This 8K ASUS monitor is a big deal in so many ways

Ready your Z9s, GFX Eterna 55s and Ursa 12K LFs, or maybe your Insta360 X4s and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultras. ASUS has a new 8K monitor on the market, and it’s something of a premium option. An 8K screen isn’t something you pick up on a whim, and you’ll probably already know if that many pixels will be helpful to your creative workflow or not, but the ASUS ProArt Display PA32KCX takes it to another level.

This screen, from the outside a perfectly ordinary 32-incher with a USB hub aimed at creatives much like BenQ’s 4K PD3225U, costs an eye-watering amount of money: £8,000. For the same price, you could fit out your studio with seven of the BenQ screens and still have a bit left over for pizza. This means it’s out of reach for most, a screen made for Disney or Wētā or any other large corporation making high-resolution video that doesn’t want to compromise. Its Mini-LED backlight gives it remarkable brightness, its colour reproduction is second to none, and with Dolby Vision support, you can play back that new Avengers movie you’ve been working on in its full glory.

Design & build

• Heavy and solidly made
• Decent adjustability

It focuses the mind wonderfully when the screen you’re trying to manhandle onto its stand costs this much. The ASUS ProArt Display PA32KCX is quite heavy, and comes with an appropriately robust stand, but otherwise goes together just like any other screen - a single thumb-turned screw to put the foot on the shaft, then a click as it attaches to the mount on the back of the screen.

There's a degree of adjustability in the mount, with tilt, swivel, pivot and height adjustments so you can get it into a comfortable position. The height adjustment doesn’t quite go high enough so that you can easily swing it into a vertical position, though this may not be a consideration for the screen’s intended uses until 8K vertical video becomes a thing, and this also makes it slightly harder to access the inputs.

It’s extremely well built, as you’d expect at this price point, but doesn’t make any attempt at chasing thinness: the bottom bar is chunky and made even thicker at the left-hand end where a flip-up colorimeter lives to help calibrate the screen, looking rather like a headphone hook but not able to hold the weight. It’s thick and has a large grille to let out heat, and a fan system to help keep it cool - it’s a bit odd to hear your monitor start making a whooshing noise, especially if you work in a quiet environment, but it’s not especially offensive, though it does carry on running long after the screen has gone into standby. Helpfully, it doesn’t use a power brick, instead plugging directly into the mains with a three-pin kettle lead, making it fast to set up.

Fast, that is, until you want to attach the screen shade, which comes in five individually wrapped parts with an extra bag of screws. This is a bit of a fiddly undertaking compared to building the rest of the screen, and feels flimsy once it’s attached, but is hopefully only something you’ll have to do once and will be worth it if screen-shading is necessary for your work.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Built-in calibration
• Easy to switch between presets

Aside from its fearsome resolution and brightness, the ASUS ProArt Display PA32KCX has a couple of useful features for the desktop. One is a comprehensive USB hub, which ties into the Thunderbolt 4 input to give you a single-cable connection that can charge your laptop at 96W and supports four further USB ports running at 10Gbps, one of them Type-C. That’s enough for a keyboard dongle, an external SSD... and it’s becoming slightly tricky to think of more USB peripherals as more and more items become wireless. Maybe a USB-powered desk fan?

You won’t need to plug in a USB colorimeter, as the screen has one of its own, which works with the ProArt Calibration app to help get accurate colours. Asus’ DisplayWidget Center app is also compatible, and provides a useful alternative to using the OSD to switch between colour modes (sRGB, AdobeRGB, DCI-P3, Rec2020 or custom) and adjust brightness.

You’ll need a Mac with an M5, M4, M3 Pro/Max or M2 Pro/Max chip in it, or a PC with a decent GPU in it to display 8K - the important thing is an HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.0 port on the back, or a Thunderbolt that can emulate one. DisplayPort 1.4 can manage 8K, but uses display stream compression which may be sub-optimal for your needs. Then you’ll need lots of graphics cores and tons of VRAM if you’re intending to render at this resolution.

Both Windows and MacOS adapt to the extra pixels well. If you ever tried hooking a Mac Pro (the Darth Vader’s Dustbin model with its Radeon Pro GPU) up to a 4K monitor in about 2013, you’d have found that the text was so small it could barely be read from a normal viewing distance. That doesn’t happen any more, the software has caught up to higher resolutions, scales nicely, and you get a lovely sharp picture.

Feature score: 5/5

Performance

• Excellent colour reproduction
• Incredible brightness

The panel is the big draw about the ASUS ProArt PA32KCX, and it’s truly excellent. Mini-LED offers brightness and contrast that can be better even than OLED, and with 4032 local dimming zones, it’s remarkably precise compared to other monitor tech.

ASUS claims 1,000 nits of sustained brightness across these zones, which is a lot and you’ll want to turn it down for general use. It shines in displaying HDR video, though good luck finding anything like that on streaming services - this is designed for displaying your own media, allowing you to appreciate every detail and graduation of colour. If you’re working in 5K you can have your video at native resolution with an interface around the edges, but for 8K you’ll need to go fullscreen.

Asus’ colour gamut claims seem more or less accurate: in AdobeRGB mode it will display 100% of sRGB, 95% of Adobe RGB and 100% of P3 showing up when we used our own colourimeter. SDR brightness topped out at a huge 965 nits at 100% brightness. Putting the screen in its Native and P3 modes produced similar results, with AdobeRGB coverage dropping off a bit.

And in case you were wondering, you can play games on the PA32KCX and they look amazing, and while the 60Hz refresh rate may look like a downer, it’s less of a problem in reality, as you’ll need a pretty powerful card and some Nvidia DLSS (other upscaling solutions are available) tricks to get there at 8K. We tried Cyberpunk 2077 in Ray-tracing Ultra mode on an RTX 5080 GPU, and saw an average framerate of 46FPS with upscaling but no frame-gen, which is playable, and you can get that to over 100FPS by turning frame-gen on. Overall though, this isn't a monitor aimed at gamers - we're sure an 8K gaming monitor is just around the corner, though.

Performance score: 5/5

Price

Obviously the cost is huge, enormous, too much. £7,998.98 in the UK, and something similar in the US and Europe. The idea of paying this amount of money for a monitor just won’t compute for a lot of people, and there are other 8K solutions, such as the Dell UltraSharp UP3218KA (£2,780ish), that you’ll immediately be drawn to if you really need this kind of resolution.

Value score: 2/5

Who is it for

• The big kids

This combination of a resolution few people need with an ultra-high price makes the PA32KCX a niche product. It’s a lot of monitor for a lot of money, but it’s more likely to be the sort of thing you’ll find at large media companies than in a freelancer’s shed.

Buy it if

• You need the 8K resolution
• You have the money
• You’ll make more money by owning it

Don't buy if

• Seven 4K screens sounds better
• You’re not Disney
• 120Hz OLED fits your needs

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