Controls and OSD

The Cooler Master GM34-CWQ ARGB uses a four-way joystick that also works as a button for OSD navigation and monitor setup. You can use it to quickly access settings like factory picture profiles, contrast, brightness, virtual crosshairs, and input selection, or dive into the main menu where you can adjust everything the OSD offers. As per usual, the four-way joystick is an intuitive method of moving around the OSD, but some parts of the user experience didn't sit well with me. For example, pressing the joystick confirms the selection in quick menus, but closes the OSD when accessing the settings through the full menu. This inconsistency is wildly annoying.


Another quirk I found is that activating the virtual crosshairs takes the quick menu, but adjusting their exact position, color, and design requires the full menu. Cooler Master should rethink and rework the OSD layout of their future monitors while keeping the four-way joystick the same.

The OSD is split into a total of five sections: Input Select, Audio Adjust, Picture Mode, Color Adjust, Manual Image Adjust, and Setup Menu.


The Input Select menu lets you—wouldn't you know it—select the active video input.


The Audio Adjust menu is where you can adjust the volume or mute the integrated 3.5-mm audio output.


The Picture Mode menu contains a total of eight picture profiles: Standard, Game, User, Movie, Web, Text, MAC, and Color Weakness. You can further adjust some of these by adjusting the black level, activating or deactivating dynamic contrast, and setting the amount of blue light filtering. The latter is an interesting option if you're experiencing headaches when using your PC for longer sessions as blue light is the most common culprit. The Game profile further expands into six genre-specific variants: GAMER1, GAMER2, FPS1, FPS2, RTS, and MOBA. The default picture profile is Standard, and that's the one we'll use as the base for any monitor adjustments in the picture quality section of this review.


The Color Adjust menu contains everything related to the color reproduction of the integrated Quantum Dot VA panel, namely contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, temperature, domain (RGB or YUV), gamma (1.8 to 2.6 in two increments), range (Full Range - RGB 0-255, or Limited Range – RGB 16-235), and color space (Auto, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3, BT.2020). If you enable HDR in the Windows display settings, this menu is where you'll be able to access and tune three available HDR profiles: Standard, Movie, and Game. Interesting is that we can adjust the color temperature, lightness, and contrast for all three of these individually, which isn't the case on most other gaming monitors. However, the Cooler Master GM34-CWQ ARGB still lacks the key component for a true HDR experience: backlight local dimming technology.


In the Manual Image Adjust menu, we can play with the sharpness and aspect ratio.


The Setup Menu has all of the gaming-related settings and toggles, such as adaptive synchronization (FreeSync Premium), overdrive (Over Drive), MPRT (Motion Clearness), and virtual crosshair selection and setup. This menu contains the option to turn off the downward-facing blue power LED, activate the power-saving features of the monitor (ECO Mode), display the current framerate and resolution, and so on.