OSD Sidekick

OSD Sidekick is a Windows app that can be used to do everything you'd otherwise have to visit the OSD for. For the app to work, the monitor has to have a USB connection to your PC, although that doesn't guarantee anything. I found the app to be excruciatingly buggy. It would work for days without a hitch only to suddenly warn me that it found more than one Gigabyte monitor in my system and refuse to run. This would of course happen even when the M32U was the only monitor connected to my system. I also despise the fact that the official OSD Sidekick EXE contains the RGB Fusion 2.0 app as well, which installs itself without asking for permission even though the M32U monitor doesn't come with an RGB lighting system of any kind. Gigabyte has to seriously rethink its approach with the OSD Sidekick app because no serious hardware company should ever back their products with a half-baked, buggy, and malware-y app like this.


To add insult to injury, ignoring the OSD Sidekick app is a bad idea. Sure, you can use the OSD to set the monitor up, but what the OSD doesn't allow you to do is upgrade the monitor's firmware. During my time with the M32U, I've tested it with two separate firmware versions, F02 and F06, and the latter brought some drastic improvements to input lag, which dropped from 17.1 to 10.9 ms (average of 100 measurements). As such, it makes a lot of sense to keep OSD Sidekick at hand for future firmware upgrades should Gigabyte release them. Funnily, after upgrading the monitor to the latest firmware version F06, the OSD Sidekick app refused to work altogether. An update to the OSD Sidekick app will probably fix this issue, but I don't know when it will be released.

The general idea is good. Using a Windows app to adjust the picture settings and assigning keyboard shortcuts to things like picture profiles and virtual crosshairs is more practical than doing the same through an OSD. It's just the execution that's seriously lacking.