Controls and OSD

The Cooler Master Tempest GP27Q uses a practical four-way joystick, which also works as a button for OSD navigation and monitor setup. You can quickly access settings like factory picture profiles, virtual crosshairs, input selection, and KVM switch by pulling the joystick in one of the four directions. If you press it instead, you'll open the main menu, where you can adjust everything the OSD offers.

The overall experience of using the OSD is decent, no small part thanks to the OSD being well organized and to the point; you won't find dozens of vague options, as often is the case on gaming monitors. One issue I have with the controls is that to confirm the selection, you have to pull the joystick to the right instead of pressing it, which would be much more intuitive.


In terms of the layout and names of options offered within, the Cooler Master's OSD is eerily similar to that of the KTC H27T22, a gaming monitor which I reviewed recently (read it here). It is split into six sections: Input Select, Picture Setting, Color Adjust, Gaming Setup, Advanced, and System. The main menu's header shows the current resolution, as well as adaptive synchronization, HDR, and Overdrive status. The Input Select menu lets you switch between the available inputs: USB Type-C, DisplayPort, and a pair of HDMIs.


The Picture Setting menu contains a bunch of factory picture profiles (Standard, User1, User2, Movie, RTS, FPS1, FPS2, Photo, Text), along with all the usual picture-related settings, such as brightness, contrast, black stabilization (black level), aspect ratio and sharpness.


The Color Adjust menu is where you'll find color-related options: color temperature, gamma, color domain (Auto, RGB Mode, YUV Mode), color space (Auto, sRGB, AdobeRGB, DCI-P3, BT. 2020), and blue light filter, which can be adjusted on a scale from 0 to 100 in increments of 10. That makes it vastly more useful compared to a rudimentary on/off implementation.


The Gaming Setup menu has a Gaming Plus submenu containing the timer, FPS counter, and virtual crosshairs. Instead of throwing in a host of silly, elaborate crosshairs, Cooler Master went with the ones that are preferred by most: a dot and a plus, both available in red and bright green color. There's one additional crosshair thrown in the mix, but let's be realistic, the dot and the plus-shaped one are what it's all about. This aspect of the Cooler Master Tempest GP27Q is, in fact, identical to the aforementioned KTC monitor. The Gaming Setup menu is also where you'll find the adaptive synchronization toggle, overdrive, and MPRT (Moving Picture Response Time). As usual, we'll dive deeper into all of them in the gaming performance section of the review.


The Advanced menu is where Cooler Master groups the options such as HDR (Off or Auto), local dimming (Off, Low, Medium, High), HDMI range, KVM switching, and RGB Light. It's interesting to note that the local dimming technology is off by default and stays off until users activate it manually. This is probably to prevent false reports of panel issues caused by using local dimming in SDR content. As for the KVM switching, you can set it to Auto to have the monitor automatically switch peripherals in relation to the currently selected video input, or you can pick the proper USB "source" manually. Finally, the RGB Light submenu has no options to pick from; you can either turn the RGB lighting system on or off.


The System menu is where you can change the OSD language, position, transparency, and timeout, control the audio volume, turn off the power LED, initiate a firmware update, and reset the settings.