When compared to other 34-inch ultrawide gaming monitors specification for specification, the Cooler Master GM34-CWQ ARGB might strike you as fairly expensive with its $650 price tag. After all, it's just another 3440x1440 ultrawide with a 144 Hz refresh rate and a VA panel, right? Well, not quite. What pushes this monitor into a higher class of gaming 34-inch ultrawides is the Quantum Dot technology, which gives it nearly 100% sRGB and DCI-P3 color space coverage, excellent overall color performance, and above-average static contrast ratio, as well as a wide usable brightness range. The brightness of its panel can be pushed above 500 cd/m², which is more than enough to please everyone. Such high brightness combined with a panel that successfully rejects reflections of its surroundings means the GM34-CWQ ARGB performs well even in very bright rooms.

The Quantum Dot technology also makes the panel very energy efficient, at least compared to conventional 34-inch ultrawides. The out-of-the-box tuning of the monitor is decent except for motion handling. For some reason, the default overdrive setting is Dynamic, which is in fact the worst one on offer. You should immediately change it to Advanced to get sharp moving visuals at all framerates. If you're after maximum color accuracy, switching the monitor to sRGB mode will give you exactly that without conducting a hardware calibration.

The gaming performance of the Cooler Master GM34-CWQ ARGB is great as well. The 144 Hz panel carries the AMD FreeSync Premium certification and offers full compatibility with NVIDIA graphics cards, so you'll be able to reap the benefits of adaptive synchronization regardless of your exact gaming setup. Input lag of the panel is only 10.7 ms on average, making it responsive enough even to hardcore gamers, including fans of arena-style multiplayer shooters.

Add to that good ergonomics, a nice-looking ARGB lighting system integrated into the stand, and 65 W USB-C power delivery and what you get is a nicely rounded gaming monitor that will serve you well for productivity-oriented tasks, too. Its productivity aspect could have been even better if the integrated USB Type-A ports were able to communicate with the USB-C interface, as it would then be much more intuitive to use the Cooler Master GM34-CWQ ARGB as a handy laptop docking station.

While Cooler Master will have you pay a bit more for the GM34-CWQ ARGB than you would for a generic 34-inch gaming ultrawide, it does feel like you're getting quite a bit of extra value for your money, particularly in the picture quality department. For that reason alone, I'm happy to recommend it to anyone looking for an excellent ultrawide gaming monitor.