Acer Predator Z57 monitor review: two 4K monitors in one, if your PC has the power
Table of Contents
The Acer Predator Z57 is a fairly ridiculous monitor (but we mean this in a good way). Most super ultrawide monitors measure 49-inches diagonally and offer a 5,120 x 1,440 resolution, which is essentially two 27-inch 1440p/QHD monitors combined together, whereas the Predator Z57 takes things to the next level: essentially being two 32-inch 4K monitors stuck together, with an overall resolution of 7,680 x 2,160.
The only other monitor we've seen with this resolution is the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC, which comes with more or less the same panel as the Z57, although this has a 240Hz maximum refresh rate, compared to the 120Hz limit on the Z57. On the face of it, this might discount the Z57 as the inferior product straight away, however when you consider how difficult it is to run games at an FPS above 120 on this resolution, it's not the immediate decider you might think it is, particularly as the Z57 can be found for around $350 cheaper.
Cast your eyes below to see how this hefty customer fared in our testing, and to see whether it’s worthy of a place in our best ultrawide monitor guide, or indeed, best gaming monitor guide.
- Refresh rate: 120Hz
- Screen Size: 57″
- Resolution : 7,680 x 2,160
- Panel type: VA with MiniLED backlighting
- Curve: 1000R
- I/O ports: 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x USB-C (90W power delivery), 2x USB-A (KVM Switch), 1x 3.5mm headphone jack
A truly colossal display, the Acer Predator Z57 is a fantastically immersive viewing experience for games in particular, although you'll struggle to find many that can run at the native resolution. You can always use it as a 4k screen with black bars at either side of course or reduce the in-game res to 5120×1440. The display also works well as a productivity machine, given the sheer amount of screen space it offers, as well as the respectable brightness and decent text clarity, plus 90W USB-C power delivery and KVM Switch.
The main drawbacks of this display are the blooming dimming zone issues you get on most Mini-LED displays on darker scenes, the fact you only get a 2 year warranty (1 year less than we'd like on such a pricey display), its colossal size and weight, and that it's limited to only 120Hz max refresh rate, although it is cheaper than the 240Hz Samsung alternative.
- Hugely immersive for games and video
- Enormous screen real estate for productivity
- Crisp, high-resolution image
- Respectable SDR brightness
- 100% sRGB coverage & high color accuracy
- 90W USB-C Power Delivery & KVM switch
- HDMI 2.1
- FreeSync Premium
- Cheaper than the Samsung alternative
- Limited to 120Hz (compared to the 240Hz Samsung G9)
- Dimming zone issues with HDR as with other Mini-LED monitors
- Only a 2 year warranty
- You'll struggle to run most games at the native resolution
- Huge desktop footprint
- Still pricey
Pricing & availability
Upon release the Predator Z57 was reportedly available for $1,700 from certain retailers, though the price seems to have increased slightly to around $1,750 on every online retailer we can find it listed on in the US. As discussed, this makes it around $350 cheaper than the only real competition for this size and resolution: the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC. UK pricing can be considerably more expensive for the Z57, currently being £1,799 over at SCAN.
Design & specifications
As discussed, this Acer uses the same Samsung-supplied VA panel as the Neo 9 G95NC, with the same 2304-zone MiniLED backlighting. This mini-LED tech ensures a higher peak brightness, but does tend to come with dimming issues in some scenes that push the HDR, as we'll discuss later.
The 7,680 x 2,160 resolution stretched over the 57-inch display comes with an impressively high pixel density of 140 DPI, which is greater than any OLED panels can manage at this size of monitor – hence why we haven't seen any 57-inch OLED superultrawides yet.
The 1000R curvature does a great job of wrapping this enormously wide screen around the user when you're sat centrally in front of it, and is the ideal curve we'd want in a screen of this size. Needless to say though the monitor still takes up a massive amount of space on your desk, so you'll certainly want to make sure you have sufficient room before you buy it, though the splayed-out tripod design of the base (with two very long front legs and a shorter rear one) at least offers plenty of space to place things in between the legs.
Adjustability is good, with a tilt of ±20°, a swivel of ±30°, and a height adjustment of 0-110mm. There's no pivot obviously, as there's no realistic way you could do so on a screen this wide.
The overall design isn't particularly striking from an aesthetics point of view, but neither is it ugly – it's your fairly standard dark grey and black fare, with silver Acer Predator logo on the bottom bezel and the front of the base. One the rear there's an elongated horizontal ring of RGB lighting that circles the point where the stand meets the monitor which can be controlled from within the onboard software.
The selection of ports and sockets is decent, though pretty much what you'd expect on a monitor of this size, crucially including two HDMI 2.1 ports for console gamers, but being limited to a DisplayPort 1.4 socket: this is what separates it from the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC which comes with DisplayPort 2.1, allowing it to reach those higher 240Hz refresh rates. Other than this you get a USB-C socket with 90W power delivery, plus two USB-A ports that come with an in-built KVM switch – useful for productivity.
The monitor comes with two 10W speakers, which isn't something you typically see in a monitor and is likely reflective of the extra room the designers had to play with on such a colossal screen. These get impressively loud for what they are, though as ever we'd still recommend getting external speakers and/or using headphones for the improved audio quality.
OSD, features, settings & warranty
The OSD has everything in it you'd expect, and is fairly easy to navigate with the controls. There are various settings like Pixel Sharpening (which we'd recommend disabling if you're just viewing text/web browsing) that can be used to tweak the visuals to how you'd like them, along with a good number of color temperature presets.
As mentioned the Predator Z57 comes with a KVM switch that allows you to more easily switch between different PCs that might be plugged into the monitor, without needing to swap your mouse and keyboard each time.
Picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture support means you can split the one monitor between two PCs if you like, with the visual output from each displayed at the same time (the screen is certainly big enough for this). The implementation of these features isn't as good as under the Tizen OS as used by Samsung however: rather annoyingly, picture-by-picture mode limits the display to 60Hz if you want to use the full 4K resolution for each window, or you can turn it down to 1440p to get it to 120Hz, HDR mode is also disabled. We'd generally advise using the FancyZones features in Microsoft PowerToys to help manage your window sizes better with this display.
The monitor comes with AMD FreeSync Premium, which is nice, and supports G-Sync.
You apparently only get a 2 year standard warranty with Acer for this display, which is a bit poor compared to what you see on the latest OLED monitors for example, although it's the same as on the aforementioned Samsung G9. Considering the great expense of this display, we would have liked to have seen 3 year coverage.
Screen testing & performance
Color gamut
As you can see above in the results we recorded from the DisplayCAL software, the Z57 presented an sRGB gamut coverage of 99.9% (which for all practical purposes is 100%) and also a DCI-P3 coverage of 91.7% and an Adobe RGB gamut of 91.9%. Note that these results were achieved by setting the gamut setting within the monitor’s OSD menu to ‘DCI-P3' – the ‘sRGB' setting within the OSD achieved significantly worse results. Based on these results alone, the monitor may be suitable for color-accurate work in the sRGB space, but not within the latter two gamuts.
Color accuracy, contrast, gamma & brightness
Below we've listed the results we measured when testing various presets found within the monitors OSD. This is not an exhaustive list, there are additional presets available, but we covered the main ones the user is likely to use.
The test measures for white point, black point, contrast ratio, average deltaE*00 (a measure of color accuracy), gamma, and brightness. In the top row of the table we've put what is considered to be the ideal value for each of these measurements, although to an extent this is just from a technical standpoint: the preset you subjectively prefer depends upon your own preferences when viewing different media on the monitor.
| Preset | White point | Black point | Contrast ratio | average deltaE*00 | max deltaE*00 | Gamma | Brightness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IDEAL | 6500K | 0 cd/m² | infinity:1 | 0 | 2.2 | ||
| Standard | 6420K | 0.1685 cd/m² | 2343.1:1 | 1.13 | 4.83 | 2.13 | 397.04cd/m2 |
| Racing | 6523K | 0.1309 cd/m² | 1476.3:1 | 4.18 | 7.62 | 2 | 192.90cd/m2 |
| Action | 6280K | 0.0694cd/m² | 2387.9:1 | 4.09 | 8.16 | 2.07 | 166.00cd/m2 |
| Graphics | 6524K | 0.1595cd/m² | 2481.6:1 | 3.93 | 7.63 | 2.03 | 397.15cd/m2 |
| User Mode after calibration (R:44, G:29: B:35, Brightness 24) | 7147K | 0.042 cd/m² | 2889.8:1 | 2.77 | 6.4 | 2.2 | 120cd/m2 |
Of all the presets we tested, ‘Standard' mode gave the best results, with a very impressive average deltaE*00 score, although the gamma was somewhat lacking. Still this is the setting we'd recommend using if you're doing color-accurate work.
As you can see in the bottom row we attempted to calibrate the monitor using the DisplayCAL software, after manually setting the color temperature within the OSD to the following: Red:44, Green:29: Blue:35, Brightness: 24. This led to improved black point, contrast ratio, and gamma, but the white point and average deltaE*00 suffered as a result.
The maximum SDR brightness we recorded was 403nits in the ‘Standard' preset, with the lowest being around 40 nits on the same preset. The brightness setting which most closely equates to 120cd/m² (the approximate value for natural light) was 31%. This is a respectable max brightness for a non-OLED display and means the screen should perform reasonably in brightly lit environments.
HDR brightness across 10% of the screen was around 1,301 nits, which is even better than the 1,000 nits claimed by Acer and a very good score indeed, meaning those bright highlights really pop with this display, thanks to the Mini-LED backlighting. That being said, in practise if you're viewing dark scenes with bright highlights the relatively low number of dimming zones for a display of this size (2,304 specifically) become apparent, as does the limitations of Mini-LED backlighting: it's no way near precise enough and you get a notable haloing/blooming effect.
Panel uniformity
When testing for panel uniformity we measure the consistency of luminance and color replication across the whole screen. Once again using the DisplayCAL software, the screen is divided into a 5×5 grid, with the central square acting as the reference point from which every other square is tested for variance.
Variance below 1.00 shows up as green (the ideal result) meaning a variance that is imperceptible to the naked eye. Yellow represents a greater degree of variance between 1.00 – 3.00, although at the lower end of this range the untrained eye is still unlikely to be able to notice any difference, and some yellow segments don't necessarily preclude the display from color accurate work. Greater variance (above 3.00) however is more of a problem, and shows up as red in the test.
As we can see from the results above, the majority of the segments came back either as green or yellow, although the two red sections in the bottom right showed a high degree of variance. Although this display is certainly good enough to game on, we wouldn't recommend using the whole display at least for color-accurate work, however the beauty of a screen this big is that you don't have to use the whole thing. If you can perform a similar test yourself on your specific unit and deduce where the weak points of it lie from a color-accuracy point of view, you can always just avoid those parts of the display when working on color-based workflows. Unfortunately given the nature of the panel lottery, there's no guarantee that our results will 100% reflect those of another Z57 display, so you'd need to do the test yourself to be sure.
Viewing angles
Although the Z57 is a curved display which does hinder your ability to view it from a side-angle, it's so big that viewing angles are still important: what's the point of such a humongous monitor if more than one person can't easily look at it?
Fortunately a VA panel means good viewing angles – the display is rated for up to 178° and in our subjective testing we found this to be accurate, with little perceptible shift in color and brightness as you moved close to this point.
Gaming performance
We gave the Z57 a spin on a few games including Doom: The Dark Ages, Horizon Forbidden West, CS2, and Cyberpunk 2077.
There's no getting around the fact that even a PC running an RTX 5090 GPU paired with an equally powerful CPU would struggle to run a demanding AAA game on high settings at the native 7,680 x 2,160 resolution. Generally speaking you'd be better playing at 5120 x 1440 (essentially the 1440p version of the same super-ultrawide aspect ratio), which is what we did for most titles, and it looks absolutely great, though this does beggar the question why you wouldn't just go for a super ultrawide with this native resolution for a cheaper price. Alternatively you could just play at 4K resolution and aspect ratio with black bars on either side.
General performance & productivity
Besides gaming, the sheer size of the Z57 means the vast majority of customers will be using it for general productivity purposes as well, as it's unlikely you'll be able to fit another monitor on your desk.
Text legibility is good on the VA panel, certainly better than on most OLEDs, which are susceptible to text fringing issues. The max SDR brightness is good enough for working in brightly lit rooms and the matte coating also helps in this with reflection handling.
The in-built KVM switch and USB-C 90W power delivery are welcome additions (though to be expected on a monitor of this size and price), and although we would have liked to have seen a couple more ports on a screen this big, the two additional USB-A sockets will do for most users.
In terms of color-accurate work, professional work within the sRGB gamut is possible, with the caveat that the uniformity won't be great across the entirety of the screen. As discussed, if you can test the uniformity yourself you can deduce which of the parts of the display to avoid and still have plenty of screen real estate to work in, given its colossal size.
Acer Predator Z57 monitor
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