Gigabyte M32UC 32″ Curved 4K 144Hz Gaming Monitor Review
Peter Donnell / 2 years ago
Performance
It’ll be a dull day when I get a 4K monitor with a high refresh rate and a massive panel and it doesn’t entertain me. Gaming on this monitor is an absolute blast and given that I recently stepped away from using a 4K60 monitor in favour of a 165Hz 1440p monitor for gaming, it’s nice to step into a world where I don’t have to choose between resolution and refresh rate.
At 32″ and with a 1500R the immersion is certainly impressive. It’s not an aggressive curve, so working in spreadsheets doesn’t banana every cell, but it’s curved enough that the edges of the screen are pulled into your peripheral vision more naturally.
While there are plenty of smaller 4K panels, I think 32″ is the best size for a desktop and it delivers a really good pixel density so you can actually enjoy all the detail that 4K has to offer. Furthermore, the monitor really benefits from strong colour reproduction and good black levels. Images look vibrant and really pop, but also retain a realistic look right out of the box.
A little calibration can help though, I find that setting the monitor to the warm profile is more ideal, but that’s true of damn near all monitors which still annoyingly favour a cool picture even on their more “neutral” settings.
The 2ms GTG or 1ms MPRT is nice though, the monitor feels snappy and responsive, especially if you’ve got the hardware to take advantage of the high refresh rate. Getting the latest games north of 100 FPS with high+ settings and at 4K is no small feat that’s for sure.
Playing Apex with a high refresh rate and high resolution is superb though, and while I’m not so extreme a gamer to care for the MPRT mode, the monitor holds up just fine without it and allows for more brightness too.
There is a HDR mode, but to be honest, as with so many gaming monitors, it locks out all the settings once enabled and while it’s OK for some things, I think the monitor performed better overall with it disabled. That and Windows 11 HDR management is still pretty pants, so I think I’ll stick to my main TV for my HDR requirements.
