for as long as i can remember i've wanted to try gaming on an ultra
wide display and i finally got my hands on one which means in today's video i'll let
you know how the experience holds up to several years worth of hype
now i know ultrawides are by no means a new thing and they're about as exciting at this point as
that two-year-old hot wheels of yours with three of its wheels missing but i've never tried one
before so i'm really excited now when cooler master reached out to send one of these over i
was interested because this seems like a great specimen for a first time ultrawide experience
down here we've got a whole bunch of the monitor buzzwords it's a 1440p ultrawide version so it's
a good resolution it's got a bit of a curve which interestingly this is also my first
ever curved monitor so very interested to see that it's also got a wide color space coverage
with some quantum dots it's got a high refresh rate with low response times and some loser hdr
so generally it just seems like it's a very well-rounded gaming monitor
and then we've got some nice clear setup instructions on the inside of the box that's cool
get this kind of powder coated steel stand which i like it it looks and feels nice
sturdy feeling base for the stand it's got lots of little footies for grip
we also get all of the cables with it we've got a displayport
hdmi a braided mini usb cable thing and then square to standard usb
whoa that is a lot bigger than i was expecting actually that's
quite a substantial display do you have high to adjust yeah you do a little bit wow that
is more curved than i was expecting this is quite a substantial monitor
now at this point all i want to go do is game on this thing so let's let's get to it
oh i am definitely gonna have to move my speakers out of it
now first impressions just on the desktop here is i don't like the curve very much there's something
about the way it makes everything look although i've just sat down with the monitor so hopefully
i'll get used to it over time and i'm sure it'll be different when it comes to actually gaming
now when it comes to gaming this is this this is really cool um i i do wish that this monitor's
stand would go a little bit higher although that is a very specific to the monitor complaint
because of how it stretches into your peripheral vision kind of like peripheral
movement is is a bit disorienting similar actually to when i did that a six-panel vga
multi-monitor display thing having so much display in your peripheral vision is is initially
a little bit disorienting but it's much better in this format and in the context of gaming the
curve is better uh i i feel like i can still see that the is displayed on a curved surface a bit
although that could just be the aspect ratio but i it it does still feel like i can see the curve but
it adds to the but it does add to the envelopment of it so yeah i mean i i think
i could get used to it uh this monitor is also nice like the okay well my squirrel brain got
a bit distracted by the gameplay here what i was trying to say was that the actual image
quality is really good the colors are bright and vibrant with pretty good black levels on first
impression it's a beautiful display i mean yeah initial impressions are are very good so now i'm
going to take it home for the weekend and spend a bunch of time playing various things on this
now just a couple of notes on the cooler master gm 34 it's got a really nice panel in it these
quantum dot va panels are awesome because you get you get very good color space coverage and in fact
in terms of color accuracy i measured an insane 0.7 average deviation and in that matched with
the great contrast ratio levels on these va panels gives you a really punchy colorful good looking
image although i do think that this specific one was damaged in shipping a bit because if you have
a solid color up there's a bit of a dark spot on the right here also there's a bit of a backlight
pulsing issue which only two of the color profiles didn't seem to have standard and fps2 i think it
was aside from that the motion rendering on the display is a bit weird uh if you have no overdrive
on at all the image is really blurry when you're moving quite quickly which does not look nice and
then when you have too much overdrive on there's a lot of overshoot so you have to have the monitor
on advanced overdrive settings to deal with either the overshoot or the blurriness in advanced it's
not amazing in terms of motion rendering but it's it's much better than any of the other settings
but now we need to talk about just ultra wides in general from the perspective of somebody that just
very recently lost their ultra wide virginity first off in terms of productivity i really like
this monitor like if you want like a word document open with like a browser open doing research for
the word document or excel or however productivity works it's really cool for that and in fact i
think if you had a flat version of one of these displays it would be amazing for premiere pro
and photoshop and stuff so yeah generally for that kind of thing it's really cool and then there's
the obvious benefit of it looking all futuristic and wide on your desk when it comes to gaming
this is where the mixed bag lives because this ultra wide display is really good for some games
and then really bad for others if you like playing mobas things like dota or league of legends you
can forget about an ultrawide pretty much it it's pretty much not usable for that genre of game
now the reason for this is because if you even have a little bit of skill in a game like dota
you're going to spend about 60 percent of your time gaming looking at the mini maps
on a normal display the mini-map is here and it's really easy to kind of look between the mini-map
and what's going on just around you where an ultrawide basically just moves the very vital
mini-map out of your field of view so then you spend the whole time doing this pretty much and
it it just doesn't work at all i actually think this will also be a problem for rts games things
like age of empires or uh or starcraft how about first person shooters things like cs go escape
from talk of battlefield v and even something like daisy you know you still have the problem
where the hud elements all kind of move out to the peripheral of your vision but it's not that
important to constantly have that information in your eyesight and the extra bit of width you know
it's nice you get to see a little bit more of the game and it feels a bit more enveloping because
most of your peripheral vision is taken up by the display now after the fbs's i moved into no man's
sky which is like a space flying game with like exploration and stuff and for that it's really
cool like getting to fly around in a spaceship with so much of your peripheral vision being
taken up by space and planet things is pretty cool and i think the same thing would go for uh
like microsoft flight simulator and even racing games stuff like forza it's really nice playing
those games on an ultra wide although again the whole time i was gaming i just thought it
you know it's just a bit wider like it's cool and everything but it's not it's not that amazing but
then sunday came around and i was like okay for the last bit of the weekend i'm gonna take off
the ultra wide and go back to this 27 inch 27-inch 16x9 display and i immediately missed the ultra
wide i was like wow this sucks a whole lot more why can i see my room through my peripheral vision
what is going on here this is awful so like you know going from a 16x9 to the 21x9 ultrawide
i was kind of like ah yeah this is a little bit better i guess but then going back from the 21 by
9 to the 16 by 9 i was like okay this is terrible this this really sucks i want the ultra wide back
um i got used to it very very quickly it took like three hours maybe of using the
display and i was like yep this the curve is fine i don't care about it anymore although
i still would refuse to do like premiere pro and photoshop and stuff on a curved display but for
gaming and even things like productivity i i the curve is fine now quick conclusion time ultra
wide monitors are like normal monitors just a bit wider and that means that moba players
shouldn't get anywhere near them other than that though i've enjoyed gaming on this ultra wide like
i said i was initially a bit underwhelmed and then i went back to the old monitor and i was like wow
i i immediately missed the ultra wide i actually think now is quite a good time to get into ultra
wide gaming because like two or three years ago if you wanted a 34 inch ultra wide display that had
above 60 hertz refresh rate you had to sell multiple kidneys to be able to afford one of
those and then you'd also have to sell like a liver or something to be able to afford
a graphics card that could comfortably power that display whereas now that's not really the
case anymore like you can get a high refresh rate ultra wide display for not a whole lot more money
than just a 1440p 27 inch display so hopefully that helps you decide i don't know how much if any
useful information that was in this video although if you did enjoy the video please subscribe to the
channel maybe watch another video and uh yeah until the next video thank you for watching bye