Cooler Master Tempest GZ2711 OLED 240Hz Gaming Monitor Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The Cooler Master Tempest GZ2711 27″ 2560×1440 OLED 240Hz 0.03ms Gaming Monitor is available now from OCUK for £598.99, putting it firmly into the premium price bracket and clearly focusing on the enthusiast market rather than your casual gamers. That’s a lot of money, but in fairness, the Gigabyte F027Q3 is £928.99 and the Corsair XENEON 27″ is £1049.95, so comparatively, it’s pretty cheap. However, the other two are brighter, and while the Corsair has a 0.01ms response time, the Gigabyte pushes a 360Hz refresh rate, so it’s not a like-for-like comparison, but the price difference is significant regardless. The Cooler Master option is around £200-300 cheaper than the next on the market.

Overview

OLED screens are steadily maturing and the prices are coming down, but they’re not excused from having their share of problems, despite having some clear benefits that make them so appealing. I don’t think the SDR performance on this monitor is particularly bright, and at around 250 nits (from my own testing), it’s no brighter than say, this £160 monitor from Philips. Is it bright enough? Absolutely, but I’ve seen better. In HDR mode this is closer to 450nits, which isn’t pretty good though. If you’re a brightness junky, then mini-LED is likely the best option, with the Cooler Master Tempest 4K 160Hz Mini-LED (read my review here) currently costing 1 penny less than the 2K LED 240Hz.

Of course, peak brightness is only one thing, and relative contrast is a welcome trade-off. With black levels truly being zero, the perceived image looks very deep and can be perceived as darker than it actually is due to the lack of backlighting artefacts that we’ve become accustomed to with edge and rear-lit LCD/LED panels. This becomes more noticeable in dark scenes in game, as yeah, they’re dark, but the detail is retained and highlights like small light sources are pin-sharp and very bright by comparison. Overall, it looks pretty damn amazing.

For daily work, this monitor isn’t the most colour-accurate, as it’s exasperated by the dimming technologies and pixel shifting that protects the panel from stationary images. At 240Hz, it’s clear this monitor is built for gaming, nobody needs 240Hz Excel or Photoshop, and there are better-suited monitors for professionals. However, when it comes to gaming, this monitor shines, the colour accuracy is vibrant and it handles motion absolutely flawlessly. The only thing you’ll notice is some games with bright and static UI elements, those elements may dim, but this can be turned off in the monitor settings if it bothers you.

Should I Buy One?

So that’s about it, this monitor is tuned for competitive gamers who want a super-fast refresh rate, extremely low input latency and perfect black levels. If you primarily use your PC for gaming and media consumption, it ticks all the right boxes, but if you’re going to be using the PC for working from home or browsing reddit all day, you can get a higher resolution, brighter and cheaper monitor that would better suit your needs, such as the miniLED monitor from Cooler Master.