even with that, it isn't nearly as bright as in HDR with other sources.

While the Acer X32 works with any signal from the Xbox Series X|S, you need to enable the console's HDMI override for 1440p @ 60Hz to work, which also disables VRR.

If you connect to your PC via HDMI or DisplayPort, you need to plug in the USB-A to USB-B cable to your computer for the rest of the USB hub to work. However, this isn't necessary if you're connected via USB-C because the USB-C port also serves as an upstream port, so you can transfer data through the other USB slots.

The Acer X32 FP works well with macOS, but some limitations exist. HDR is very washed out and dark, to the point where it's unusable. VRR works in the desktop, but games have a lot of flickering, and the screen sometimes goes black. It's better to disable VRR and HDR altogether with macOS. Luckily, windows stay in place when closing the lid of a MacBook and return to their original position when waking the laptop up from sleep.

Although the monitor doesn't have a physical switch for the KVM switch, you can change sources through settings in the OSD. Only the USB ports in the back of the monitor also work for the KVM switch. There are a few other features including:

• ACM: Adjusts the contrast based on the content.
• Aim Point: Displays a virtual crosshair that your game's anti-cheating tool won't detect, giving you a competitive advantage.
• Blue Light Filter: Reduces the blue light to help reduce eye strain.
• Max Brightness: Makes the screen the brightest possible
• Refresh Rate Number: Displays the current refresh rate of the display.

While the white balance is still off after calibration, the red tint in the photo is caused by an issue with the interaction between the camera and the monitor, and the red tint isn't as noticeable in person.