Controls and OSD

The Cooler Master GM34-CWQ2 uses a four-way joystick, which also works as a button for OSD navigation and monitor setup. You can use it to quickly access various settings like factory picture profiles, virtual crosshairs/timer/FPS counter, KVM switch, and input selection, or to dive into the main menu, where you can adjust everything that the OSD has to offer. As usual, the four-way joystick is an intuitive method of moving around the OSD, and additional props to Cooler Master for improving the overall experience of using the OSD by making the button functions consistent between the quick menu and main menu, which wasn't the case before.


The OSD is completely overhauled both visually and functionally. It now offers six vertical menus and a quick overview of the selected resolution, and adaptive synchronization, HDR and overdrive being on or off. The menus are Input, Picture, Color Adjustment, Gaming, Advanced Settings and System.


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


The Picture menu contains a total of 10 picture profiles: Standard, User1, User2, Movie, RTS, FPS1, FPS2, MOBA, Graphics, and Text. The default picture profile is Standard, and that's the one we'll use as the base for any and all adjustments of the monitor after we get to the picture quality section of this review, as it looks by far the best. In this menu you can also adjust the brightness, contrast, black level, aspect ratio and sharpness.


The Color Adjustment menu contains settings related to the color reproduction of the integrated Quantum Dot VA panel, namely color temperature, gamma (1.8 to 2.6 in .2 increments), six-axis hue and saturation (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow), color domain (RGB or YUV), color space (Auto, sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3, BT.2020), and blue light filtering (adjustable on a 0-100 scale in increments of 10).


In the Gaming menu you'll find the adaptive sync toggle, overdrive selection (Off, Normal, Advanced, Ultrafast, Dynamic, User), MPRT selection (Off, Low, Medium, High), as well as gaming tools like the timer, virtual crosshairs and FPS counter.


In the Advanced Settings menu you can select the HDR mode (Off or Auto), color range, KVM switch behavior (it's best to have it on Auto and let it switch the peripherals in relation to the currently active video input), and Picture-in-Picture/Picture-by-Picture toggles. If you activate PiP or PbP mode, you can visit the same menu again to select or swap sources, and to select window sizes and exact locations.


The System menu is where Cooler Master stacked together everything else: language settings, OSD menu position, transparency and timeout, sound volume, power indicator toggle, sleep timer, and the factory reset option.