The line between TV and gaming monitor has blurred. As HDMI 2.1 merges 4K, HDR, and high variable refresh rates with low input lag in Game Mode, the latest TVs are pretty well tuned for the next generation of game consoles. The Gigabyte Aorus FV43U lies in between the worlds of TVs and monitors, with a large 4K 144Hz screen that can go just about anywhere, HDMI 2.1, and HDR1000 all for $1,100. But is it worth buying over a more traditional desktop monitor or living room TV? We put one through its paces to find out.
Let's start with the obvious: at 43 inches, this is neither your typical gaming monitor nor your typical TV. While a few years ago, this might have been considered a normal size for a TV, 43 inches is practically unheard of in the high-end TV market today, with most worthy models starting at 55 inches and going up (with occasional 48-inch sizes for smaller rooms). At the same time, 43 inches is absolutely massive for a desktop monitor, so it works best in very certain types of spaces – I could see this being very at home in a dorm room or small studio apartment where you don't have room for a large TV alongside a typical monitor, and want something that can pull double duty for gaming on all platforms.
The panel itself checks all the right boxes for a monitor: 4K resolution, HDMI 2.1 with VRR, and Quantum Dot color with almost-full coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, perfect for matching its HDR1000 specification. Couple that with 144Hz and a host of gaming settings (like a shadow booster, aim stabilizer, overdrive motion, and spatial audio) and you have a display that is clearly designed for consoles and PCs. There are some caveats, though, and I'll get to them in the testing section below, including the mediocre edge-lit LED layout and the ever-fudgeable "1ms" quoted response time.
You can configure those gaming and picture settings using a traditional joystick button on the bottom of the display, or using the included remote, which is on the minimal side but has a few handy shortcuts for switching between inputs, picture presets, and sound modes so you don't have to reach your arm out during gaming sessions. (Switching inputs was occasionally finicky for me, bumping me back to the input I was using – but this is something I've experienced on other Gigabyte monitors as well, and it only happened a couple times in my testing.)
It uses a more TV-esque stand with legs on each edge of the monitor, and the IO – which includes two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C port, and a headphone jack – is on the side of the display. This layout allows easy mounting to the wall if you prefer it in a more TV-style setup, and in fact this is how Gigabyte presents it in marketing materials. (Though other similar 43-inch displays have been presented as desktop monitors as well as TV replacements, so it's clear these are designed to be used either way). The USB ports act as a KVM switch if you want to use a mouse and keyboard across multiple devices, as well.
To evaluate a display's performance, I run a series of tests in CalMAN Ultimate using an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter, as well as a few by-eye tests using Lagom's LCD test patterns. My tests started out on an impressive note: With local dimming turned off in the Standard mode, I measured a contrast ratio of 5156:1, which is fantastic even for a VA panel. That means blacks will look deep, rather than light grey, and I didn't notice much clouding around the edges either. This monitor has a local dimming feature to improve the black levels even further, but it's edge-lit rather than full-array, and I only counted four vertical zones, which isn't really enough to make a huge difference in most scenarios – but I suppose it's something, particularly in dark scenes where the whole monitor can dim itself down a bit. I'm always an advocate of white bias lighting to keep the blacks looking deep and even, as well.
In that same Standard mode, gamma adhered decently to the 2.2 target curve, though you can adjust the gamma to your liking using the on-screen display – if you're in a darker room, a gamma of 2.4 may help make the picture pop just a bit more, for example. The FV43U also covered 95.8% of the DCI-P3 color space, meaning it can produce vivid, saturated colors particularly in HDR content.
Unfortunately, accuracy of those colors left just a bit to be desired. Color balance was noticeably off in greyscale tests, and CalMAN's ColorChecker test averaged a deltaE of 4.4, with a whopping maximum of 10.9. (A deltaE value describes how close the color measured is to the color the monitor was attempting to target – a deltaE of 3 or below being ideal). I'd call this just barely "fine" for the average gamer, but if you value color precision, you may notice it's a bit off – in my case, the monitor had leaned too heavily into green tones. I was able to alleviate this by changing the color temperature to a custom value of R100, G93, and B98, which brought those deltaE values down to an average of 2.5 and a maximum of 5.6 (though it did lower the gamma as a result). Your mileage may vary with these settings, though, so don't take them as gospel. There is also full six-axis color control if you have your own calibration gear and want to really dial things in.
Note also that if you're playing games in SDR on a Windows PC, you'll want to manually change the color space to sRGB in your preferred settings profile – otherwise colors will be oversaturated in games due to the way Windows color manages applications. Setting the monitor to sRGB, though, would undersaturate HDR content, so I recommend creating one custom profile for HDR usage and one for SDR usage, so you can easily switch between them with the remote. (You could use the built-in sRGB picture mode, but it doesn't allow for any adjustments whatsoever, so if you plan on tweaking things to your liking, you're better off using one of the other presets with the color space set to sRGB.) This isn't so much a flaw with the monitor as it is a flaw with Windows' color management, and most other monitors will have similar drawbacks – at least the FV43U gives you a lot of tools to counteract it.
In other areas, though, the FV43U's built-in settings don't offer enough flexibility. Speaking of HDR, for example, this display performed better in HDR content than most other monitors I've tested, thanks to a peak brightness of 1042 nits on a 10% window (hence the HDR1000 certification). Coupled with the fantastic coverage of the DCI-P3 space, HDR produced a pleasant boost to performance, even if its local dimming is middling at best. But annoyingly, the Local Dimming setting locked brightness to 50, which is a frustrating and unnecessary limitation – in a dark room, I found this to be occasionally too bright, which meant turning local dimming off and sacrificing that better contrast ratio. Oh, and HDR mode locks pretty much all the picture settings entirely, which is a limitation I'm really tired of seeing on gaming displays. TVs allow for adjustments in HDR mode, why can't monitors?
Motion performance was a bit of a disappointment as well, thanks to a somewhat low response time. Blur Busters' UFO test showed quite a bit of ghosting behind moving objects, especially in darker transitions, though bumping the Overdrive feature up to "Balanced" helped alleviate this a little bit. The "Speed" setting was far too aggressive, producing noticeable inverse ghosting that in my opinion was worse than the regular ghosting produced at the Balanced setting, making Balanced the ideal setting at 144Hz – though you'll still see smearing in dark scenes of your games. If you're gaming at 60Hz, as most console gaming and high-fidelity PC gaming will be, the lower "Picture Quality" setting is the better option, as higher settings produce more inverse ghosting artifacts at lower refresh rates.
I was curious to try gaming on the FV43U, since it straddles the line between a large desktop monitor and a small gaming-centric TV. I put it on my desk for testing in place of my usual monitor, and when it came to doing work on the desktop, I found it much too large, as half the monitor was well above eye level, requiring me to crane my neck up to see browser tabs at the top of the screen. I expected gaming would have a similar drawback – but I was wrong.
Even at a fairly short distance, gaming at 4K was absolutely glorious on such a large display, filling your field of view and sucking you in like few other monitors can. I frequently use the opening scene of Shadow of the Tomb Raider as an HDR test, since it takes place in the dark Cozumel caves with bits of light shining through holes in the rock. HDR performed well in this scene, as expected, but what I didn't expect was the feeling of vertigo as Lara climbs up the rock to reach the tomb – seeing this scene at a larger-than-life 43 inches (from a close viewing distance) looked incredible, even at a more modest 1440p scaled up to 4K.
It wasn't all perfect, though. In games with less-than-stellar graphics, like Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS turned on, the flaws are more glaring at this large size than they would be on a typical monitor. In addition, the ghosting I saw in dark Cyberpunk scenes was pretty ghastly, again exacerbated by the size of the screen – which soured my experience somewhat. A bit of ghosting is to be expected with VA panels, but this was more bothersome than most of the monitors I've reviewed in the past year or two, negating some of the benefits it has over an HDMI 2.1 TV.
The speakers, as you'd expect, are nothing to write home about – audio was a bit muddy, and frankly too loud even at its lowest setting if you're sitting anywhere close to the display. While the spatial audio features definitely widened the soundstage, you'd almost certainly be better off with a small soundbar or pair of computer speakers rather than using the built-in audio. I also had a few instances where, after waking my Xbox Series X from sleep and launching a game, the audio would cut out entirely until I turned the monitor off and on again – though Gigabyte is fixing this problem in an upcoming firmware update.
Otherwise, the Xbox Series X ran just as smoothly as my PC, thanks in no small part to the HDMI 2.1 features baked into this display. Gears 5 looked gorgeous at 4K 120Hz in Versus mode, combining detailed maps with super-smooth motion as I swept the area with bullets. Call of Duty: Warzone was another great test of the new spec, since its 120Hz mode rarely gets all the way up to 120 frames per second – making VRR a must-have if you're going to play in this mode. (Now if only the PS5 would catch up and give us that VRR firmware update, already.)
That said, this isn't the kind of monitor you'd use for a competitive game like Warzone at a desk, thanks to the monitor's size and slower response time. You'd have to crane your neck to see certain parts of the screen, which is not ideal for competitive play. This is more of a "kick back in your gaming chair" kind of display, since it helps you keep the slightly longer viewing distance required for comfortable viewing at 43 inches (and even then, it felt a bit bright for longer sessions that close up – again, bias lighting would probably help alleviate eye strain here). Sitting further back is doable with a mouse and keyboard, but more comfortable with a controller, which makes sense given that this display is aimed at gamers using next-gen consoles alongside PCs. Whether you use it at a desk or as a TV is up to you – I'd lean toward the latter, though again, it works best in small space where its 43-inch size won't seem too diminutive.
And that's the other downside here: 43-inch gaming displays are sort of a niche product category. I'd argue it's a bit too big to be a traditional monitor for most people, and a bit too expensive for the size compared to be used like a TV – not to mention the lack of full-array local dimming that even midrange TVs come with these days. The FV43U has more gaming features and settings to tweak than any TV available today, but it artificially limits you from tweaking them in too many scenarios, like when local dimming is turned on or when in HDR mode. Given the $1,100 price tag, I'm not sure having an overdrive setting, aim stabilizer, and an extra 24Hz of refresh rate make up for these shortcomings over a similar or better performing 120Hz TV with full-array local dimming and a good Game Mode. If you have the space, I'd be much quicker to recommend a 50-inch Samsung Q80A or Sony X90J for a similar price. Heck, if you have a bit more to spend, the 48-inch LG CX OLED would stomp all over this, thanks to pixel-perfect black levels and a super fast response time. For most people, I'd argue a modern HDMI 2.1-capable TV is going to be a better all-around gaming display, and if you're the type of super-competitive gamer where every millisecond matters and a TV won't work, the FV43U probably wouldn't be the monitor for you anyway due to its slow response time.
Some people will really like this monitor's huge size – and if that's you, it'll do the job well. But if you sit far back enough that you can go up in size just a tad, an HDMI 2.1 TV will probably get you better bang for your buck.
The Gigabyte Aorus FV43U is available on Amazon and Newegg with an MSRP of $1,099.
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Aorus FV43U – Design and Features
Let's start with the obvious: at 43 inches, this is neither your typical gaming monitor nor your typical TV. While a few years ago, this might have been considered a normal size for a TV, 43 inches is practically unheard of in the high-end TV market today, with most worthy models starting at 55 inches and going up (with occasional 48-inch sizes for smaller rooms). At the same time, 43 inches is absolutely massive for a desktop monitor, so it works best in very certain types of spaces – I could see this being very at home in a dorm room or small studio apartment where you don't have room for a large TV alongside a typical monitor, and want something that can pull double duty for gaming on all platforms.
The panel itself checks all the right boxes for a monitor: 4K resolution, HDMI 2.1 with VRR, and Quantum Dot color with almost-full coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, perfect for matching its HDR1000 specification. Couple that with 144Hz and a host of gaming settings (like a shadow booster, aim stabilizer, overdrive motion, and spatial audio) and you have a display that is clearly designed for consoles and PCs. There are some caveats, though, and I'll get to them in the testing section below, including the mediocre edge-lit LED layout and the ever-fudgeable "1ms" quoted response time.
You can configure those gaming and picture settings using a traditional joystick button on the bottom of the display, or using the included remote, which is on the minimal side but has a few handy shortcuts for switching between inputs, picture presets, and sound modes so you don't have to reach your arm out during gaming sessions. (Switching inputs was occasionally finicky for me, bumping me back to the input I was using – but this is something I've experienced on other Gigabyte monitors as well, and it only happened a couple times in my testing.)
It uses a more TV-esque stand with legs on each edge of the monitor, and the IO – which includes two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C port, and a headphone jack – is on the side of the display. This layout allows easy mounting to the wall if you prefer it in a more TV-style setup, and in fact this is how Gigabyte presents it in marketing materials. (Though other similar 43-inch displays have been presented as desktop monitors as well as TV replacements, so it's clear these are designed to be used either way). The USB ports act as a KVM switch if you want to use a mouse and keyboard across multiple devices, as well.
Aorus FV43U – Testing
To evaluate a display's performance, I run a series of tests in CalMAN Ultimate using an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter, as well as a few by-eye tests using Lagom's LCD test patterns. My tests started out on an impressive note: With local dimming turned off in the Standard mode, I measured a contrast ratio of 5156:1, which is fantastic even for a VA panel. That means blacks will look deep, rather than light grey, and I didn't notice much clouding around the edges either. This monitor has a local dimming feature to improve the black levels even further, but it's edge-lit rather than full-array, and I only counted four vertical zones, which isn't really enough to make a huge difference in most scenarios – but I suppose it's something, particularly in dark scenes where the whole monitor can dim itself down a bit. I'm always an advocate of white bias lighting to keep the blacks looking deep and even, as well.
In that same Standard mode, gamma adhered decently to the 2.2 target curve, though you can adjust the gamma to your liking using the on-screen display – if you're in a darker room, a gamma of 2.4 may help make the picture pop just a bit more, for example. The FV43U also covered 95.8% of the DCI-P3 color space, meaning it can produce vivid, saturated colors particularly in HDR content.
Unfortunately, accuracy of those colors left just a bit to be desired. Color balance was noticeably off in greyscale tests, and CalMAN's ColorChecker test averaged a deltaE of 4.4, with a whopping maximum of 10.9. (A deltaE value describes how close the color measured is to the color the monitor was attempting to target – a deltaE of 3 or below being ideal). I'd call this just barely "fine" for the average gamer, but if you value color precision, you may notice it's a bit off – in my case, the monitor had leaned too heavily into green tones. I was able to alleviate this by changing the color temperature to a custom value of R100, G93, and B98, which brought those deltaE values down to an average of 2.5 and a maximum of 5.6 (though it did lower the gamma as a result). Your mileage may vary with these settings, though, so don't take them as gospel. There is also full six-axis color control if you have your own calibration gear and want to really dial things in.
Note also that if you're playing games in SDR on a Windows PC, you'll want to manually change the color space to sRGB in your preferred settings profile – otherwise colors will be oversaturated in games due to the way Windows color manages applications. Setting the monitor to sRGB, though, would undersaturate HDR content, so I recommend creating one custom profile for HDR usage and one for SDR usage, so you can easily switch between them with the remote. (You could use the built-in sRGB picture mode, but it doesn't allow for any adjustments whatsoever, so if you plan on tweaking things to your liking, you're better off using one of the other presets with the color space set to sRGB.) This isn't so much a flaw with the monitor as it is a flaw with Windows' color management, and most other monitors will have similar drawbacks – at least the FV43U gives you a lot of tools to counteract it.
In other areas, though, the FV43U's built-in settings don't offer enough flexibility. Speaking of HDR, for example, this display performed better in HDR content than most other monitors I've tested, thanks to a peak brightness of 1042 nits on a 10% window (hence the HDR1000 certification). Coupled with the fantastic coverage of the DCI-P3 space, HDR produced a pleasant boost to performance, even if its local dimming is middling at best. But annoyingly, the Local Dimming setting locked brightness to 50, which is a frustrating and unnecessary limitation – in a dark room, I found this to be occasionally too bright, which meant turning local dimming off and sacrificing that better contrast ratio. Oh, and HDR mode locks pretty much all the picture settings entirely, which is a limitation I'm really tired of seeing on gaming displays. TVs allow for adjustments in HDR mode, why can't monitors?
Motion performance was a bit of a disappointment as well, thanks to a somewhat low response time. Blur Busters' UFO test showed quite a bit of ghosting behind moving objects, especially in darker transitions, though bumping the Overdrive feature up to "Balanced" helped alleviate this a little bit. The "Speed" setting was far too aggressive, producing noticeable inverse ghosting that in my opinion was worse than the regular ghosting produced at the Balanced setting, making Balanced the ideal setting at 144Hz – though you'll still see smearing in dark scenes of your games. If you're gaming at 60Hz, as most console gaming and high-fidelity PC gaming will be, the lower "Picture Quality" setting is the better option, as higher settings produce more inverse ghosting artifacts at lower refresh rates.
Aorus FV43U – Gaming
I was curious to try gaming on the FV43U, since it straddles the line between a large desktop monitor and a small gaming-centric TV. I put it on my desk for testing in place of my usual monitor, and when it came to doing work on the desktop, I found it much too large, as half the monitor was well above eye level, requiring me to crane my neck up to see browser tabs at the top of the screen. I expected gaming would have a similar drawback – but I was wrong.
Even at a fairly short distance, gaming at 4K was absolutely glorious on such a large display, filling your field of view and sucking you in like few other monitors can. I frequently use the opening scene of Shadow of the Tomb Raider as an HDR test, since it takes place in the dark Cozumel caves with bits of light shining through holes in the rock. HDR performed well in this scene, as expected, but what I didn't expect was the feeling of vertigo as Lara climbs up the rock to reach the tomb – seeing this scene at a larger-than-life 43 inches (from a close viewing distance) looked incredible, even at a more modest 1440p scaled up to 4K.
It wasn't all perfect, though. In games with less-than-stellar graphics, like Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS turned on, the flaws are more glaring at this large size than they would be on a typical monitor. In addition, the ghosting I saw in dark Cyberpunk scenes was pretty ghastly, again exacerbated by the size of the screen – which soured my experience somewhat. A bit of ghosting is to be expected with VA panels, but this was more bothersome than most of the monitors I've reviewed in the past year or two, negating some of the benefits it has over an HDMI 2.1 TV.
The speakers, as you'd expect, are nothing to write home about – audio was a bit muddy, and frankly too loud even at its lowest setting if you're sitting anywhere close to the display. While the spatial audio features definitely widened the soundstage, you'd almost certainly be better off with a small soundbar or pair of computer speakers rather than using the built-in audio. I also had a few instances where, after waking my Xbox Series X from sleep and launching a game, the audio would cut out entirely until I turned the monitor off and on again – though Gigabyte is fixing this problem in an upcoming firmware update.
Otherwise, the Xbox Series X ran just as smoothly as my PC, thanks in no small part to the HDMI 2.1 features baked into this display. Gears 5 looked gorgeous at 4K 120Hz in Versus mode, combining detailed maps with super-smooth motion as I swept the area with bullets. Call of Duty: Warzone was another great test of the new spec, since its 120Hz mode rarely gets all the way up to 120 frames per second – making VRR a must-have if you're going to play in this mode. (Now if only the PS5 would catch up and give us that VRR firmware update, already.)
That said, this isn't the kind of monitor you'd use for a competitive game like Warzone at a desk, thanks to the monitor's size and slower response time. You'd have to crane your neck to see certain parts of the screen, which is not ideal for competitive play. This is more of a "kick back in your gaming chair" kind of display, since it helps you keep the slightly longer viewing distance required for comfortable viewing at 43 inches (and even then, it felt a bit bright for longer sessions that close up – again, bias lighting would probably help alleviate eye strain here). Sitting further back is doable with a mouse and keyboard, but more comfortable with a controller, which makes sense given that this display is aimed at gamers using next-gen consoles alongside PCs. Whether you use it at a desk or as a TV is up to you – I'd lean toward the latter, though again, it works best in small space where its 43-inch size won't seem too diminutive.
And that's the other downside here: 43-inch gaming displays are sort of a niche product category. I'd argue it's a bit too big to be a traditional monitor for most people, and a bit too expensive for the size compared to be used like a TV – not to mention the lack of full-array local dimming that even midrange TVs come with these days. The FV43U has more gaming features and settings to tweak than any TV available today, but it artificially limits you from tweaking them in too many scenarios, like when local dimming is turned on or when in HDR mode. Given the $1,100 price tag, I'm not sure having an overdrive setting, aim stabilizer, and an extra 24Hz of refresh rate make up for these shortcomings over a similar or better performing 120Hz TV with full-array local dimming and a good Game Mode. If you have the space, I'd be much quicker to recommend a 50-inch Samsung Q80A or Sony X90J for a similar price. Heck, if you have a bit more to spend, the 48-inch LG CX OLED would stomp all over this, thanks to pixel-perfect black levels and a super fast response time. For most people, I'd argue a modern HDMI 2.1-capable TV is going to be a better all-around gaming display, and if you're the type of super-competitive gamer where every millisecond matters and a TV won't work, the FV43U probably wouldn't be the monitor for you anyway due to its slow response time.
Some people will really like this monitor's huge size – and if that's you, it'll do the job well. But if you sit far back enough that you can go up in size just a tad, an HDMI 2.1 TV will probably get you better bang for your buck.
Purchasing Guide
The Gigabyte Aorus FV43U is available on Amazon and Newegg with an MSRP of $1,099.
Continue reading...