The age of OLED has arrived for gaming monitors, and Gigabyte wasn’t about to be left out in the cold. The Gigabyte Aorus FO48U is a gargantuan 48-inch gaming monitor with a color-rich 4K panel, 120Hz refresh rate, and a set of features that put it much closer to an actual actual computer monitor instead of a repurposed TV. At $999 and frequently on sale for less, does it have what it takes to beat out the competition?
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: the FO48U is ridiculously large for a computer monitor. Though it’s designed to function more like a computer monitor than a TV, which I’ll explain soon, the form factor and design are absolutely that of a small television. Instead of a stand, it has a pair of stationary feet and is completely non-adjustable. Instead of buttons, it uses a remote and single joystick that you’ll probably never touch to navigate the OSD. Its TV-like size also means it has room for large built-in speakers that sound more full and rich than any PC gaming monitor has a right to.
Using a monitor this size at a desk is a challenge, which is why there isn't a single picture on its product page that shows it being used that way. If you’re looking at this monitor for use on a desk, don’t let that marketing dissuade you. To achieve a comfortable viewing distance, you’ll need a deep desk or the ability to wall mount. In my case, I found about three feet to be far enough, which is more than most standard desks reach with leveraging a mount. If you’re using it to play games on your PS5 or Xbox Series X, you can set it up like a normal TV and be good to go. Despite its size, don’t let anyone tell you it’s not usable as a normal PC monitor. It absolutely is given enough distance, and you’ll have the benefit of stunning OLED picture quality to enhance your PC gaming experience.
In spite of its massive size, it cuts a thin profile. Viewed from the side, it’s easily the thinnest panel I’ve ever encountered on a gaming monitor – at least along its upper third. Below that it thickens out, but it’s still impressive to see just how thin Gigabyte was able to make that portion of the screen. That same slim design applies to the bezels, which makes the screen feel even more spacious, but leaves precious little room for character.
In fact, the only real trim you’ll find on this monitor is along the bottom edge and on the back panel. The chin has a simple metallic speaker grille and a centered Aorus badge above the power indicator light and OSD joystick. Around the back, a vent is cut in the shape of the Aorus eagle and a pair of glossy strips that look like wings. There’s no fancy RGB to light up your wall, which is a bit disappointing on such an expensive gaming monitor, but it’s not like you’d really be seeing it back there anyway. Instead, this monitor is all about the OLED.
For gaming and content consumption, OLED is at the pinnacle of display technology today. Compared to a traditional LCD monitor which uses a dedicated backlight to illuminate the screen, OLED displays control the light through individual pixels. That means that all eight million pixels can act as local dimming zones, scaling all the way down to complete darkness. Contrast is infinite and blacks are true, and because it applies to individual pixels, the effect can be applied with incredible precision for vastly improved picture quality and HDR performance.
The FO48U uses a 4K OLED panel, so games look about as good as it’s possible for them to look. Gaming at that kind of resolution demands a powerful GPU, but if you have the horsepower, it’s able to run at up to 120Hz with support for variable refresh rate with AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync. Even when you’re not gaming and are running the panel in SDR mode, the dynamic range is incredible. The display also covers 98% of the DCI-P3 and 130% of the sRGB color spaces, making it a good fit for content creation.
That kind of picture quality comes with some important trade-offs, however. Peak and typical brightness both lag behind top-tier LCD gaming monitors. While 1000-nit brightness is considered standard for true HDR on LCDs, the FO48U peaks at only 800-900 nits and only in very small sections of the screen. This isn’t as big of a drawback as it may seem, however, since the improved contrast more than makes up for slightly less eye-searing peak brightness. In side by side HDR tests with Gigabyte’s Aorus FV43U gaming monitor, which uses a 1000-nit VA panel, the FO48U still offers far better HDR performance and image quality.
The bigger drawback is that average brightness is much lower for browsing and productivity. Because of how OLEDs function, how bright it will be depends on what you’re doing, how big your windows are, and the settings you’re currently using. All OLEDs scale back brightness with the amount of white on the screen. Gigabyte rates “full white” brightness at 135 nits. It’s incredibly low but should be viewed as a worst case scenario. A monitor this size lends itself to smaller windows, which enhance brightness substantially. Likewise, any dark elements on the screen will increase the overall brightness. You can also leverage the improved brightness of the monitor’s HDR modes, adjust the Window’s SDR slider, and raise brightness and contrast settings. The simplest solution is also the most natural for a monitor this size: use applications in smaller windows. It solves the brightness issue and feels much more natural on such a large screen.
This is rarely ever an issue with games and movies. Since active content is rarely if ever a full white screen, you’re able to enjoy the full dynamic range and brightness the monitor has to offer and it’s spectacular.
Getting up and running is also incredibly easy. Since there’s no stand, setup is as simple as inserting two feet, securing them with a pair of screws, and plugging in your cables. If you need to wall mount it, it features standard VESA mounting points for a 300x300 bracket.
Around the left side of the monitor, you have the inputs and outputs. You have two HDMI 2.1 ports, a DisplayPort 1.4 with Display Stream Compression for full HDR and refresh rate support, one USB Type-B upstream connection, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB Type-C with 5V/1.5A fast charging support, a headphone jack, and a line-out for speakers. Console players beware: the HDMI ports are limited to 24 Gbps instead of the full 48 Gbps you would expect from a modern HDMI 2.1 port. It’s a baffling decision, and the lack of bandwidth will force your console to use compressed HDR (4:2:0) which won’t look quite as rich as a full-speed port.
The Gigabyte FO48U has a rich onscreen display with plentiful options to customize picture settings and enable gaming features. This menu can be accessed using the remote or joystick at the bottom of the screen. It's also accessible using Gigabyte's OSD Sidekick application, which allows you to make changes from within Windows.
While being able to make changes from within an app is ideal, OSD Sidekick is fairly slow to load and is prone to crashing unless you leave it running all the time. For quick changes, simply using the remote is convenient and fast. There are shortcuts built into the four directionals to access the full settings menu, change audio modes, and turn on an on-screen system monitor or timer.
Inside the main menu, the settings are divided into tabs for gaming, picture, display, PIP/PBP, and system. The gaming tab allows you to turn on gaming-specific features like the Aim Stabilizer or Black Equalizer to peek into the shadows. These features are best tied to hotkeys using OSD Sidekick to enable or disable them on the fly.
The Picture setting is where you’ll select your current picture preset and have the ability to change individual settings within each. Each preset features typical brightness, contrast, and sharpening settings, but also allows you to fine tune color balance with a six-axis equalizer, five different gamma presets, color temperature adjustment, and set options for sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color spaces.
Gigabyte includes numerous other options hidden in these menus, too. There’s a built-in wizard for setting up your KVM, and multiple sound modes to tune the speakers for different kinds of content (Standard, Arcade, FPS, Movie, Live Concert). You can enable DSC through the Type-C input, customize the directional shortcuts on the remote, manually trigger pixel refresh, and more.
While most OLEDs at this size are TVs, the FO48U behaves much more like a normal gaming monitor. It lacks the smart features and apps found on modern TVs, but for a PC user, not having a home screen and built-in apps is a non-issue. You may miss some of the advanced image tuning options those displays offer, however, but Gigabyte’s PC-first design works to its benefit in other ways.
For example, protective features like auto-dimming occur instantly when you maximize a window and don’t distractingly ramp up like they do with the LG C1. If you shut down your PC, the monitor will go into standby mode and not simply sit idle, rotating a screensaver. It offers a DisplayPort connection to easily connect to any modern graphics card and has features like a KVM easily swap machines, as well as a USB Type-C fast charging port. It also integrates with Gigabyte’s OSD Sidekick software, so you can tie picture settings to hotkeys to easily access them in game. Practically speaking, it irons out some of the pain points of trying to turn a TV into a gaming monitor and adds a few other features on top.
Gaming with the FO48U is outstanding. The massive size necessitates a big desk or wall mount, but once it’s in place, it’s an absolute treat for the eyes. The large size draws you into the experience, taking up more of your field of view. It’s not just the size that sells it, though: it’s the incredible picture quality.
If you’ve never gamed on an OLED screen before, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. I found myself getting hung up, admiring scenes I’d moved past dozens of times in games before. Whether it was the glowing, shadowy halls of the Oldest House in Control or the hauntingly ethereal swamps of Nazmir in World of Warcraft, the dynamic range possible on this monitor is breathtaking.
On an OLED display, every pixel is essentially a local dimming zone with independent brightness control, right down to turning itself off. Contrast is infinite, which means blacks are richer and inkier than even the best LCD monitor, and HDR performance is dramatically enhanced. Though it admittedly can’t get as bright, the dynamic range is tremendous. There’s more detail hidden in the shadows, more nuance tucked into the whites. Paired with the outstanding color coverage, games are incredibly vivid. Sure, I would have liked to see the monitor hit 1000-nits like Gigabyte’s FV43U gaming monitor, but its HDR performance is clearly superior.
This also makes it an excellent choice for watching HDR movies, TV shows, and really, consuming content in general. The image quality makes doing everything from pulling out a win in Valorant to binging YouTube videos a unique treat. I spent hours just tweaking animated wallpapers for my desktop so it could look that good all the time.
The nature of the technology also makes it an outstanding display for competitive gaming. While the best LCD gaming monitors boast 1ms response times, OLED pixels refresh at 0.01ms – a thousand times faster. It’s no surprise then that ghosting just isn’t an issue on this monitor. On the Blur Busters UFO Test, there was none to speak of and only minor overshoot on the bottom row that is completely imperceptible without a high-speed camera.
Gameplay is buttery smooth thanks to the monitor’s combination of 120Hz refresh rate and support for Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync. I would have liked to have seen a jump to 144Hz to have parity with the Aorus FV43U, but the difference is hard to notice in actual gameplay. It’s a major jump from 60Hz and only a nominal downgrade from 144Hz.
While it’s an outstanding choice for PC gaming, it’s less so for productivity. There are a number of panel protection features built into the monitor that can be distracting when you’re trying to get work done, and there are issues with text clarity too. While you can remedy some fuzziness around the edges of text with Microsoft ClearType, you can’t do much to avoid frequent brightness changes and the nagging risk of burn-in with still images on your screen.
Like all OLEDs, the FO48U tries its hardest to keep itself from dying a premature death or raising your electricity bill. Since every pixel has a limited life span (and ability to wear unevenly and burn-in), Gigabyte employs an Auto Brightness Limiter (ABL) that progressively dims the screen the more white there is. This is a very common feature on OLED screens to limit heat, power, and protect the panel, but is especially noticeable here since the FO48U isn’t the brightest to begin with.
Gigabyte also uses an Automatic Static Brightness Limiter (ASBL) that attempts to dim the screen when it’s not being used. After five minutes of inactivity brightness drops by 30%. It dips to 50% brightness after ten minutes, and displays a screensaver after 15. These are good features for the longevity of the panel, but typing emails or essays isn’t enough “activity” to prevent automatic dimming from kicking in. You’ll need to move your mouse or change windows periodically.
On paper, these issues sound like deal breakers, and they may be for some. The LG C1 isn’t as aggressive as the FO48U with its ABL dimming and is able to maintain a higher sustained brightness in normal use. In practice, the impact is less than it first seems. Given how large the monitor is, it rarely makes sense to use the full screen for a single window, and even just splitting the monitor in half doubles its brightness. Likewise, the dimming effect when typing is gradual. I often didn’t notice it until well after it had set in, and simply Alt+Tabbing reset it back to full brightness.
The bigger issue is the risk of burn-in. When used as a productivity monitor, it’s far more likely that static elements will appear on the screen, especially if you keep your smaller windows in the same place with Snap Layouts. To prevent this, the monitor runs a pixel refresh cycle after four hours of use, once it’s been turned off. After 1500 hours, it runs a longer, more intense refresh cycle for about an hour. Interestingly, there is no pixel shift behavior like we saw on the Alienware AD3423DW, which is another common protection feature on OLED monitors. Even with these protections in place, burn-in is a concern with all OLEDs and you should take steps to avoid static elements, like hiding your taskbar and desktop icons, and using an animated wallpaper.
Compared to other options on the market, the FO48U’s brightness trade-offs present a real conundrum. Its peak and sustained brightness is more limited and the built-in options are less than you’ll find on a competing smart OLED TV. At the same time, it behaves like a normal gaming monitor and doesn’t require as much tweaking to use with a gaming PC. It can also frequently be found for less than similarly specced competitors like the LG C1 or Ultragear 48GQ900, going as low as $799 in the month preceding this review. If you’re considering spending that much on a monitor, increasing your budget to avoid some of the FO48U’s quirks isn’t unreasonable, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not a great monitor in its own right.
The Gigabyte FO48U is currently available for $999 at Amazon and Newegg. Throughout the month of August, purchases made through Newegg are eligible for a $100 mail-in rebate.