Cooler Master GM2711S

Introduction

There’s a huge range of monitors available in the 27″ market nowadays, and it’s pretty rare that we see something new and different launched in this space. We have with us for review now the new Cooler Master GM2711S which features a brand new panel coating developed by AU Optronics called “A.R.T.”, which stands for “Advanced Reflectionless Technology”. It’s supposed to improve reflection handling and reduce glare on the panel and this new coating has been incorporated in to a range of AUO’s new panels. Cooler Master are the first we’ve tested to adopt one of those in to their monitor range.

• Related content: Check out a round-up of all Cooler Master monitors, and their planned future roadmap here

This particular screen is designed for both content creators and gamers, aiming to bridge the gap between professional work and entertainment. It’s 27″ in size with a typical 2560 x 1440 resolution, but has a moderate refresh rate of 180Hz as well – the fastest currently on offer in fact from AUO’s new A.R.T. panel range. The rest of the spec is fairly modest by today’s standards, but the screen has a more professional design than a gamer aesthetic which some people will prefer. We’ll put the screen through all our usual testing and of course check out the new coating which is a unique selling point of this model. Does it make a difference? Is this the future of anti-glare screen coatings?

Where to Buy

#affiliate. We may earn a commission if you purchase from our affiliate links in this content – TFTCentral is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.ca and other Amazon stores worldwide. We also participate in a similar scheme for Overclockers.co.uk, Newegg, Bestbuy and some manufacturers.

Key Specs and Features

• 27″ screen size with 16:9 aspect ratio
• 2560 x 1440 resolution
• ‘Ultra Speed IPS’ panel technology from AU Optronics
• A.R.T. (Anti Reflectionless Technology) screen coating
• 180Hz refresh rate
• Adaptive-sync support for variable refresh rates
• Wide colour gamut covering 95% DCI-P3, 91% Adobe RGB and ~128% sRGB
• 1x DisplayPort 1.4 and 2x HDMI 2.0 video connections
• 1x Headphone connection and 1x audio output. 2x 2W integrated speakers
• Tilt, height, swivel and rotate stand adjustments

Advanced Reflectionless Technology (A.R.T.) Coating

A.R.T. is a new multi-layer coating being developed by AU Optronics, one of the leading LCD panel manufacturers. It combines anti-reflection and anti-glare treatments which are designed to change the direction of reflected light, and reduce scattered light to a level that is apparently barely noticeable. Basically it will help reduce glare and reflections on matte coated panels, even in bright environments. This can be particularly helpful if you’ve got lamps, light sources and windows that might otherwise cause reflections on the screen, or if you want to use the screen in an office environment where they tend to be more well lit than at home. AUO’s surface is also designed to eliminates ambient light disturbances and helps preserve the true color tones, saturation and ambient contrast. 

This technology was originally designed for panels that might be used in art displays and galleries (linking again to the name A.R.T.) allowing artists to be able to reproduce texture, brushstrokes and original colors of the artworks and paintings in an authentic digital format. It’s now being integrated in to some of their monitor panels, largely aimed at the general, office, productivity and professional use cases, as opposed to gaming panels. Although a few, like the one featured on this monitor, do offer mid-tier refresh rates still and so could be interesting options for those wanting a screen for both work and play. With this new coating, display brightness can also be reduced by around 20% AUO say, compared with a traditional panel, helping to save energy by up to 60%.

In our testing we were impressed by the new screen coating, and it’s immediately noticeable even with the screen turned off as you set it up and plug it in. The black (off) panel looks less shiny and reflective than standard anti-glare coatings that are usually used on IPS-type panels. It looks more uniform, even a bit like a matte black painted surface. You can immediately tell the difference and it reduces glare really nicely. We’ve captured some of the real-world reflection handling of the screen in our video below, including shining various light sources on the panel. This compares the screen against AU Optronics’ standard matte anti-glare coating featured on their normal IPS-type panels, which is also basically the same as used on other competing IPS-type technologies.

You can see that lights being shone on the panels are diffused a lot more than standard AG coating, significantly reducing the glare and reflections. This is all achieved without any impact to the graininess of clarity of the coating as well, it remains the same as modern IPS-type panels with what we’d call a “light AG” coating finish. Even though the screen is “more matte” in terms of its reflection handling, it does not add any additional graininess to the image or impact picture quality. In practice and during normal day to day use we found external light sources, windows and general reflections even less noticeable than on normal AG coated panels. This makes it a little easier to focus on the image and use the screen comfortably, without needing to contend with any glare you might otherwise get. This was especially useful during the daytime or in a well lit environment.

The new A.R.T. panels make an interesting choice for any screen that might need to be used in more well-lit environments, especially if you want a screen for daytime work and for night time gaming. Even if you have a more controlled lighting environment or tend to use the screen in a darker room, there are some benefits in the reflection handling from these panels we think. The coating will be incorporated in to more of AU Optronics’ mainstream, office and productivity focused panels but hopefully they will also expand this coating in to more higher refresh rate gaming panels and their new higher contrast ratio IPS panels in the future.

Design and Features

The screen comes in a simple but smart all-black design. There is a 3 side “borderless” panel with a thin ~8mm black edge around the sides and top, and then a thicker black plastic bezel along the bottom edge which gives is a ~24mm black edge.

The stand arm and base are finished in a matte black plastic and look pretty sleek. It provides a pretty stable base for the screen as you move it around or use the OSD menu. There is a little bit of wobble from the stand but nothing major. There’s a full range of tilt, height, swivel and rotate adjustments available which are all pretty easy to use and mostly smooth. The height adjustment is a little clunky but on the whole it’s fine.

The back of the screen is encased in a matte black plastic as shown above with a simple design. The stand needs to be screwed in to place on the back of the screen, or can be removed in favour of VESA mounting options if you prefer. Actually you have to screw a few parts of the stand together when you unbox it, check the provided instructions if you’re unsure.

The screen has a thin profile as well despite the built in power supply (no need for an external power brick here). For connectivity there are 1x DisplayPort 1.4 and 2x HDMI 2.0 ports provided for video. There is an audio output and a headphone connection, or you can also make use of the basic integrated 2x 2W speakers if you want for some simple ‘office’ sounds and alerts. There is physically a single USB-A port on the monitor (and upstream USB-B port) but this seems to only be there for firmware updates/service purposes and cannot be used as a PC data port oddly despite our attempts.

The OSD is controlled through a single small joystick toggle/button on the bottom edge of the screen. It’s mostly easy to use, although sometimes we found ourselves pressing a direction instead of the button itself. There’s a pretty good range of options available although it’s sometimes a little unintuitive to select an option and make changes to it.

Default Setup

The screen comes out of the box in the ‘standard’ preset mode, with gamma set to 2.2 and colour temp set to 6500K in the OSD menu. We tested the screen’s performance in this mode:

The default gamma is shown on the left hand graph and tracks the target 2.2 quite well. It is a little high in the darkest and lightest grey shades but measured at 2.19 average overall. The middle graph shows the RGB balance, and you can see that the red channel is a little too high in lighter shades and for white, whereas the blue channel is a little low. This results in a greyscale colour temp which is 7% warmer than intended on average, and a white point that is 9% too warm at 5883K. So it’s a fair bit off the target 6500K colour temp selected in the OSD menu. This resulted in an overall poor greyscale accuracy, with dE 3.4 average, but reaching up to 5.3 maximum, getting progressively worse in the lighter grey shades because of that warmer colour temp. We would have liked a more accurate colour temp and white point really out of the box, and when using the 6500K mode in the menu.

The default brightness is moderate at 258 cd/m², and we had a reasonable contrast ratio for an IPS panel at 1008:1. This exceeds the spec of 900:1 from the manufacturer which is pleasing, but you can get higher contrast ratio IPS-type panels nowadays reaching up to around 2000:1 for instance with LG.Display’s IPS Black technology. The contrast ratio and black depth performance were pretty typical here though for an IPS panel. In darker content there was moderate performance, with the first grey shade in this test that was visible out of the box being number 6. For gaming this is easy to improve with the ‘Dark Contrast Enhancement’ setting which makes darker grey shades brighter, and it could also be improved nicely with calibration and profiling.

The brightness setting in the OSD menu allows a luminance range of between 39 and 460 cd/m² which should give you a good range for using the screen in darker or brighter room environments. It can reach a lot brighter than popular OLED panels as well, and with the A.R.T. coating also on offer it is well-suited to brighter office and home-office environments.

The screen has a wide colour gamut backlight, extending considerably beyond the common sRGB reference space and reaching ~130.1% relative coverage. You can see from the top left CIE diagram that it extends beyond the sRGB space especially in red and green shades, which look more vivid and saturated as a result. Because of the wide colour gamut, and as is common for all wide gamut screens, the accuracy of sRGB colours is only moderate with a dE 3.5 average measured.

The native colour space of the screen is quite closely aligned with the DCI-P3 reference space, covering 96.9% of that gamut and extending only a little outside the space in red and blue shades, resulting in a 103.7% relative coverage. The accuracy then of DCI-P3 colours is reasonable overall, let down a bit especially in the grey shades as the colour temp was a bit too warm as we discussed earlier. Still, this does make the screen more suited for working in the DCI-P3 reference space for content creation and consumption if you need.

There is a modest coverage of the Adobe RGB reference space (91.9%) which is commonly used in the professional and photography markets, but because it can’t cover enough of this space it’s not that well suited to working with content in this colour gamut unfortunately.

sRGB Emulation Mode

Surprisingly for a modern wide gamut monitor there is no sRGB emulation mode available in the OSD menu at all. No gamut option, or even any sRGB preset mode and so it appears that the screen will always operate in its full native colour gamut. This means that if you want to to work with SDR and sRGB content more accurately you will need to be able to profile the screen yourself using a colorimeter, and use that profile within colour aware applications.

That is quite restrictive for an average user unless they are happy running in wide gamut mode all the time, although you could also try our calibrated ICC profile linked below too. It’s a real shame that no sRGB mode is offered at the hardware level to clamp the monitor gamut back to this colour space and this is a big omission from Cooler Master we think. Perhaps this can be added in a future firmware update?

Calibration

You can improve the RGB balance and colour temp pretty nicely through some simple OSD changes, like moving to the ‘user’ colour temp mode and adjusting the RGB channels from there as shown in the table able. That’s a simple start for everyone to correct the warmer default setup. Because there’s no colour space emulation modes, you can only run the screen in its native gamut, creating profiles to then clamp back to different colour spaces for use in colour-aware applications.

The calibration and profiling can produce excellent results if you have a suitable device and software. This was profiled to 2.2 gamma, 6500K colour temp and to the sRGB colour space. This profile will be used in colour-aware applications (e.g. Photoshop) to map back to sRGB in this instance. You can find our calibrated settings and ICC profile in our ICC profile database now.

Office and General Use

The resolution of 2560 x 1440 is comfortable on a 27″ sized screen like this, providing a nice desktop area to work with including decent support for split screen working and a sharp text clarity. While there are some higher pixel density 27″ 4K options available, we think that 1440p is perfectly fine for most people on a 27″ screen like this, providing a sharp and crisp image and definitely offering a big step up from 1080p. It has a comfortable text size and a very good image quality.

The IPS panel offers the usual solid all-round performance with very wide viewing angles and a stable image. You do get the familiar IPS glow when viewing darker content from an angle, that is inherent to this technology. The new A.R.T. coating worked really well at reducing reflections and glare during usage, particularly useful if you want to use the screen during the day time in more well-lit rooms for work. We thought it was a good new improvement to matte AG coatings.

The screen has a full range of ergonomic adjustments with tilt, height, swivel and also rotate available which make it easy to position and move around. Connectivity and related functionality is limited by today’s standards with only DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 video connections available. There is no USB type-C connection available on this model for single cable connectivity from laptops, nor are there any useable normal USB-A data ports which is unusual for any modern monitor. There is a single physical USB-A port on the monitor but this appears to only be useable for firmware updates, and cannot (for some reason) function as a normal data port. There is also therefore no KVM switch function which you will find on a lot of modern monitors, in case that’s something you needed. There are however 2x 2W integrated speakers as well as an audio output and headphone jack.

The backlight operates without PWM and so is flicker free as advertised.

The spectral distribution of the backlight is shown here at a 6500K white point. The blue peak is at 452 nm wavelength which means it is not Eyesafe certified, where there is a supposed harmful range between 415 – 455nm. There is a ‘Blue Light Reduction’ setting available in the OSD menu with levels from 1 – 5 to choose from, which makes the image progressively warmer. We measured a white point of 5675K (1), 5391K (2), 5139K (3), 4867K (4) and 4627K (5) at each level. The lower settings could perhaps be useful if you want to quickly shift to a warmer mode for lots of text work or in the evening perhaps, while the higher settings get a bit too yellow in appearance for our liking.

Gaming

The GM2711S has a mid-tier refresh rate at 180Hz, although this is currently the maximum available from the new A.R.T. panels from AU Optronics. It’s supported by adaptive-sync for variable refresh rates (VRR) from compatible NVIDIA and AMD systems, although at this time the screen hasn’t been certified under either the ‘G-sync Compatible’ or the ‘FreeSync’ schemes.

Within the OSD menu are a few gaming related settings. You can change the overdrive level (measured in a moment) as well as turn adaptive-sync on or off here. With adaptive-sync off, you can also then enable the ‘MPRT’ (Moving Picture Response Time) blur reduction mode if you want, which we will test a bit later too. The ‘Dark Contrast Enhancement’ worked nicely to adjust the dark grey shades in games and can help bring out some shadow detail well. There aren’t any other settings on this screen for things like FPS counters, timers, crosshairs etc though.

We tested support for NVIDIA DSR / DLDSR and confirmed that this was available on this model if you want to use it. That could be potentially useful to upscale the resolution to something higher like 4K, to improve image detail in games, as it’s then scaled back down to the 1440p resolution of the panel. Good to see it supported.

We will quickly mention HDR as well here as although the screen can accept an HDR10 input signal, it lacks the necessary hardware capabilities to provide any improvements to the dynamic range / contrast unfortunately. There is no local dimming available here at all, so you’re stuck with the ~1000:1 contrast ratio of the IPS-type panel. There is at least a wide colour gamut, so you get decent support for HDR content mastered in DCI-P3, but we could not consider this an HDR-capable monitor. If you want something more capable for HDR, check out their range of Mini LED or OLED monitors covered in this article.

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Our thanks to the following manufacturers for support in the build of our new test system:

	AMD Ryzen 9 7950X | Buy AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs here on Amazon
	Asus ProArt B650-Creator | Buy Asus B650 motherboards here on Amazon
	Corsair DDR5 RAM | Buy here on Amazon
	Corsair H100i Elite Capellix AIO cooler | Buy Corsair coolers here on Amazon
	Corsair iCUE RGB Elite Fans | Buy here on Amazon
	NVIDIA RTX 3090 | Buy NVIDIA RTX graphics cards here on Amazon

We may earn a commission if you purchase from our affiliate links in this content – TFTCentral is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.ca and other Amazon stores worldwide. We also participate in a similar scheme for Overclockers.co.uk, Newegg, Bestbuy and some manufacturers.

Response Times

As discussed in our detailed article about Response Time Testing – Pitfalls, Improvements and Updating Our Methodology we are using an improved and more accurate method for capturing G2G response times and overshoot, based on figures that are more reflective to what you see visually on the screen in real-World usage. Our article linked above talks through why this is better and how we arrived at this improved method in much more detail.

There are 5 settings for overdrive available in the OSD menu and we tested each of them while running at the native 180Hz refresh rate. With overdrive turned off the response times were too slow to keep up with the frame rates and we had 40% refresh rate compliance, although there was no visible overshoot at all. You’re going to want to use one of the higher modes, and we found Level 1 and Level 2 to look visually the same, with only very minor changes to the G2G average measured, moving from 5.3ms in Level 1 mode, to 5.0ms in Level 2 mode. There was still no visible overshoot in either of these modes at 180Hz which was good, and there was some noticeable improvements to motion clarity, and reductions in smearing and blurring.

Level 3 mode pushed things a little further, with an average G2G now measured at 4.5ms, but the overshoot had crept up a bit. We’d still considerable it reasonable, although there were a few pale halos evident in practice. The ‘Burst’ mode seems to be a little more aggressive still, reducing response times to 4.0ms, but at the cost of a bit more overshoot which is now reaching moderate levels. The Level 2 mode was optimal overall.

We also tested each of the modes during variable refresh rate situations to see how they behaved when the frame rate/refresh rate lowers. There is no variable overdrive feature used on this monitor, and so you get a consistent G2G response time performance across the refresh rate range, but the overshoot starts to increase as refresh rate lowers. This is standard for most screens which don’t have variable overdrive, and so the trick is to find a mode which gives you optimal performance, but without the overshoot becoming problematic at the lower end of the VRR range.

Thankfully the optimal Level 2 mode we had identified at 180Hz was useable across the VRR range. The overshoot did creep up a bit, but still remains at reasonable levels even down at 60Hz and never becomes overly obvious or problematic during usage. This means that thankfully the screen has a single overdrive mode experience which is pleasing, so you can select Level 2 here and use it for all situations – set and forget. If you wanted to eliminate all traces of overshoot for perhaps a 60Hz fixed input source, you could drop down to the ‘off’ mode, but we don’t think that should be necessary for most users.

Motion Clarity and Gaming Experience

The above pursuit camera photos capture the real-world perceived motion clarity of the screen at its native 180Hz refresh rate and in the optimal Level 2 overdrive mode. This is pretty typical for an IPS-type panel of this refresh rate, and we were pleased that there was no obvious issues with black smearing like you get on most VA panels, and no visible overshoot either. There is a bit of smearing from light to dark transitions like behind the yellow part of the UFO, caused by the slower response time transitions you can see in the bottom left hand corner of the tables provided above. You will find faster refresh rate monitors of course, but 180Hz is a mid-tier refresh rate and certainly a lot better than 60Hz-only panels. It’s good to see Cooler Master take advantage at least of the highest refresh rate A.R.T. coated panel currently in production from AUO. This should be perfectly fine for casual gaming.

MPRT Mode (Motion Blur Reduction)

The GM2711S includes a strobing blur reduction backlight option, available via the MPRT setting in the OSD menu. This is only available once you’ve manually disabled the adaptive-sync (VRR) option which makes it a bit annoying to activate. Likewise once you’ve finished with MPRT mode, you would have to disable it and then re-enable adaptive-sync if you want to use that feature. Another user experience annoyance is the fact that the brightness setting is not independent for MPRT mode, and so you find yourself needing to alter the brightness slider once you enable this mode, and then have to change it back afterwards for normal mode. Hopefully a future firmware update can make this operation more simple.

Motion Blur Reduction Mode
Motion Blur Reduction Backlight
Refresh rates supported	180, 144 and 120Hz (not 60Hz)
60Hz single strobe operation
Blur reduction available with G-sync/FreeSync VRR
Strobe length control	Levels 1, 2 and 3
Strobe timing control
Available in SDR mode
Available in HDR mode
Brightness capability (SDR, max refresh rate supported)
Independent brightness control available
Motion blur OFF – Max brightness	460 nits
Motion blur ON – Max brightness	Level 1 = 350 nits Level 2 = 119 nits Level 3 = 88 nits

The MPRT mode is available at fixed refresh rates of 180, 144 and 120Hz only – it is not available at 60Hz on this screen. Once enabled there are 3 settings available to choose from in the menu which basically control the strobe length. As you move up the levels, the “on” period of the strobe gets progressively shorter, which can help improve the motion clarity, but at the cost of screen brightness.

We have provided measurements of the strobing behaviour at 180Hz in each of the 3 modes below, along with the “on” period length, and the maximum brightness possible in each mode. You can click the tabs to switch between the 3 available modes:

Motion clarity pursuit camera photos

The lowest Level 1 setting provides only a very short “off” period to the strobe and so its actual real-world improvements to motion clarity are very small. The moving image becomes a tiny bit sharper in some situations, but it’s not significantly clearer than the ‘off’ mode really. There’s very little reason to use this above normal off mode and adaptive-sync VRR.

Thankfully as you move up to the Level 2 MPRT mode the improvements are more noticeable. You get a sharper and crisper moving image and you can see this in the pursuit camera photos above. There is minimal strobe cross-talk ghosting as well which is good, with the photos above captured in the central region of the screen. This level 2 mode can still reach reasonable brightness of ~119 nits which should be ok for some users, although it might be limiting to others who prefer a brighter screen or want to game more in well-lit rooms or during the day time. We would have liked to have seen a bit of a higher brightness available in this Level 2 mode ideally.

The Level 3 mode provides some small additional improvements in motion clarity thanks to the shorter strobe length, but it’s at the cost of brightness even further, now only reaching 88 nits maximum. The small incremental benefits in motion clarity don’t really feel worth it compared with Level 2 when you have to give up even more brightness.

We have also captured the motion clarity in the top, middle and bottom regions in what we consider to be the optimal MPRT mode (level 2). This demonstrates the levels of strobe cross-talk evident across the screen with the central area being the clearest and cleanest which is good news, as that’s where most of your attention is focused.

Console Gaming

The screen was tested with an Xbox Series X games console. There are 2x HDMI 2.0 inputs available on the screen and console support is a bit limited here. The maximum resolution and refresh rate we could set the Xbox to was 1440p @ 120Hz. At least you can run the screen at its native resolution and up to the maximum 120Hz of the console which is the main requirement really.

	Console Gaming
Native panel resolution	2560 x 1440 (1440p)
Maximum resolution and refresh rate supported	1440p @ 120Hz
Virtual 4K support
4K at 24Hz support
4K at 50Hz support
HDMI connection version	2.0
HDMI-CEC auto switch
Adaptive-sync (FreeSync) over HDMI
HDR10 support	PS5 only, not on Xbox
Dolby Vision HDR support

There is no support for a “virtual 4K” input here which is a bit of a gap, and something offered by many 1440p monitors. That would have allowed you to set a 4K resolution from the console (at 60Hz max given the bandwidth of HDMI 2.0 here) and have the panel scale the image back down to 1440p. It’s not needed for some consoles, but for the Xbox Series X it is a little more important. That is because HDR mode only works from that console if you can set it to 4K resolution, and so without support for virtual 4K here, you cannot game in HDR or watch HDR content from the Xbox Series X. That is a shame, although to be honest the HDR hardware capabilities of this monitor are very limited anyway so it’s not really a major problem. Note that this isn’t an issue on PS5 as you can run HDR at 1440p on that console. It’s a limitation with the Xbox at the moment, and has been since launch. Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) was available from the screen.

The lack of Virtual 4K support could perhaps be addressed if possible through a future firmware update in order to handle consoles a little further.

Input Lag

Read our detailed article about input lag and the various measurement techniques which are used to evaluate this aspect of a display. The screens tested are split into two measurements which are based on our overall display lag tests and half the average G2G response time, as measured by our oscilloscope. The response time element, part of the lag you can see, is split from the overall display lag and shown on the graph as the green bar. From there, the signal processing (red bar) can be provided as a good estimation of the lag you would feel from the display. We also classify each display as follows:

Lag Classification (updated)

• Class 1) Less than 4.17ms – the equivalent to 1 frame lag of a display at 240Hz refresh rate – should be fine for gamers, even at high levels
• Class 2) A lag of 4.17 – 8.33ms – the equivalent of one to two frames at a 240Hz refresh rate – moderate lag but should be fine for many gamers. Caution advised for serious gaming
• Class 3) A lag of more than 8.33ms – the equivalent of more than 2 frames at a refresh rate of 240Hz, or 1 frame at 120Hz – Some noticeable lag in daily usage, not suitable for high end gaming

Lag was measured at the max 180Hz refresh rate, as well as at 60Hz to account for external devices, including games consoles. The overall lag at 180Hz was measured at 1.83ms. The response times account for around 1.25ms of the total lag measured, leaving an estimated signal processing lag of only ~0.58ms which was impressive. The lag remained consistent at 60Hz which was great news, as many screens show a much higher lag at these lower refresh rates.

Conclusion

Competition is tight in this 27″ monitor market, but it was good to see and test something different on the GM2711S, which was the new A.R.T. coating. We were actually really impressed by its performance, perhaps surprisingly so as it’s hard to get too excited about a screen coating. We felt though that this did a really nice job of reducing glare and reflections, even compared with typical matte AG coated panels and this made the screen more comfortable and easier to use day to day. This was especially useful during the day time and in well-lit environments, and if you’re looking for a screen to handle those situations well then this is a welcome improvement. We hope to see more of these panels in the future.

The 27″ screen size and 1440p resolution were standard in today’s market, no complaints there really. It was good that the screen can support wide colour gamut for more vivid colours in gaming and multimedia, including decent coverage for DCI-P3 content. However, it was disappointing that Cooler Master had not included any sRGB emulation mode option at the hardware level, so you’re basically stuck with the full wide gamut all the time, even if you wanted to work with sRGB/SDR content more accurately. You will need to be able to calibrate the screen yourself (or perhaps try our ICC profile) if you want to map the gamut back to sRGB or anything else, although some people may be happy just running in wide gamut mode all the time anyway. Brightness range was good, contrast was typical for an IPS panel and overall image quality was as expected from this technology.

It’s good to see Cooler Master opt for the fastest current A.R.T. coated panel AUO produce to provide some mid-tier gaming capabilities from this screen as well, and with a 180Hz refresh rate it makes it a good choice for casual gaming alongside your work and office uses. Response times were good, there was a single overdrive mode experience, motion clarity was good, input lag was very low and the provided MPRT blur reduction mode worked well too. We would have liked to have seen simpler operation of the MPRT mode and switching between that and adaptive-sync operation, as well as a separate brightness control in that mode. Console support was generally ok with 1440p @ 120Hz and VRR support, but the addition of Virtual 4K could have made it a bit more complete. These are the kind of things that could be easily added with a firmware update though hopefully. Keep in mind there’s no real HDR hardware capabilities on this model too.

The design is simple but smart, and it’s nice to see a less “gamer” focused aesthetic. Ergonomics were also very good and flexible, but you may miss some of the modern productivity features you find in today’s monitor market like USB-C and a KVM switch for instance. The lack of USB data ports was also a bit odd, especially when there’s physically one on the screen, you just can’t use it!

Where to Buy

The GM2711S is available in the UK already at a price of £264.99 including from retailers like Overclockers. That makes it attractively priced for a screen of this size and spec, and definitely worth a look we think if you’re after a combo monitor for work and play. We have not yet seen it available in the US but will update this review when it becomes available. We’ve asked Cooler Master for information about pricing and availability in the US and other regions too.

• Related content: Check out a round-up of all Cooler Master monitors, and their planned future roadmap here

Pros	Cons
A.R.T. coating does a really good job of reducing reflections and glare and was impressive	Switching between MPRT and normal mode was annoying, and need a separate brightness control too
Good mid-tier refresh rate, response times and gaming performance	Lack of any sRGB emulation mode from the screen
Smart and simple design	Missing some modern features you can find commonly nowadays

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We may earn a commission if you purchase from our affiliate links in this review – TFTCentral is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.ca and other Amazon stores worldwide. We also participate in a similar scheme for Overclockers.co.uk, Newegg, Bestbuy and some manufacturers.

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