MSI MAG342CQR Reddit Verdict: Great Deal or VA Nightmare?

I'm sure those 4 screws could hold your body weight in shear or tension just fine. Engineer here. Not going to break out any calcs, but just know a little metal goes a long way, and that monitor isn't that heavy.

Working on a sim rig and the deal with the wife was it had to go in the basement, yet I don't want to lose a monitor upstairs. This feels like it will be a decent size to mount until I find a deal on something larger, plus gotta love Walmart and easy returns!!

It seems like a great choice, good reviews. Only a VA panel...but I mean for a basement sim setup you dont need much more.

Cool a monitor that I've owned before. If anyone has any questions then I'll be happy to answer. Also VA smearing is not that bad on this monitor. I've had multiple VA monitors and this one was actually really good at handling the VA smear. It's not as good as a IPS panel (obviously) at handling the smearing effect but it's still good.

I just got a cheapo 165hz 34 curved VA for $169 and it looks pretty damn amazing. Very nice color and contrast and no smearing. I also have a 65 inch oled next to the monitor and I am shocked its not that much worse. Only thing is some backlight bleed on the 4 corners that is gone when displaying stuff.

I used a Dark Matter 34" Ultrawide monitor for a couple years. It came with the same type screws for use with a VESA mount. Never had a single issue.

Definite upgrade in terms of size 29" to 34". Pixel density is an upgrade as well 105ppi to 110ppi. IPS to VA panel has its trade-offs which don't really compare to OLED but you're saving hundreds with this monitor.

I have 2 of these both running great, would recommend to anyone who's looking for an ultra wide monitor.

I had this monitor for a week and have to return it. The text on screen when is just horrible. The text is not smooth to look at like when you are browsing reddit.

Got this monitor as well, the ghosting is abyssal and brutal.

Majority of people won't ever notice it anyway and if your budget is tight, it's an excellent option. I've used my 40" 4K VA Monitor for 7 years now and never found it an issue. I'm looking at some Ultrawides right now to get something different after all these years and this MSI is looking like a decent option.

It's got a lot of ghosting on darker objects out of the box. It's a decent monitor overall. UI is a little annoying to control though. If you turn response time to the fastest it removes some of the ghosting, but it's still there. I'm comparing it to my Samsung Odyssey G7, 1440p 240hz VA panel also. It obviously has more ghosting than that.

It's awful. While this would have been my first ultrawide monitor I sent it back the same day. The ghosting is just unacceptable. You can't scroll through a website without noticing it. In game anything with even slightly high speed movement will seem a blurry mess. I thought my previous monitor had bad ghosting but this is honestly just pure garbage.

Has anyone managed to find good settings to make the most of this screen while avoiding ghosting? Am I the only one who finds the HDR management completely rotten?

Yes you are good to use the VESA screws. I used the same screws for my setup.

I've had this for a few months, great gaming monitor.

All VA will have some sort of ghosting, that's the unfortunate drawback of the monitor's method to reach high contrast.

Curved 34" VA panel, reviews seem alright.

Did you get the ghosting fixed through settings or did you get a whole new monitor? That's pretty alarming feedback.

Want to say I purchased from Newegg and returned it because I couldn't stand the black smearing on the VA panel. Bad enough I didn't mind paying the $70 restocking fee. There was also flickering with adaptive sync when crossing 48fps point, which happened often due to 1% lows in some games.

Nice screen for the price, 2k and 144hz ultra-wide is awesome! Bad Ghosting! I bought one on February 9th, 2021. It had 3 or 4 dead pixel. So I returned it and received the new one 4 days later. I noticed some pretty bad ghosting on 144hz so I kind of hoped the new one would also fix that. Nope. The Ghosting is still very apparent with white text on dark background.

I just got mine yesterday and played around with it for a bit. I didn't notice much for ghosting in games, I had to really look for it and specifically look at certain areas and make the certain movements to notice it. But just playing and not focusing on it I couldn't tell.

Just got mine earlier today, it is amazing idk if i got lucky but there's absolutely no backlight bleed at all and the monitor looks great.

Had both, still have the AOC. I don't know why but the msi just looked awful in comparison, text wasn't as sharp, colours were awful and it felt slower. Tried all sorts of settings, cables, fresh windows installs, hard resets and it just never looked good at all. And that was being compared to the AOC which while good, is far from the best ultrawide out there.

MAG342CQR is horrible. I had it and I hated it. Black smearing on that monitor is horrendous.

I do game on the setup however only really play MW3 currently. I run it at 144Hz via DP connected to a 16GB 4090 laptop card. I will say I haven't noticed anything with the settings it's running on. 21:9 res 3440x1440 @144Hz. It never stutters and is quite a sharp picture.

Mine arrived at the weekend. I love it. My previous was a very basic 1080p 27 inch, so I dont have anything to compare it to, but I am more than happy with it.

I bought this monitor a couple days ago and I've been blown away by how beautiful the display is. Ghosting is bad on blacks, but this is at 100hz — it mostly goes away by turning your brightness up 1 or 2. Got it running at 180hz at 8 bit colour now.

Been using it more than a month and it is great for me.

The CQR has 10 bit panel bit depth, 4000:1 contrast and 14ms average response time (1mprt) and 2x HDMI 2.0 and a DP 1.4 connection, which is better than the CQRV on paper. This one has been great so far and everything works flawlessly. There can be some glare if a light is behind you but other than that everything else is good. I would recommend it.

I love it so far, no complaints! Other people who are used to high-end monitors could probably pick out flaws/other issues but for its price range it's really good imo.

I bought it, nice for its price but I suggest going for the CQR since it's the same price but better on paper.

Got the monitor yesterday. PC use — it's great, got the 3440x1440 resolution and 144hz using displayport with no issues. 2020 Macbook pro recognized the correct resolution and allowed me to use 3440x1440 however only at 50 Hz via HDMI through a dock.

I have the 100hz version, and it's been pretty solid.

I ordered one too. Seems almost too good to be true... lol

Thanks for saving me the trouble, this was my biggest concern. Wanted a decently cheap ultrawide for gaming but I should've known this was too good to be true.

You are 100% right. You won't notice any problem while gaming 99% of the time. I happen to play path of exile which has a lot of white text on dark background that moves around the screen and it's extremely visible. The other games I played I had no complaint. The monitor is a little bit more blurry on fast action than my other 144hz 1080p monitor but you seriously get used to it very fast.

Well it's time for a monitor upgrade. Was looking at 32" UW but I found this 34 on sale for about the same price. This post convinced me to get one. Nice setup!

Bro chill, I bought the same one this week and it works fine. You probably got a defective one.

This one was one of my few choices, but I chose Asus TUF VG34VQL3A. 300 cd/m on MSI is too low for me.

Out of the box it looks great and has a quality feel to it. Was easy to setup and came with a display port cable. No dead pixel out of box. Just one dimmed pixel in the top left corner that's only visible with a white screen and have to look really hard for it. Screen looks sharp.