Have you been looking for an actually decent ultra wide for gaming? Well, the
from Cooler Master
might just be it. It's ultra wide, 3440 by 1440p, so 21 by 9. It's got 144 hertz
refresh rate and the motion pixel
response time. Ah.
It's rated at half a millisecond. It's curved, 1500 radius curvature. Oh my
god, why is this one so hard to get out of the box? HDR 400, which
isn't very good, admittedly. It's a VA panel.
So, there's like a lot of pros and also some cons with this one, so I don't know
how to feel about it yet. However, at $650, it's actually kind of a good deal.
At least it seems like it based on the specs on the box. It covers 98% of the
DCI-P3 color space because it's got quantum dots. I haven't seen quantum
dots on a VA panel, so I don't know what to expect really, but honestly, it
should be okay at the very least, especially for that price. As for
packaging, it's pretty standard, you know, you've got your foam case and then you've got a bit of a foam sleeve around
the whole display. We've got our stand. We've got our base. I'm really excited.
It's got RGB, but it's not on the back of the panel like most of these guys do
it. It's on Whoop. I'm really excited because it's got this diffusion layer
and it's all along the base instead of being on the back. I don't know if
that'll be a terrible idea and super distracting while gaming, but at the
very least you're not going to get like Oh, it's got RGB on the back and then you like can't even It doesn't even
reflect off the back cuz it's not very bright. I don't know. I'm kind of stoked
to at least see it. Goes together pretty easy just like uh most higher-end gaming
monitors. It's got my handy favorite
uh captive screw. Look at that. I already look at Look, it's the Cooler Master logo. I love it. We have a
sleeved USB-C No, it's not even USB-C. What the
hell is this thing? This is like micro USB. What the I am genuinely perplexed.
Why it's A to like micro I guess I got
to read the quick start guide. Yep, that's all the things. Okay. Okay. Okay,
whatever. We'll plug it all in and see where that cable goes. Um
kind of a weird choice. I don't know why they didn't just choose USB-C. The IO on
this thing is actually pretty good. I took a quick look earlier. That's why I
got so excited about the USB-C. It can do DisplayPort 1.4 over it and up to 65
watts of power delivery. So, you can just like plug a laptop into this thing
and boom, you got a display out and you've got power. Oh, there's four speakers. I like how you can clearly see
them. Whoa. It's not very heavy, probably like 20
pounds or so. Let's get all these peels off for all those gamer RGB. It looks
like there's RGB on the back of the display, too. I'm not 100% sure, but if you look at
here, I don't know why it's glossy for like no reason. I had to take peels off
of it, so I'm guessing that this is also RGB. Uh Kensington lock. These are headphone
hangers and they like come out when it's on or something like that. Oh, USB-A.
Nice. I love it when they put USB-A ports either on the side or like right
on the bottom or something. Anything where you don't have to like move the whole monitor and plug it in through the
back is always good. Let me get more of these off. This comes with a lot of
peels. Wow.
It's a lot of peel around the bezel. This is like borderline annoying. This
thing does have some like height adjustment and well Oh, the
spring's really light. I don't know cuz like here, I just
Yeah, a little too light on the spring for the stand for height adjustment
stuff. You might have to be a little Oh, yeah, see look, I'm trying to put it midway. It just falls. All right, so
you're either probably going to have to use this thing all the way down
or all the way up and it seems okay. If you want height adjustment in the
middle, you're kind of hooped, so that's definitely something to consider.
Although, I'm pretty sure when installing this, it looked like regular 100 by 100 VESA mounts, so maybe just
put it on an ARM or a desk clamp or something. Maybe there's a spring
somewhere to tighten, but it doesn't tell me in here and damn it, I don't see
one anywhere. So, uh buyer beware, I guess. That's one It's a really minor
thing, but uh still though, you think if you get a height adjustable stand, you'd
be able to adjust it exactly how you want instead of like I'm not Promise
it's not magic, I'm just letting it go. Plenty of IO here. There's our power plug there. It's just a C13, so that's
like really easily uh exchangeable with any other power cable. We've got HDMI,
two ports. I think they're just HDMI 2.0, I don't think it's 2.1, but it's
not 4K 120, so who cares? Uh DP 1.4,
USB-C and USB-B and a headphone jack.
The one really cool thing about this USB-C, like I said, is it's got the DisplayPort and the power delivery. So,
you can just like plug a laptop into this thing and all of a sudden it's your secondary display.
You don't need it anymore, take the laptop away. You're good to go. Other than the lack of good height adjustment,
the stand is actually pretty decent. It's got a lot of swivel, a fair amount,
honestly, for a display this size. And then, you can
like tilt it up and down to angle it better
at yourself, especially if it's all the way up or all the way down. But other
than that, it's not bad. It's a little It's actually not too wobbly. The
display itself is a tiny bit wobbly on the stand, but the stand itself is
pretty sturdy. What I really want to do though is I want to see this RGB, but I
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UGREEN in the link in the description below. I'm not entirely sure what the
point of this thing is. It looks like it's just an indication light because it's definitely not the power button. Uh
that was on the back with the navigation nipple that we know and love. A rubberized one at that, so it seems like
that's a bit of a trend that everyone's kind of adopting, which I am a fan of. I
don't like the RGB on the stand.
In the pictures, maybe because it's eye level, it looks like the bottom
diffusion around here is a lot more prominent, but instead, all you really
see is this inner light here. Um I don't really see this unless I like lean all
the way back or something. I think it's fine. The problem is when you're like
sitting right here, it's just this whole thing just completely goes away and then
all you see is this inner light. I don't hate it. I'm actually okay with it. It's
just I was expecting something a little nicer uh from the pictures I saw, it
looked more like the bar came all the way out to the outside area of the stand
and instead it's very inside. I don't know why they did that. Maybe to make it
less distracting. I think if you took it off the desk pad
If you take it off the desk pad, it does glow and reflect a little bit off the
table underneath, but I'm still not sold on it. I just all I wish for is I wish
that their diffusion bar went further out and fully seated with the rest of
the stand. It kind of bothers me that I've got this gap here. Like even if
it's not about RGB, I don't like that there's this gap here. It doesn't like
It doesn't even have to do with the RGB. It's just it feels weird. It feels like
it's got this huge base of a stand and then there's a bunch of wasted space
that isn't there for stability. So, I'm
not against it. It's perfectly fine. It seems relatively stable. It's just, you
know, the ARM that it's on that's kind of not. It looks okay. We've got a 1500R
curvature, which isn't like super aggressive, but it's enough that you
notice it and it's enough to make a 1440p ultra wide feel a little better
when you're like this close to it. Advanced display settings. We don't want
60 hertz, we want 144. All right. Uh we've got 8-bit color with YCbCr 4:2:2,
which actually isn't bad. I was kind of expecting 4:2:0. DCI-P3 quantum dots.
Oh, yeah, let's check out those quantum dots though and the HDR 400. I'm very
curious to see how this experience is on a VA panel. Cool. All right, there we
go. Yeah, David wanted me to turn the brightness up a bit so we can see the screen better. So, we're going to try
Cooler Master's Master Plus Plus. It's like Master Plus and then a plus symbol.
I'm not a big fan of the name, but hey look, it detected our monitor right
away. We can change the RGB right here. Is it RGB on the back? Or were those
just glossy? Nope, they're just glossy parts of plastic. I don't know why they
did that, but whatever. Uh let's see how this goes. Hey, look, the RGB works.
Reload. Let's recoil. Let's just go to around. Okay, breathing. Classic classic
breathing. Refill. Oh, it's like slowly fills up. I actually like refill. That's
pretty cool. Uh and then you can do custom stuff, too, where you can adjust all the individual LEDs, it looks like,
which is actually great. Brightness. So, you can dim them, too. All right. Yeah,
max brightness, crank it. Uh and that's it. Is this only the lighting? Cooler
Master, I'm a little disappointed. I mean, it's cool and it's great that you
can let me change this with software, but I would have totally expected Like
if I'm already getting an app for this, I might as well be able to do OSD stuff
with it, but I Maybe that's a thing. I don't see it anywhere readily apparent.
Yep, this is all system config. The rest is lighting. Cool. All right, well,
that's that. Well, it's just for RGB, I guess. So, thank god they included a
navigation nipple. We're using our DisplayPort. That's great. Video adjust
Oh, yeah, there's speakers on this guy that like we saw earlier. Uh we're not
going to use them cuz monitor speakers are typically just not very great, but
at least it's got them, so you can use them in a pinch. Picture mode, standard.
Yeah, we probably just want standard Ooh, movie. There's no sub options with
movie. So, let's just go standard and then you can change black stabilization,
advanced DCR, blue light filter, recall. Sure. Another minor issue, there's a bit
of a delay when pressing the button for the OSD. So, if you press it, just give
it a second instead of pressing it twice like I'm doing or it's just going to go
away right away. Contrast, brightness, brightness. That's why we came here in
the first place. Crank it, baby. Is that bright enough for you, David?
plenty bright. All right, well, it's at 100, so hope it's good.
Color domain, auto. RGB or YUV? That's cool. Ah, you can change the gamma, too.
All right, color space. Sick. Let's go to DCI-P3 for no real reason. You
probably just want to leave it on auto, so it'll smart switch for you, but like
it depends on what you do. If you're a content creator, then you probably just want to leave it in DCIP3 or Adobe or
whatever. Uh it's pretty cool though. They have BT.2020, DCIP3, Adobe RGB,
sRGB. Like it's not a bad system. I don't like how it just went away on me
when I wasn't touching it for just a few seconds. Sometimes you want to read things. Um and then you got image like
sharpness and aspect ratio and some overscan stuff. FreeSync Oh, we want to
turn FreeSync Premium on. That's All right, we're checking out the HDR right
now. It's got HDR 400, which isn't great. We're not getting that crazy
banding that we saw with NZXT's monitor. It's not really dynamic though at all.
This really just kind of looks like SDR. So, I'm not even entirely sure that it's
actually on. And I'm kind of willing to trust the panel at this time when it
tells me that HDR is off. As you can see, HDR is grayed out. We've tried
turning off AMD's FreeSync Premium. Windows is set to HDR, and I'm in a
standard picture mode. This should kind of just work, and I'm surprised that it
doesn't because to be honest this does kind of look like SDR to me. I might be
able to tell a bit better once we try gaming and then I can actually like
basically create um bright spots and everything to see if it looks like it's
popping. But the reality is with HDR 400, you're barely going to be able to
tell anyway. There is a possibility that to turn that on, we're just missing
something or it's a firmware update that we can't find yet. But the reality is
not many people actually update the firmware on their monitors. You should,
um but people don't. You know, they buy them, set them up, and leave them. It's
often kind of a pain to to do so in the first place. We had the audio on for a
different video, and we didn't think the speakers sounded that bad actually. So,
uh we're going to try them out.
The bass is better than I expected. It's not good,
but honestly, if you need speakers in a
pinch, this thing isn't bad. I'm actually pretty okay with the speakers
that you get on the bottom of this thing. That's cool. Okay, let's check let's check motion clarity though. Um
with VA, I always kind of worry about overdrive and and whatnot. So, let's
check let's check the UFO test. I also want to check some viewing angles. It's
not as bad as you'd think though, honestly, from different angles. It could be a lot worse. There is color
shift, but it's not the worst. It's doable. You could you
could be watching content from like over here, and it would look perfectly fine
to most people. Ooh, I think I see a little bit of overdrive on the edge of
the UFO. It just looks more blue than it should, but that's pretty minor, and it
still looks okay. Don't use movie mode. I don't know why it did this, but we
switched to movie mode, and it's just like really bad contrast. I don't know
what's going on. I'm going to try turning HDR off in Windows and see if that helps at all. No.
Still really bad. The black levels aren't Like in terms of
clarity, it's not bad, especially considering like the other stuff we've
been looking at recently. It's actually pretty decent. Looks pretty much the
same as it did earlier. The only So, the main difference I see is black level.
And when it crazy or like So, look at this car, right? Looks pretty bright.
And then if I look away and look back, do you see it darken?
Am I just crazy? Yeah, it looks pretty good though. I mean, it's definitely not
the best HDR experience I've ever had, and Destiny says HDR is on. Windows says
HDR is on. The only thing that says it's off is the panel, and I don't understand
why. But I mean, yeah, for HDR 400, this is pretty much what I expect. Basically
SDR gets a little brighter. Oh yeah, there there's no local dimming zones or
anything like that. So, I expect this part to be like particularly Yeah, like
this should be getting way darker around him. This looks like a big circle
instead of it fading away around it. Yeah, the whole thing was illuminated.
Um it's not the best experience. If you're looking for an amazing HDR
experience, you're just not going to get that here. But the reality is at the
price point, it's not bad. I mean, if you want to spend 650 bucks, and you
want to get a really good like actual gaming monitor, ultrawide, you want most
of the bells and whistles, but you're not really sold on HDR, honestly, this
is probably the display for you cuz everything still looks pretty good. The
motion clarity isn't bad. I expected it to be a lot worse, but I guess VA has
really come a long way in the last few years. Just looking at it right now, I
can't see a huge difference with quantum dot being there, but the reality is they
really do help it hit that 98% coverage
of DCIP3. That's really impressive. It's probably not color accurate out of the
box, but because you have access to that gamut, and there is color correction
stuff, you can tune it yourself to get everything down to probably a pretty
good average delta E. I think that if you're looking for your next gaming
monitor, and you really want ultrawide, you really want like at least 1440p,
and you really want 144 hertz, this is probably the display for you. Sure, we
encountered a couple quirks, but you know, they're not that bad, and the reality is
that there's a good chance that it just is our panel and not the entire run of
them. There you have it. It's the GM34-CWQ
ARGB version from Cooler Master. Pretty decent monitor.
Uh if you want to check out another one on ShortCircuit, maybe look at the NZXT
Canvas. That one was nice, but uh it had some issues with HDR. So, I don't know.
It's up to you. Shop around, and uh thanks for watching.