Cooler Master Tempest GP27U MiniLED Quantum Dot Gaming Monitor Review

Performance

My god it’s awesome, case closed, go buy one. Unfortunately, while I’m not paid per word, I think I have to explain in a little more detail. Firstly, colours, it has many of them. Filling the full sRGB and aRGB spectrums easily, and pushing high 90%’s of the DCI-P3 and Rec 2020 colour spaces. It’s a shame these pictures do it very little justice, although I will concede they actually do look pretty lush in their limited colour space.

The 576 point backlight gives it a staggering peak brightness, and even in SDR where you have to make do with a mere 600 nits (that’s a lot btw), it can have you squinting at brighter scenes. Alas, you still get deep blacks though, and while it’s not like OLED black, it’s a drastic improvement over edge-lit panels.

The colours are stunning, and while they look flat in this photo, in reality, they had an electric liveliness and vibrancy that unironically, you would need this monitor to see.

Being a 4K panel is nice too, I’ve been using a 1440p panel for a while myself, and the increased resolution is a feast for the eyes as I plan out my new Cities Skylines map.

The colours are like candy.

It doesn’t matter what you play, if the same is SDR or HDR, it’s going to look awesome.

It’s likely that you’re seeing mostly a large patch of the same blue, same red and same green on your display right now. But on the MiniLED panel, it’s a lovely gradient of vibrant colours from the DCI P3 chart.

Games tend to be very vibrant compared to movies and TV. Moving to some YouTube, TV and film, you can really appreciate the colour accuracy of this monitor, with very natural and believable real-world tones.

There’s a lot of warmth in the browns and reds that you don’t realise most panels are missing. Especially in darker scenes, as the backlight will wash out the darker areas to light the brighter parts. Not here though.

I thought it would be fun to turn off the local dimming. It turns out that having 576 LEDs all at 100% brightness obliterates the image, they’re incredibly bright even in a dark scene.

Turn local dimming back on, and you can appreciate just how big a difference it makes.

Interestingly, I thought it looked even better on classic titles, with the 4K HDR remaster of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo having an amazing colour depth from its more old-school matte-looking presentation.

For image editing, the 4K panel is great, and while I would prefer a 32″ one myself, 27″ just means that I’ll move the panel a couple of inches closer to my face.

The pixel density is great, and side by side windows look nice and clear, even on smaller text.