Cooler Master Tempest GP27Q

Originally published 7 Dec 2022, last updated 9 Dec 2022

Introduction

In November 2022 we reviewed Cooler Master’s new Tempest GP27U display, a 27″ screen with a 4K resolution, 160Hz refresh rate and high-end Mini LED HDR backlight. It was an impressive screen, especially considering the attractive price point, and it was great to see high performing backlights added to more displays to enhance HDR experience. We have with us now the other new Tempest screen, the GP27Q (aka GP27-FQS), this time the Q stands for Quad HD, as this version has a 2560 x 1440 resolution, as opposed to the GP27U where U = Ultra HD, 3840 x 2160. It’s got a very similar spec to the U model apart from the resolution, and maintains a high refresh rate, wide colour gamut and that all important Mini LED backlight.

To explain the importance of the Mini LED backlight a bit further, pretty much every monitor launched nowadays is marketed as being great for HDR (High Dynamic Range), but very few can deliver a real HDR performance in practice. Many so-called HDR screens simply accept an HDR input signal, but lack any of the hardware to improve the contrast and dynamic range or even improve the colours associated with this kind of content. Nothing you’d associated with HDR is delivered, and it makes a farce of so-called HDR certifications at the same time. The Cooler Master Tempest GP27Q and GP27U model are different. These are displays focused on delivering a better HDR performance. They achieve this by adding two key ingredients, a Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) Mini LED backlight, and a Quantum Dot screen coating. The former allows for vastly improved local dimming of the backlight across the screen, with 576 local dimming zones in total on this 27″ sized display. This should help offer bright highlights up to a spec of 1200 nits, as well as very dark areas where needed, significantly improving the overall image contrast. The latter provides the colour enhancements associated with HDR, with a wide colour gamut covering 98% of the DCI-P3 wide colour gamut reference.

If you’re looking for the 4K version of this screen, check out our written review of the Tempest GP27U here, or for a quick hit of all the relevant information check our our 5 minute Cooler Master Tempest GP27U review video here.

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Update 9 Dec 2022 – Firmware Improvements

Before we get in to the rest of the review, very shortly after we published this review Cooler Master updated the firmware available for this screen (v1.0 dated 7 Dec 2022), which can be flashed quickly and easily yourself using a USB stick plugged in to the monitor. We have updated the review in various places to account for the changes they’ve made, some of which were based on the feedback we gave, as well as feedback from owners of this screen. Well done Cooler Master for listening to feedback and making improvements quickly to the product, that’s really great to see!

The new firmware can be found here. The changelog for the firmware (v1.1) as of 7 Dec 2022 is below, with key update highlighted in bold:

Changelog:

1. Adaptive Sync (VRR) and Local Dimming can now be enabled together.
2. Fixed some instances where the KVM would not automatically switch to a new signal input.
3. More overall flexible color adjustments in all picture modes.

Key Specs and Features

• 27″ “Ultra speed IPS” panel from AU Optronics (flat format)
• 2560 x 1440 QHD resolution (16:9 aspect ratio)
• 165Hz refresh rate
• Adaptive-sync VRR for NVIDIA and AMD systems
• Motion Blur Reduction mode
• 576-zone local dimming Mini LED backlight
• 1200 nits peak brightness spec for HDR
• 98% DCI-P3 wide colour gamut and 10-bit colour depth
• 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB type-C (DP alt mode and 90W power delivery) and 2x HDMI 2.0 video connections
• 2x USB ports, 2x 3W integrated speakers and headphone jack
• Stand with tilt, height, swivel and rotate adjustments
• Rear cover RGB lighting

Design and Features

The GP27Q looks basically identical to the GP27U model. It comes in a black and dark silver design and has a 3-side borderless panel design with a thin ~9mm black edge along the sides and top, and a slightly thicker ~16mm black bottom edge. It is fairly minimalist in design, and in keeping with other Cooler Master screens we’ve tested in the past.

The rear of the screen is encased in a matte black plastic with a quick release stand attachment in the middle. You can see from the above images the fairly subtle RGB lighting elements on the back with two “wing” sections and a circle around the monitor’s arm. These are not bright enough to cast a light on your wall behind the screen really, so are only really useful if you can see the rear of the screen in certain situations. There is also a cable tidy clip on the arm of the stand, and you can see the OSD controller joystick on the left hand side in the photos above too.

The stand provides a full range of ergonomic adjustments with tilt, height, swivel and rotate functions. All of these are smooth in movement and generally easy to use, although side to side swivel is a little limited in its range, and the tilt and height adjustments are stiff to operate on our sample. The panel remains stable with very little wobble on the stand as you move it around or use the OSD buttons.

The screen has a thin profile as seen above. Connections are shown in the photo below on the back underside of the screen where there are 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x HDMI 2.0 (note that the U model includes HDMI 2.1) and USB type-C (with DP Alt mode, data and 90W power delivery) available. There are also 2x USB 3 data ports, a USB upstream port and a headphone jack here.

There are also 2x USB data ports and a headphone jack on the back here. It might have been nice to have the USB ports and headphone jack in a more easy to get to position for easy access.

The OSD is controlled through a single joystick on the back right hand side of the screen (when viewed from the front). Navigation is generally quick and intuitive, although you have to select and enable settings sometimes by pressing ‘right’ on the joystick, when a press of the button seems to feel more logical. There’s a decent range of options to play with in here too. It’s a very similar menu to the GP27U with the same software.

One annoyance with the menu software is that many settings trigger a warning about increasing/changing power consumption, and that happens every time. The most annoying of these is if you want to change the brightness control or when switching between the different local dimming modes, although once you’ve found the settings you like, you shouldn’t need to change it again hopefully. It would be nice if you could turn off these warning messages as they get very annoying appearing all the time.

Default Setup

The GP27Q offers a wide colour gamut backlight which provides vivid and saturated colours well suited to a lot of gaming and to modern multimedia and HDR content. HDR is a key target use for this model given its high end Mini LED local dimming backlight. If you like the more colourful appearance then the screen does nicely here with a wide colour space. However, for a lot of normal desktop uses actually you want to work with a smaller SDR / sRGB colour space and that can be more difficult on a wide gamut screen. We will see how this screen handles that usage scenario shortly.

We first want to measure the accuracy of the default out-of-the-box setup relative to typical sRGB content, while also examining the screen’s suitability and accuracy for common wider colour gamut spaces such as DCI-P3, or for Adobe RGB which is used in the professional and photography markets quite often. We should note that the screen does carry a factory calibration, but this applies in the defined sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB modes which we will test shortly.

Note that we left the local dimming function disabled for these tests.

The screen has a fairly modest default brightness which is rare for a desktop monitor, but it is set for some reason in the ‘cool’ colour temperature mode out of the box which is a bit too cool visually and leaves whites looking a bit bluish. From our measurements we can see that the image is a lot cooler than desired, at 7883K white point it was 21% too cool compared with our 6500K target. Gamma tracking of 2.2 gamma was at least pretty good, but the overly cool image resulted in high errors in greyscale with dE 7.7 average.

The contrast ratio in this default mode was disappointing though, at 782:1 which is poor even for an IPS-type panel. This seemed to be a result of the pre-defined colour temp setting (default = cool). We tested the other modes as well including bluish, native and warm and all had similarly poor contrast ratios. If you move in this mode to the ‘user color’ temperature instead, which allows you control over the RGB channels, the contrast ratio is significantly improved up to a little over 1000:1. We would definitely recommend avoiding the pre-defined colour temp settings as those seem to crush contrast. We will test the different colour gamut and colour space emulation modes and also see what is achievable after calibration later too. This was a similar story to the GP27U model as well.

Backlight adjustment range in this default mode (with local dimming off and in SDR) was a whopping ~644nits max, down as low as ~62 nits, which provided a good range of luminance for both bright and dark room conditions. You can actually enable the backlight local dimming if you want even in SDR mode which provides an even brighter image (!!), which we will test a bit more later. Local dimming is really supposed to be used for HDR gaming and multimedia, you won’t want to use it for normal desktop or office use, although you could enable it for SDR games and movies as well to provide a better contrast ratio and potentially brighter image if you want.

From a colour point of view we have measured the screen’s native mode relative to the common sRGB colour space at the top, and then also relative to Adobe RGB at the bottom, a wider gamut colour space often used in the photography and professional market. Thanks to the Quantum Dot screen coating there is a very wide 154.9% relative coverage of sRGB, with large over-extension of reds, blues and greens, making them look very saturated in practice. When viewing sRGB/SDR content in this default mode, colour accuracy is bad at dE 6.5 average but that’s common on wide gamut screens because of the over-coverage of the colour space. That’s exaggerated here because the gamut is so wide.

The bottom section shows that there is good coverage of wider colour gamut spaces like DCI-P3 (98.1% absolute) and Adobe RGB (98.3%), although both also over-extend in this native gamut mode by a considerable way (123.5% and 132.7% relative coverage respectively). Although this does mean that in theory you can work with those wider gamut spaces nicely, if you have a way to clamp the colour space back to the intended area either from the monitor itself (tested in a moment), or via calibration and profiling. With the large over-coverage even of the Adobe RGB space, we had poor colour accuracy in this default mode for those colours with dE 5.4 average. This is all to be expected really from a screen with such a wide colour gamut, but it will be interesting to see how we might restrict and tame this via the other monitor modes.

sRGB Emulation

The GP27Q provides an sRGB emulation mode in the OSD that can allow you to restrict the colour gamut back to the more common sRGB / SDR reference space. These modes can be useful if you want to avoid the over-saturation in the native wide gamut mode or specifically work with and view SDR content, although it’s also possible to use other methods such as graphics card clamping, or of course calibration and ICC profiles. Having a usable and working sRGB emulation mode from the monitor itself is the easiest method though, and can be used for all different applications, inputs and modes.

The provided factory calibration report lists sRGB mode as one that should have been factory calibrated, and mentions 2.2 gamma and 6500K colour temp, along with an accuracy of dE 0.47 on our sample.

The sRGB emulation mode thankfully allows you control over many settings within the OSD menu, including importantly brightness so you are not stuck with whatever the manufacturer default is like on some screens. This means you can thankfully turn it down to something more comfortable than the 242 nits we measured out of the box in this mode. One immediately noticeable benefit of this mode compared with the default ‘auto’ gamut mode was that the contrast ratio was a bit better, as the screen was now operating in the ‘user’ colour temp mode and not the default ‘cool’ mode. Still not exactly brilliant, but certainly an improvement. It had improved from the default 782:1 to a better 875:1, and what we would consider reasonable for an IPS-type panel. Remember this is the SDR contrast ratio with local dimming disabled.

Gamma was variable, being too low in darker tones, and too high in mid to light grey shades. The white point was a bit warm in this mode at 6090K, giving us a deviance of 6% from our target. The greyscale was slightly better on average at 6276K but was warmer in the lighter grey shades.

Update 9 Dec 2022 – When we originally tested the screen we found that you did not have access to the colour temp or RGB channel gain controls, so the colour temp was one area you couldn’t correct without separate calibration devices. With the new firmware (dated 7 Dec 2022) you now have access to the RGB channels to make tweaks if you want, which is really handy. You get a warning that this will move you away from their factory calibration, but ultimately it gives you better control in this emulation mode.

Clamping of the very wide native gamut of the screen (~155% relative sRGB coverage in native mode) back to the defined sRGB space was good generally, but did go slightly too far, leaving us with a 94.4% absolute coverage now. This mode is much better and less saturated than the native mode for sRGB and SDR content though. Colours now looked more muted of course than in the full wide gamut mode, but they are far more accurate for sRGB and SDR content. We measured a 2.2 dE average which was much better and represented an overall good colour accuracy for this mode. With access to brightness and other settings (except colour temp/RGB) still available to the user, this is a decent and usable sRGB emulation mode.

Adobe RGB emulation

The GP27Q also includes a factory calibrated mode for the Adobe RGB colour space, useful in the professional and photography markets. According to the report with our sample this should be calibrated to 6500K white point, 2.2 gamma and with an achieved colour accuracy of dE 0.62.

This mode had a pretty good gamma tracking for 2.2 gamma overall with 2.24 average measured, but its colour temp and white point were a bit warmer than our target like in the sRGB emulation mode. We measured a 5% deviance for white point at 6146K, and a slightly lower average 2% deviance at 6392K average across grey shades. This was pretty close though and should be considered good.

Update 9 Dec 2022 – When we originally tested the screen we found that you did not have access to the colour temp or RGB channel gain controls, so the colour temp was one area you couldn’t correct without separate calibration devices. With the new firmware (dated 7 Dec 2022) you now have access to the RGB channels to make tweaks if you want, which is really handy. You get a warning that this will move you away from their factory calibration, but ultimately it gives you better control in this emulation mode.

Contrast ratio was moderate for an IPS-type panel in this mode at 888:1 and very similar to what we’d seen in the sRGB emulation mode – again better than the default native mode where the screen is in one of the colour temp presets.

Clamping of the colour space was a bit too aggressive in this mode which is exactly what we’d seen on the GP27U model as well. We didn’t know whether to give this a tick or a cross in the table really. On the one hand, it’s certainly cut back on the large over-coverage of the native mode (from 132.7% relative coverage), especially in red and blue shades where the monitor’s native gamut goes a long way beyond the Adobe RGB space. But then it goes a bit too far, and now we have some under-coverage of red shades instead, resulting in a 91.3% coverage of the colour space. Still, by emulating the Adobe RGB space quite well, and by including a factory calibration, we had a better colour accuracy that we would rate as good, with dE average of 1.8.

This is a usable mode as well if you wanted to work specifically with Adobe RGB content for photography or professional applications, and can live with a slightly too warm image and a not-quite-perfect colour space. You need a calibration device to correct the white point any further really, and then if you do have one you might actually be better profiling the native gamut mode back to Adobe RGB and using the ICC profile in colour aware applications for the Adobe RGB colour space clamping. That could give you a more accurate Adobe RGB gamut coverage, and more flexibility in calibration targets.

DCI-P3 Emulation

The GP27U also includes a factory calibrated mode for the DCI-P3 colour space, applicable in the HDR content creation and multimedia markets. On our sample the provided report said this had been calibrated to 2.2 gamma, 6500K white point and with an achieved colour accuracy of dE 0.83 average.

This was a nicely set up mode with a very good gamma at 2.19 average, very close across the greyscale to our 2.2 target. The white point was basically spot on at 6531K which was great news, and the grey scale was only slightly too cool by a minor 2% in some shades. The contrast ratio was not very good in this mode though at 778:1, very similar to what we’d seen out of the box and not as high as it had reached for the sRGB and Adobe RGB modes for some reason. As of the firmware update on 7 Dec you do have access to the RGB channels if you want, but you shouldn’t need them in this mode given the decent white point.

Like the Adobe RGB mode, this DCI-P3 mode did cut down on the very large native gamut nicely, but went too far in red shades, resulting in a 89.5% coverage of DCI-P3. The colour accuracy was reasonable in this mode, and again we would say this is a usable mode generally if you need to work in this colour space, and tame somewhat the very wide default gamut. Having a calibration device would give you better control over the colour space profiling, and allow you to correct things like the too cool white point.

Calibration

Note that the calibration here is with local dimming turned off

Calibration and profiling can produce very good results if you have a suitable calibration device and software. This was profiled to 2.2 gamma, 6500k colour temp and to the sRGB colour space. The screen was left in its native wide gamut mode, but this profile will be used in colour-aware applications (e.g. Photoshop) to map back to sRGB in this instance. You can see the recommended OSD settings above that go along with this profile. Our calibrated ICC profile for this display is available now for our Patreon supporters and will be added to our main database in the coming months.

SDR Local Dimming

Cooler Master provide the option to enable the local dimming backlight even in SDR mode, which could potentially be useful for gaming and multimedia. It can offer impressive increases in brightness and contrast in those situations although keep in mind that the tone mapping of content won’t be there like it is for HDR. SDR content is mastered to a much lower brightness level (actually 100 nits), so you will need to try and get to a comfortable brightness for your uses, ambient light conditions and content. You don’t have to get it to 100 nits, many people find that too dark, but you will need to customise the brightness control in the OSD to get something comfortable. With local dimming enabled you can then still benefit from the local dimming to improve black depth and darker content, while improving the contrast ratio significantly.

For these tests we switch to the sRGB gamut mode, as SDR content is based on that colour space and it will provide more accurate colours as as result. You can of course use the ‘auto’ wide gamut mode if you prefer for your SDR gaming and multimedia, but the colours will be more saturated and unrealistic if you do. You’d have to experiment with the OSD settings to get a comfortable brightness, gamma etc. We have provided some recommendations below for the sRGB emulation mode with local dimming enabled.

We first of all tested the brightness range with local dimming enabled in each of the three modes. We used a 10% APL for this test:

Local Dimming Setting	Max nits (100%)	Min nits (0%)
Low	1005	34
Medium	1135	43
High	1173	46

The brightness levels possible with local dimming in SDR mode are very close to the peak brightness measured in HDR mode (see results later on in the 10% APL row). This means that the screen can be crazily bright and this can be a problem for SDR content which is not tone-mapped and graded in the same way that HDR content is. Unlike HDR mode where you would just leave brightness on 100%, you need to set the brightness in SDR local dimming mode to something comfortable and suitable for your uses. Turn the brightness setting down to something appropriate.

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After a fair bit of experimentation in the sRGB mode with local dimming enabled (set to high in this case to maximise contrast) we found that the gamma needs to be increased a step to the highest setting of 2.6 in order to more closely match our target 2.2 gamma. We left other settings at default.

Gamma was as close to 2.2 as we could get it here after we’d adjusted the OSD setting to 2.6, although the lightest grey shades were the furthest from the target. Overall in SDR with local dimming enabled the gamma tracking wasn’t great. The white point and colour temp were good though at 6563K white point, and had only a minor 1% deviance from our target. Contrast ratio was significantly improved thanks to the backlight local dimming, and with the high number of zones the max contrast ratio across the screen was >100,000:1.

Colour accuracy is moderate in this mode, but you do at least have a pretty good emulation of this smaller sRGB colour space which is suitable for SDR content.

One other option if you want to use local dimming for SDR content is to run the screen at its native ‘auto’ gamut mode where you then have access to correct the white point through adjustments to the RGB channels. You can use the settings recommended in our calibration section above (50, 47, 47) to get a white point closer to 6500K, although you then have the wide gamut colour space to contend with. SDR content, designed to operate within the sRGB colour space, would then be far less accurate, with more saturated, vivid and neon looking colours.

One simple option if you want to have a mode for SDR desktop use (local dimming off) and one for SDR gaming/movies (local dimming on) is to use the two User preset modes. Save one load of settings in each mode, and then you can simply switch between the two presets rather than having to mess around with multiple changes.

Update 9 Dec 2022 – Cooler Master have stated on this Reddit post that they are planning some updates and improvements to SDR local dimming performance in a future update which will hopefully apply to both the GP27Q and GP27U models.

General and Office

The IPS-type panel used for this screen offers some solid all round performance including wide viewing angles and a stable image quality that you’d expect from this technology. Darker content was more limiting as the screen exhibited the familiar off-angle IPS pale glow associated with this technology. The resolution of 2560 x 1440 is also comfortable on a 27″ sized screen providing a nice desktop area to work with, including decent support for split screen working and a sharp text clarity. The GP27U model has a higher 3840 x 2160 “4K” resolution which provides an even sharper image for these kind of uses, although there are added complications then of how your applications and OS handle scaling, and whether your system is powerful enough to run the screen at 4K in different situations, including for gaming. 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. You wouldn’t get any more desktop space on a 4K model either keep in mind, as you’d normally have to use 150% scaling to reduce back from 4K resolution to the equivalent of 1440p, although the higher pixel density does then provide increased sharpness if that’s of key importance to you. Depending on your viewing position and eye sight, you may or may not see benefit in the increased pixel density of 4K on a 27″ screen like this when it’s scaled. It’s a tricky one to provide a recommendation on, but we think 1440p is likely to be more accessible and perfectly fine for most users on a screen this size.

The contrast ratio is good but not brilliant for an IPS-type panel at around 924:1 after calibration, but still not as good as VA panels or next generation “IPS Black” panels. Just make sure not to use the defined colour temp modes in the menu which crush contrast to ~780:1. Select the ‘user’ mode and tweak the RGB channels as we suggest in this review to get a nice white point and maintain a much higher contrast ratio. The backlight adjustment range with local dimming turned off (62– 644 cd/m²) is good, although we would have liked to have seen a slightly lower adjustment range for darker room conditions, and no one really needs a screen that can get as bright as 644 nits for desktop and SDR use! One minor bug we noticed was that when the screen wakes from sleep, it seems to flash very bright for a split second, before coming on at the normal configured brightness level. Get your sunglasses ready! (we didn’t notice this on the GP27U).

We confirmed that when the local dimming function is turned off, the backlight operates with a flicker-free direct current (DC) method, as opposed to any PWM.

If you enable local dimming then a low amplitude oscillation, with the higher peaks you see in this graph syncing with the refresh rate of the screen. So in this example at 166Hz the high peaks were every 6.06ms. This shouldn’t present any noticeable flicker in practice, but we would not recommend turning local dimming on for office and general use anyway. There’s perhaps scenarios where it could help contrast in SDR movies, games and multimedia, but not for office use.

The wide colour gamut provides flexibility to work with a range of different colour spaces if you need to. The native wide gamut is useful for gaming, HDR and multimedia where you might well prefer the more saturated and vivid colours, and especially for HDR content which is mastered in a very wide Rec.2020 colour space anyway. Having the ability to cover nearly all of the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB colour spaces from this screen is great news if you want to work in either of those, and the provided emulation modes are pretty useful for this too. sRGB emulation is also provided and well set up.

The spectral distribution at a calibrated 6500k is shown above, with the blue peak measured at 448 nm wavelength. This means it is not part of the Eyesafe certified range of products, as it does not have a blue peak that is outside of the supposed harmful range according to Eyesafe which is 415 – 455nm. There is a ‘Blue Light filter’ setting in the OSD menu which can be accessed via the ‘color adjust’ section. This is a slider from 0 (off) to 100 in increments of 10, and makes the image progressively warmer, but then also very yellow in colour. It’s usable up to about a setting of 20 which measured 4454K, but any higher setting just looks far too yellow, especially at the higher settings.

With a built-in KVM switch in the Tempest Monitor series, you can easily control an extra device such as a laptop, another desktop, tablet, or a phone using only a single set of a keyboard and mouse. With a simple toggle in the OSD menu, you can seamlessly swap controls to your second device for ultimate multitasking.

The screen has a decent range of ergonomic adjustments with tilt, height, swivel and also rotate available. Along with the common DisplayPort and HDMI inputs, there is a USB type-C with DP Alt mode and 90W power delivery and data transfer which might be useful for some devices for single cable connectivity. There are also 2x USB ports and a headphone jack too, as well as some simple integrated 2x 3W speakers on this model.

Gaming

The GP27Q is based on an IPS-type panel from panel manufacturer AU Optronics, their AHVA or so-called “Fast IPS” technology which Cooler Master have branded “Ultra Fast”. The screen has a quoted 1ms response time spec which is intended to be G2G, but unlike the U model there is also blur reduction backlight mode available on the GP27Q.

There is a pretty high 165Hz native panel refresh rate and the screen features adaptive-sync for variable refresh rates (VRR) from both AMD and NVIDIA systems although it has not yet been certified under any of AMD’s or NVIDIA’s certification schemes according to their respective websites, but Cooler Master say in their reviewers guide that ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ certification is expected.

Within the OSD menu are a few ‘Gaming Plus’ settings for timer, crosshair and FPS counter in case you find those useful by the way. Unlike the U model there is also a blur reduction mode available on this mode, accessible via the “MPRT” setting in the gaming part of the OSD menu. There are also a range of preset modes available for things like FPS, simulation, RTS and some customisable modes.

Response Times and Motion Clarity

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.

We tested the screen at the maximum 165Hz refresh rate in each of the overdrive modes in the OSD menu, using our measurement devices and a range of visual tests. We have not bothered with the ‘off’ mode here by the way, instead focusing on the four other modes. You can see that there are actually very good response times even in the ‘normal’ mode with 4.9ms G2G average and basically no overshoot at all, with good refresh rate compliance so the pixel transitions can keep up with the frame rates well. The response times improve slightly when you move up to the ‘advanced’ mode with 4.3ms G2G average now measured but a small amount of overshoot starts to appear in the measurements, not really visible at all in real use. These two modes look visually very similar in motion tests and real content.

If you move up to the ‘Ultra Fast’ mode there are improvements to the G2G figure down to 2.8ms G2G, but at the cost of some high levels of overshoot, visible in practice too with some pale halos being the most obvious. There is also a ‘dynamic’ mode available which offered slightly faster response times at 165Hz than the ‘normal’ and ‘advanced’ modes at 4.0ms G2G measured, and only low, non-visible levels of overshoot in practice. It looked very similar in practice at 165Hz to the normal and advanced modes though. At the maximum 165Hz refresh rate the dynamic mode is slightly better than the others and recommended.

The performance during VRR situations and for other fixed refresh rate inputs also needs to be considered. First let’s look at VRR mode:

We tested all of the overdrive modes during VRR situations with a range of different active frame rates. In VRR, the Advanced and Dynamic modes looked the same across the VRR range, and both showed high levels of overshoot with visible pale trails at the lower end of the refresh rate range. We tried the normal mode as well which we felt also showed a little too much overshoot at lower frame rates too. In the end we decided to experiment with the ‘User’ mode which gives you manual control for the overdrive impulse. We pushed this as high as we sensibly could at the lower refresh rates before overshoot became too noticeable, and settled on a level of 20 for the best balance. This was the same level we’d landed on when we tested the GP27U model too in fact.

The above measurements show response times at 60, 120 and 165Hz in this User 20 mode. You can see the G2G response times are largely the same across the range but the overshoot level is a bit higher as the refresh rate reduces. On this screen it never reached any level that we would consider a problem visually, even as low as 60Hz. The increase in overshoot as refresh rate lowers is pretty typical for any screen without ‘variable overdrive’, but we still felt that this User 20 mode gave a simple “single overdrive setting experience” for gaming in VRR. At no point did the overshoot become too problematic which was good news. We had expected the ‘dynamic’ mode to offer variable overdrive in VRR, but it seems not to.

We would probably also recommend sticking with this User 20 mode for fixed input refresh rates like 60Hz, for consoles or external devices.

We have provided some motion clarity pursuit camera photos below comparing the recommended ‘User 20’ mode to the (not recommended) ‘Ultra Fast’ mode when using 165Hz refresh rate. You can see the solid performance in user 20 mode, and also the pale and dark overshoot trails that start to appear if you were to use the ‘ultra fast’ mode. This overshoot in that mode gets worse by the way in that mode at lower refresh rates, but it’s still bad at 165Hz. Motion clarity will vary of course if you lower the refresh rate or use VRR and frame rate drops, this is more to demonstrate the best case motion clarity at the max refresh rate.

Motion clarity is basically the same as the GP27U model but gaming at 1440p native resolution here will be easier to power than the 4K resolution of the U model, especially at higher refresh rates up to 165Hz. There is of course the option to go for a 4K model which has very similar specs and performance if you want, it will depend on your preferences, system capabilities and budget.

We will talk about HDR more in a moment, but the HDR gaming experience is also excellent. Update 9 Dec 2022 – when we first tested the screen you could only use HDR when adaptive-sync VRR was disabled but that has since been updated with the new firmware (v1.0 dated 7 Dec 2022).

Another useful option perhaps for gaming is enabling the local dimming backlight even in SDR mode, which is a supported option on the GP27Q, as it was on the GP27U. That can significantly increase brightness, and you’d want to be careful about what you set that to. But it can also help with contrast, improving darker areas and increasing the overall image quality. That’s something you could consider for SDR gaming too and it was nice to see access to the local dimming Mini LED backlight outside of HDR.

MPRT Blur Reduction Mode

Unlike the 4K GP27U model, there is an added blur reduction mode available on the 1440p GP27Q display. This is accessible via the gaming section of the OSD but only when you have adaptive-sync disabled, you cannot use it at the same time as VRR. It’s available at 120, 144 and 165Hz refresh rates but not at anything lower and has 3 settings for low, medium and high. There are no further controls for anything like strobe timing or strobe length provided here.

When this mode is enabled the backlight is strobed in sync with the refresh rate to help try and reduce perceived motion blur in gaming, which is explained a lot more in our article here. The strobing is in sync with the refresh rate, so for example at the maximum 165Hz there is a strobe every 6.06ms.

The brightness control is greyed out when using MPRT mode, so we measured the brightness of the screen in each of the settings and recorded 291 nits on low, 144 nits on medium and 76 nits on high. In theory the motion clarity should get a little better as you move up the settings as the strobe “on” length is being shortened each time, and that’s the reason why the brightness drops too. In practice there was minimal difference between the 3 modes visually, so you can just use this setting to determine how bright you want the screen to be for your gaming.

We captured some pursuit camera photos in MPRT mode (high) to try and demonstrate the motion clarity across the screen in top, middle and bottom regions. There was a fair amount of strobe cross talk evident, where you get a ghost image behind the moving image. The sharpness of the image was improved with this MPRT mode and tracking of moving objects became clearer, but it’s hard to eliminate or reduce this ghosting image on LCD blur reduction modes generally. At least nice to see it included as an option for those who might like to use it for their gaming.

Lag

We measured a super low input lag on the GP27Q. There was a total display lag of only 2.33ms and with ~1.20ms of that accounted for by pixel response times, that leaves a signal processing lag of only ~1.13ms which is excellent. As a result the screen is perfectly fine for fast paced competitive games if you need from that point of view. There was no change to this lag result with local dimming enabled in SDR mode by the way.

Console Gaming

The screen offers reasonable support for modern games consoles. It has a 1440p native resolution which is supported on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X. With the display only having older HDMI 2.0 ports, selecting 1440p would be your best bet if you want to push for 120Hz refresh rates, as 4K 120Hz will not be possible over HDMI 2.0. The only problem and gap with this at the moment is that the Xbox Series X won’t allow you to use HDR mode unless you are inputting a 4K signal annoyingly. That’s a shame as the Mini LED backlight is obviously well suited to HDR content and gaming on this screen.

The screen does also support “Virtual 4K” inputs which will then be scaled down to 1440p by the display, but would allow you to input 4K and use HDR from the Xbox. But then because of the older HDMI 2.0 ports, you won’t be able to push 120Hz refresh rate unfortunately. We would have liked to have seen HDMI 2.1 ports included on this model given the high end HDR capabilities. Normally we’d be less bothered on lower grade HDR 1440p displays, but it leaves a gap here because of the Xbox’s HDR support options.

	Console Gaming
Native panel resolution	2560 x 1440 (1440p)
Maximum resolution and refresh rate supported	1440p @ 120Hz 4K @ 60Hz (8-bit max)
Virtual 4K support
4K at 24Hz support
4K at 50Hz support
HDMI connection version	2.0
HDMI connection bandwidth	14.4 Gbps
HDMI-VRR (over HDMI 2.1)
Adaptive-sync (FreeSync) over HDMI
Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM)
Ultra high speed HDMI 2.1 cable provided

VRR was supported only when you have adaptive-sync enabled in the monitors OSD because it’s using FreeSync over HDMI (supported for VRR from the Xbox) but not HDMI-VRR as that’s a feature of HDMI 2.1. We do not have access to a PS5 to check if VRR would work from that, but we believe it would not work with FreeSync over HDMI 2.0.

Updated 9 Dec 2022 – When we first tested the screen you could not use VRR with local dimming, but that has now been changed with the new firmware (v1.0 dated 7 Dec 2022). This means you can now use HDR, local dimming and VRR which is great news – from the Xbox at least.

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

One of the key benefits of the GP27Q is its 576 zone Mini LED backlight which sets it apart from common edge-lit local dimming monitors, which only have a very limited number of dimming zones, commonly 8 or 16. Mini LED backlights like the one used here provide a much better control over the image on the screen, being able to dim smaller parts of the image while brightening other areas to improve the contrast and dynamic range. Dark areas can often be dimmed so low that they are basically being turned off, while bright highlights can often be brightened to very high peak brightness levels. That’s one of the key benefits in using a direct lit backlight with many zones like this.

Each zone on this screen is responsible for around 6,400 pixels given the 1440p resolution which obviously isn’t as finite in control as something like OLED which has per-pixel level dimming control. Having said that, a Mini LED backlight is capable of reaching much higher brightness levels, including sustaining those brightness levels for larger screen areas, so each technology has its advantages and limitations. The 576 zones used here is very good though on a screen this size in the LCD market. This helps reduce blooming and halos in practice relative to screens with fewer zones. There can still be challenges on very specific content like star fields for instance, or scenes with very small bright areas, but that’s going to be hard for any FALD screen to handle and you really need something like OLED to avoid all halos.

Normal use HDR content looks impressive, with images that pop with nice colours, decent bright areas, and very low levels of blooming and halos from what we could see. We tested the local dimming in both SDR mode (where it is available to use if you want) and HDR, and in a range of different settings and options, and the blooming was consistently low. Halos were small and the Mini LED backlight did a very good job of brightening light areas, and darkening dark areas. There are quite a few different options available, which are explained below so you do need to make sure you are using the appropriate settings when using the screen for HDR. Being an IPS panel you do get some pale glow when viewing darker content from an angle, and this can cause patches of blooming if you are viewing the screen off-angle. For the best performance you do need to be using the screen from a head on viewing position to reduce the appearance of halos and IPS glow.

HDR Technical Capabilities
VESA DisplayHDR certification level		Not officially certified
HDR formats supported		HDR10 Only
Local dimming		576 zone Mini LED
High number of local dimming zones		576 zone Mini LED
Increased peak brightness		1257 nits max (local dimming = high default colour temp mode)
Reaching advertised peak brightness		Surpassing 1000 nits
Increased dynamic range (contrast) max		~100,000:1
Increased “local” HDR contrast ratio max		~2200:1
Wide colour gamut >90% DCI-P3		98.1% absolute coverage 123.5% relative coverage
10-bit colour depth support		Supported

Updated 9 Dec 2022 – When you first enable HDR in Windows the image might very washed out, but this is because on the older firmware you also have to enable HDR in the OSD menu (set it to ‘auto’ instead of the default ‘off’), and then also enable local dimming to one of the three settings (low, medium, high). Once you’ve done that, the default Windows appearance in HDR mode is very good. On the newer firmware v1.0 from 7 Dec 2022 this seems to be enabled by default now which is easier and avoids that initial shock of it looking really bad!

There are 3 preset modes for HDR which are User, Movie and Game. All carry different default settings but after the v1.0 7 Dec 2022 firmware update you can now change most settings to your liking. We don’t need to break down the modes here as they are all pretty customisable.

Local Dimming Setting

Before we get in to the other measurements we compared the peak brightness performance in each of the ‘local dimming’ settings. Visually when switching between the three modes you could see the brightness increased as you moved up the setting. There was some very minor increase in blooming as it seems the backlight is now being raised even higher to bring out the highlights, which could risk some slight “over-spill” in to adjacent areas more often. To be honest, the differences were very minimal, so unless you are experiencing blooming problems with your specific content, we would probably recommend sticking to the ‘high’ mode to optimise the brightness of the screen and make images pop more.

You can see from the above that the high mode delivered the highest brightness levels for content. If you find the image too bright at all, turning the local dimming down a step is an effective way to reduce the peak brightness of the screen, while avoiding the need to darken the overall image (like changing the brightness slider would), and at the same time also get a small improvement in blooming levels. So if you find the screen too bright at all, use the ‘local dimming’ setting to make that a bit darker and move down to medium or low.

HDR User Mode Default Settings

We went ahead and tested the User mode which gives you the best flexibility in settings. HDR mode was set to ‘auto’ on the monitor so that it was active, and local dimming was set to ‘high’.

Tracking of the PQ curve was good with only some very small deviance in dark grey shades. The colour temp and white point were the main problem in this mode out of the box, being far too cool at 13,353k (105% deviance!) white point. This lead to some very high errors in grey scale which had a blue tint to them. Some people prefer a cooler image for HDR and movies, but our target here is for 6500K and this is way off that. In this HDR User mode you do at least have access to the colour temp setting and RGB channels so it is possible to improve things with some changes there. We will look at that in a moment.

Colour accuracy of HDR Rec.2020 colours is only poor because of the overly cool setup, despite the particularly wide colour gamut covering a decent 83.9% of the Rec.2020 colour space.

We measured a peak brightness of 1264 nits, which is very close to the advertised 1200 nits spec. The peak brightness varied depending on the APL (size of bright content on the screen) with the highest brightness being achieved for 5% and 10% window sizes, before dropping down to a bit lower as that APL increased, and then pushing back up near the maximum again for 100% white screen. Small highlights were also very bright at ~902 nits, although not reaching as high as the screen is capable of due to the local dimming nature, and the desire to avoid creating halos or blooming problems. Brightness setting remains available in the HDR mode, so if you do want to turn it down to something a bit lower to be more comfortable for close-up viewing, that is possible. Having said that there is also an impact to HDR brightness if you make adjustments to get a less cool setup as discussed below.

HDR User Mode Adjusted Settings

We made some simple adjustments to the OSD menu, mostly to the colour temp mode which basically we adjusted to have the same RGB values (50, 47, 36). This was a more extreme change to the blue channel than we’d needed to make in the SDR mode, to correct the very cool default setup of the HDR preset. These changes now returned a white point much closer to 6500K and improved colour accuracy quite nicely as a result. This was a more accurate HDR setting with minimal setting changes.

The only drawback with this change was that there was an obvious and noticeable change to the screen’s brightness as soon as you made any change to the colour temp levels in the menu. We’d seen the same thing on the GP27U model too. Even a single step change from the default 50, 50, 50 RGB levels seemed to drop the brightness, it was almost as if it was in some kind of “super bright” mode from the factory, but then changing the settings impacted that and moved you to a somewhat lower brightness. You can see from our peak brightness above that once adjusted to ~6500K white point it was now reaching up to only ~786 nits, and was not nearly as bright as it had been out of the box at the default settings (~1264 nits) when it was running in its very cool mode. Cooler Master have told us that the brightness has been optimised for a cool colour temp which explains the change here.

We would still consider the improvements to the white point and colour accuracy probably worth this drop to brightness, of what is still a very bright HDR monitor when you’re using it up close. Although the HDR image isn’t as impressive and doesn’t pop as much with the brightness now being considerably lower. Perhaps a future firmware update from Cooler Master could optimise HDR brightness while providing a less cool white point. For now if you want to maximise brightness, stick with the default state, and just live with a much cooler image. Or if you want it a bit warmer, you can get a nice setup as above with simple RGB changes, but it seems to impact brightness quite a bit.

Conclusion

Updated 9 Dec 2022 after new firmware update

The Tempest GP27Q is another impressive HDR gaming screen from Cooler Master, this time with a lower 1440p resolution panel if you don’t want or need 4K like the GP27U can provide. As we’d said in our GP27U review, it’s really great to see investment in proper HDR capable backlights at the moment, with more and more screens shunning poor edge-lit local dimming in favour of FALD and Mini LED options. This gives you a big boost to HDR performance in the desktop monitor space.

For gaming the response times were very good, and the screen provided a single overdrive mode experience for VRR situations which was great news. The 1440p resolution is perfectly adequate on a 27″ screen like this and will be less of a drain on your system and graphics card, allowing you to instead push higher frame rates and refresh rates, and maximise your in-game settings. Input lag was super-low too which was great news. Console gaming support was decent overall but the lack of HDMI 2.1 left some gaps when it came to VRR on the PS5, and high refresh rate 4K HDR gaming on the Xbox. Cooler Master have added a blur reduction mode to this model which isn’t featured on the 4K GP27U, and this works reasonably well.

A main use-case for the GP27Q would be for HDR gaming and multimedia, and we found the Mini LED backlight to work very well, producing very good contrast, very bright highlights and low levels of blooming. Thankfully Cooler Master added support for local dimming at the same time as VRR in their latest firmware, which improves the HDR gaming support nicely. In other HDR uses like movies, the Mini LED backlight performed very well, it’s great to see a proper HDR-capable backlight being used here instead of poor edge-lit dimming solutions (or no dimming at all) like you find on most supposed “HDR” monitors. The brightness and HDR pop does take a hit if you want to adjust the settings and move away from the very cool default state though which is a shame and the brighter experience is configured for a very cool image.

The wide colour gamut enabled by the Quantum Dot coating provides vivid and saturated colours for HDR and gaming, but also provides you enough space to work within common colour gamuts like sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB. The provided sRGB emulation mode is likely the most important and works well, with a nice factory calibration. We would have liked a slightly higher contrast ratio on this panel though really. Cooler Master have thankfully allowed you control over important screen settings. The P3 and Adobe RGB modes do a reasonable job of emulating the smaller colour space and are practical if you want to work with content in those spaces too, although having your own calibration device would allow better accuracy and mapping of the colour space. But good news is the native gamut of the panel allows full coverage of those spaces if you need them.

	Check pricing and availability in your region

The inclusion of USB type-C, a KVM function and other familiar extras like USB ports, basic speakers and a fully adjustable stand make it also a decent screen for more general and office kind of uses if you need to.

The Tempest GP27Q has an MSRP of $499 USD, 679 Euro (Nordics) and £499 GBP which makes it a very competitive offering relative to other 27″ 1440p screens when you consider that this model has a high end Mini LED backlight for HDR, and many of the competition lack that entirely. It’s expected to be available in Europe and the UK towards the end of November, but is available in the USA from Amazon.com already. Keep an eye on availability and pricing for your region here, or using our links above.

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