iiyama G-Master 45″ Ultra-Wide 165Hz Curved VA Monitor Review

A Closer Look & Performance

Obviously, the most striking thing about this monitor is its size. With a 45″ panel, it’s pretty massive, so you’ll really have to measure up your desk to ensure you can even accommodate it. Obviously, it’s wider than a 45″ 16:9 panel would be, as it stretches out the aspect ratio to a whopping 32:9, making it 1090mm wide, and 409mm tall (539mm with the stand), meaning it doesn’t sit that much tallet than a 32″ monitor, it’s just so wide it’s similar to having two 1440p monitors stuck side by side, but without the join in the middle.

The panel is VA, and features a 1500R curvature to give you a slight wrap around effect. It’s not to extreme a curve either, which I don’t like, and for a panel this size, it feels like it wraps around to your field of view quite naturally. Of course, it’s still big, so you’ll be turning your head left to right to focus on the extremes, but again, that’s the same as you would do if using multiple monitors.

The viewing angles are excellent, which is important, as if you’re sitting in the middle staring at the dead centre to this screen, the size and curvature means that the outer edges of the monitor are off angle to you, but thankfully, the colours and lighting look nicely uniform throughout. I think it’s helped by having a matte finish on the screen too, it doesn’t reflect a lot of ambient light, which really helps the overall contrast.

Colours look decent, and the monitor claims to cover 100% of sRGB (a pretty low bar these days, but also 80% of the NTSC colour gamut. No rating was given for DCI-P3, but I’ll be testing that myself shortly anyway. The panel is 8-bit, so I’m not expecting flagship colour performance here, but as I’ve said, it looks good to my eyes so far, so I’m expecting it to be competitive despite it’s very competitive retail price.

Around the back, there’s plenty of connectivity, with two HDMI inputs, a DisplayPort, and Type-C (90W PD) ensuring you can get all your devices connector, and there’s even a built-in USB and LAN that can all operate through a built-in KVM switch, making it a versatile display for productivity between multiple systems; handy if you want to hook up your work laptop while still running your gaming PC.

When it comes to productivity, it’s obvious that a panel of this size brings plenty of benefits, as it’s simply massive amounts of real estate to play around with. The 5K2K 32:9 panel is literally the same total pixels and aspect ratio you would get by pushing two 2560×1440 16:9 displays side by side. However, because there’s no bezel in the middle, you get to properly use the space in the middle, so it’s more like having three displays, one in the middle, with extra room on the left and right.

You can comfortably place three windows side by side on a 21:9 display, but on 32:9, four or even six windows really isn’t a problem. You can have your work in the middle, leaving you room for YouTube, Discord, reddit, Facebook and Twitter to ensure you get as little as possible done while you’re on the clock. Of course, don’t worry about the boss seeing you, it’s impossible not to at least look like you’re being productive sitting behind a big monitor like this.

For gaming, well, it’s going to be pretty damn immersive, so long as you have a game that supports such a resolution. Thankfully, super-ultra-wide support is pretty decent these days, and most modern games at the very least support 21:9, which will result in smaller black borders on the left and right, but isn’t so bad to be honest.

What really nails the gaming performance of this display is that it’s 165Hz. Sure, there are higher refresh rate displays out there, but I typically find if I’m above 100 FPS/Hz, I’m pretty happy with how my games play. Competitive gamers will want higher because of the faster input latency and response times, but I’m too slow and old to care too much on that front. 165Hz is plenty for online gaming and fast paced action though.

Just keep in mind 5120 x 1440 is around 7.3m pixels, while 4K is around 8.3m pixels, so pushing this resolution at 165Hz is going to be loosely comparable to hitting 4K@120Hz, which is to say, you’ll be wanting a pretty damn fast gaming PC to get the best out of it. Competitive online shooters may be a little easier, but the latest AAA games will obviously offer a challenge for those not running some pretty robust hardware.