Arctic Z2 Pro Monitor Stand Review

A small lip on the top of these mounting arms allows the VESA mount plate to slide on, before being secured to the arm by two screws further down. This means it's pretty quick and easy to swap out a monitor. The VESA mounts themselves cater for both 100mm and 75mm types and these worked fine on our 22in and 24in monitors.


The stand is very sturdy and uses a simple clamping mechanism to secure to your desk. The only downside here is that for particularly deep desks, the stand base and subsequently the USB 3 ports, are too far away to be easily accessible, although you could just run a hub from one of the ports closer to you and use the others to provide USB connectivity for your monitors or other desktop devices.


Our 75mm VESA monitor was simple to mount. However, our Dell U2412M had an inset mount and the mounting plate couldn't fit inside with its arms protruding over the edges. Thankfully Arctic has thought of this too, and provides a range of spacers and screw lengths that you can use to raise the mounting plate to a level that suits, then bolt it down.


It's a great solution that worked a treat with our U2412M so we're pretty confident in saying that the Z2 Pro should be compatible with a wide range of VESA-equipped monitors, be they 75mm or 100mm type mounts.


The ball and socket joints can be locked into position using three screws. This proved to be a little tricky as you can't easily do this while the monitor is on the stand as it either droops as soon as you put it on, or is stuck fast. However, we found it was easier to adjust the ball and socket to a point where the monitor could be moved with a little force but didn't droop when we attached it. Once you've set it up like this, you likely won't have to tweak it again.


Typically we didn't have a duo of identically-sized monitors to hand when writing this review but our 22in and 24in models show the score. It's a bit of a shame you can't independantly adjust the height of each monitor arm as you're essentially stuck with however the differing sizes line up. As such, you'd be well advised to opt for identical monitors as even different models of the same size can be different, making lining them up perfectly impossible although as we said very few stands we've seen offer this.

Conclusion

The Z2 Pro is fantastically well-made and sturdy and at less than £60 it's very reasonable too. We have just a couple of quibbles, which are that the USB 3 ports on the stand aren't ideally located to use regularly and are more suited to powering fixed devices such as hubs or external hard disks. Also, the stand doesn't have independent height adjustment for each monitor but this is only likely to be an issue if you're not using identical monitors plus it's only available on far more expensive stands anyway. The Z2 Pro is otherwise one of the sturdiest stands we've seen and offers excellent compatibility with a range of VESA mount types and sizes too.