Cooler Master Tempest GP2711 165Hz Mini-LED Gaming Monitor Review

Gaming Performance

This monitor was built for gaming, no doubt about that, with a 165Hz refresh rate, FreeSync, G-Sync compatibility, and all the other bells and whistles, it’s built to just make games look great. The biggest things are by far the colour, brightness, and contrast ratio. Blacks are inky black, with superbly bright highlights. This is especially true in the HDR mode, with the 576-zone mini-LED backlighting technology really making things pop. There’s definitely a bit less glow in the darker areas compared to the faster IPS panel of the previous model too, which is certainly welcome.

One thing is for sure, it’s not easy to photograph an HDR display, especially in these dark scenes as the local dimming of the mini-LED actually drops the brightness quite a lot, really adding to the immersion. On a standard edge-lit panel this game just looks grey, but with all these backlights, blacks are very black indeed.

For brighter content, you can really reap the benefit of the HDR brightness, and the overall clarity is just excellent. 2560 x 1440 is a great sweet spot for gaming, it’s easier to maintain high refresh rates while still being very generous with the quality sliders. While the response time isn’t as fast as the IPS version, sub 4ms is good enough for me, and I had no issues with screen tearing, at all, no ghosting or blur either, just clean, fast and smooth images throughout.

For latency-sensitive gaming, it holds up really well, and with the MPRT mode that strobes the backlight with the refresh rate, you get down to a 1ms response time at the cost of overall brightness, but this does give a higher perceived clarity too, making it ideal for getting my ass handed to me in Valorent.