Acer Predator Z35P review: Huge, curved G-SYNC gaming monitor

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TA-ratings-88Your monitor is one of the most important parts of your gaming setup. Sure, your PC handles the heavy lifting, but without a monitor you’re not going to be able to see any of its hard work. We’ve been largely impressed with the recent monitor offerings from Acer, and today I’m looking at one of their biggest and baddest. The Acer Predator Z35P gaming monitor is huge, curved, and you’ll learn all about how it works in this review.Your monitor is one of the most important parts of your gaming setup. Sure, your PC handles the heavy lifting, but without a monitor you’re not going to be able to see any of its hard work. We’ve been largely impressed with the recent monitor offerings from Acer, and today I’m looking at one of their biggest and baddest. The Acer Predator Z35P gaming monitor is huge, curved, and you’ll learn all about how it works in this review.

Specifications

  • Screen Size: 35″
  • Screen Mode: UW-QHD
  • Response Time: 4 ms
  • Aspect Ratio: 21:9
  • Backlight Technology: LED
  • Panel Technology: Vertical Alignment (VA)
  • Tilt Angle: -4° to 35°
  • Swivel Angle: 20°
  • Maximum Adjustable Height: 5.12″
  • Maximum Resolution: 3440 x 1440
  • Standard Refresh Rate: 100 Hz
  • Color Supported: 16.7 Million Colors
  • Contrast Ratio: 2500:1
  • Brightness: 300 Nit
  • Tearing Prevention Technology: NVIDIA G-SYNC™
  • Speakers: Yes
  • Ports: HDMI, USB, DisplayPort
  • Operating Power Consumption (Energy Star): 65 W
  • Standby Power Consumption: 470 mW
  • Off-Mode Power Consumption: 420 mW
  • Height: 15.2″
  • Width: 33.2″
  • Depth: 5.3″
  • Height with Stand: 22.80″
  • Width with Stand: 33.24″
  • Depth with Stand: 12.16″
  • Weight (Approximate): 20.72 lb
  • Weight with Stand (Approximate): 27.56 lb

What’s in the Box

  • Predator Z35 Widescreen LCD Monitor
  • Displayport Cable
  • HDMI Cable
  • Power Cord
  • USB 3.0 Cable

Design

The first thing you’ll obviously notice about the Acer Predator Z35P is its size. The box is large, the screen is huge, the stand is substantial, and the entire package is just big. You know what they say though, bigger is better, and that holds true here. The 35” curved display is surrounded on all sides by just over ½” of bezel, which you’ll really barely notice once you turn this thing on. The Acer Predator logo and wordmark are centered on the bottom bezel. The bottom right edge of the monitor includes the control buttons including power, and five multi-function buttons, each of which will open the top level menu. Once you dive into the menu, on-screen prompts will further illustrate what each button does, providing a quick and easy way to insure that you’re hitting what you expect to hit in the various menus.

Acer Predator Z35P Front
Overall bad lighting in my basement explains why most photos will be stock photos. This thing is huge.

All of the inputs are located in the center of the monitor and all point upwards into the body of the display, which is overlapped by part of the outer casing. I generally prefer inputs that plug in perpendicular to the monitor as they’re usually a little bit easier to work with. On the Z35P it wasn’t too horribly difficult to plug everything in, though you’ll really only be annoyed with that step once, or likely very rarely.

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The back of the monitor features Acer’s Predator design cues with angular red venting on the top and bottom. The included dual 9w speakers fire up and out of the top vented area as well. The Predator logo and wordmark are emblazoned in large letters at around the middle of the left side of the back of the monitor (when looking at the back of the monitor). Just below that are four USB 3.0 ports and a USB input to power those ports.

Acer Predator Z35P Review Back
The back of the Acer Predator Z35P gaming monitor.

The stand is as sturdy as you’d expect, with a large V-shaped bottom, where the middle is just a bit wider and rises into the rest of the stand. A circular section about eight inches above the desktop allows the display to rotate 20° in either direction. Above that is the lift control which lets you raise or lower the display just over 5” total. On top is another handle allowing to more easily move the monitor.

Display

The Acer Predator Z35P display is just plain impressive. It’s obviously huge, allowing for multiple apps, tabs, etc. to be open at once and have sufficient screen real estate to work with. You can pretty easily replace a smaller dual-monitor setup with just this one display. The slight curve does provide a more immersive experience, though it’s still just very subtle and doesn’t take long to get used to.

Acer Predator Z35P Stand
The stand is quite sturdy to hold up the giant monitor (and my desk is a mess of cables).

Display features include blue-light reduction, Predator GameView, NVIDIA G-SYNC, Eco, Graphics, and Movie modes, as well as gaming modes for action, racing, and sports. Settings can be saved to three separate users, so you can either share in the fun with two of your friends or just set three distinct modes for three games that you’re playing. Game modes can also include a reticle aim-point in the center of the monitor if you like having an extra sight for improved hip-firing accuracy.

Performance

A DisplayPort connection will allow you to get a maximum resolution of 3440 x 1440 at 100Hz, while a sufficient HDMI setup will get you the same resolution at 50Hz. When coupled with an NVIDIA graphics card, NVIDIA G-SYNC keeps everything moving buttery smooth. The extra screen real estate just provides a great experience no matter what you’re doing. You get to see a much broader range of the environment in any game you’re playing, while even productivity software has plenty of room to spread out making multitasking simple.

Color reproduction is pretty spot-on to my eye, and there are plenty of on-board controls to tweak the color temperature, saturation, brightness, etc. to your preference. This is a gaming monitor by name, but boasting 16.7 million colors and 100% sRGB you’ll have good luck with gaming, design work, photography, and more.

Speakers/Sound

This is an area that has suffered on several previous Acer monitor reviews. While the on-board speakers here aren’t the best you’ll find anywhere, there does seem to be a pretty significant improvement in sound from other Acer monitor speakers. That’s a relatively low bar to clear, and you’re still probably going to want to use a good pair of gaming headphones or other external speakers for any major audio needs, but the speakers here will work in a pinch for some YouTube videos or other light audio. The score for this section will bring the overall score for this monitor down slightly, though do keep in mind that our reviews use an average of the scores for all sections, and leaving the speakers out of consideration would raise the overall score.

Price/Value

Anytime you hear something is priced at or over $1000, that’s going to initially come as a bit of a shock. The Acer Predator Z35P gaming monitor is priced at $1099.99, which is expensive, but this monitor does provide value for that price. The huge display, additional USB 3.0 ports, extensive settings and controls to make the display exactly what you want, and have I mentioned the huge, beautiful display? If you’ve got the funds in your gaming budget, I’d highly recommend adding this monitor to your arsenal.

Acer Predator Z35P Review with game straight on
Front shot with targeting reticle.

Wrap Up

A 35” curved monitor isn’t going to be for everybody. Shoot, this monitor may not even fit on your desk depending on your setup. However, if you can swing it, I think you’ll really appreciate what the Acer Predator Z35P offers. All the screen real estate you could ever need along with fantastic performance. It’s for these reasons that the Acer Predator Z35P gaming monitor earns a Techaeris Top Pick for 2017.

*We were sent a review unit of the Acer Predator Z35P for the purposes of this review.

Last Updated on November 19, 2017.

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