So a little while ago iiyama got in touch for us to take a look at one of their new 1080p gaming monitors, and I must say it was a pretty decent offering. Now though, iiyama has got back in touch, and this time, we’re taking a look at their new GB3467WQSU monitors, that model number is a mouthful by the way so I won’t be repeating it again. And I must say, being a 32-inch ultrawide panel, this thing is huge and amazing, and to be honest, I’ve pretty much fallen in love with it. Now I’ve got to convince iiyama to let me keep hold of it…hmmm.

So let’s talk about some specs. The iiyama monitor here is a 34-inch, 1440p gaming monitor with a max resolution of 3440×1440. This works out to a 21:9 aspect ratio, so slightly wider than your typical widescreen monitor. It also has a 1500R curve for that added immersion and peripheral vision, which I must say when you’re playing FPS games comes in absolute clutch sometimes. It uses VA technology for its panel, so not the best in terms of Colour, but certainly with refresh rate, as it sports 165Hz, and it’s also compatible with Freesync Premium for that adaptive refresh rate technology, with a VRR range of 44-165Hz.

It comes with a stand which is pretty chonky, but after all, this is quite a heavy panel, so it does need a substantial stand for the desk. It’s not quite wide enough for me to store my full-sized keyboard underneath, but it’s sleek enough not to look garish when on the desk. It’s made from plastic on both sections, though there is a substantial piece of metal stuck in the middle of the arm. Its height, tilt, swivel and rotate adjustable, though why anyone would want a monitor this wide at 90-degrees is mental. There are VESA 200×100 mounting holes on the back though if you’re wanting to use this with a wall mount or monitor arm, but be warned, it’s very heavy so make sure you’ve got the gear to use first. I would have liked to have seen thinner bezels, to really sell the premium feel of this monitor, though they can still be considered skinny. There are no RGB effects here and the monitor is a nice matte black finish, including the stand too which looks nice. It’s also pretty sturdy too on the stand and has very little wobble if nudged.

Around the back you’ve got two HDMI 2.0 ports which will display a 3440×1440 resolution at 100Hz, and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports for a 3440×1440 resolution at 165Hz. It’s also got a handy USB hub which requires a wired connection to your PC but has four USB Type-A 3.0 ports on there for USB accessories. There’s a headphone port even though this monitor has speakers, don’t use them they are terrible and following their other model sent, it has a joystick control for navigating the menus which I absolutely love.

Running some tests using my Datacolor Spyder Elite, I started with the iiyama panel’s colour gamut. I can safely say that it’ll do a pretty decent job with gaming, but for content creators and colourists, please look elsewhere. This after all is technically a gaming panel, and with a score of 100% on the sRGB, your games are going to look decent. Though with scores of 83% AdobeRGB and 89% P3, you’re going to want to look elsewhere.

Its contrast levels though I am not going to sniff at, at all. Because looking at them at 100% Brightness, the panel achieved 503.2 units of brightness with a 3200:1 contrast ratio, and at 50% brightness, it achieved 290.6 nits of brightness and a contrast ratio of 2520:1. This at 100% brightness can start to touch the tip of that HDR content, if you so desire, and actually turning it on this time round (I know, I never really look at the HDR in gaming panels) the peak brightness certainly helped in keeping those colours nice and vivid and saturated and looking great.

The panel’s colour uniformity was pretty steller, and at 50% brightness. there were no real visible dark spots, though there was a bit of a hotspot in the very centre of the screen. Nothing here really to complain about. At 100% brightness though the corners got a little dark while the centre still remained pretty hot at 0.0.

And moving on to the panel’s luminance uniformity, this again was pretty decent and the only real standouts were down the right-hand side where the luminance difference at 100% overall brightness hit 10%, but again, nothing major to really complain about, and it certainly didn’t affect my gaming or even watching media. When dropping the brightness to 50% though, the luminance uniformity did get worse, but again not by much at 13%.

I ran a colour accuracy test twice. The first was before any kind of calibration, and the second was just after my colour calibration exercise and the results I thought were actually pretty decent. When running the test pre-calibration, the monitor gave me an average Delta-E score of 0.68 with a high of 3.17 and a low of 0.15. Once I ran a colour calibration, it didn’t improve the overall colour accuracy by a huge amount, as I must say it was already decent from the box, but I did squeeze a smaller average Delta-E of 0.94 with a high of 2.34 and a low of 0.17 so cracking score on the colour accuracy chart right there.

Running a UFO ghosting test with no Overdrive setting switched on, and it was pretty obvious that ghosting was present. Even on the brighter test, there was still a significant amount of ghosting. Even with G-Sync turned on, and yes it did give me a warning that this isn’t a G-Sync compatible model, it didn’t help. However, what did was turn my Overdrive setting to 4, which admittedly is pretty high for an Overdrive setting, but it did give me a decent reduction in ghosting on the UFO test which I thought was pretty impressive. However, throwing it into a beautiful-looking game, and this did result in a bit of inverse ghosting, and I was forced to lower the Overdrive setting to around 1 or 2 depending on the environment. This though I don’t think is really much of a problem for me, as I am not an e-sports gamer, so input lag isn’t something I strive to get as low as possible, and even when playing something like Destiny 2, or Battlefield 2042, having my overdrive lower didn’t cause me any issues.

Playing through some Grounded, the colours of the garden just absolutely popped and looked really nice and saturated and the visuals looked super sharp. And likewise, with Battlefield 2042, those colours again popped, and having that extra real estate on either side of the screen just made it feel so much more immersive, especially when piloting vehicles. Ultrawide monitors for gaming I just think is absolutely game-changing and when you find a decent game that can render those wider resolutions, you’re going to just feel so extremely immersed into your game.

Now, let’s talk about price. I’ve found one eBuyer for around £345 but other retailers have it for a similar price, which is an absolutely astounding value, and if you’re in the market for an ultrawide right now, I’d recommend picking one up. I must say that I am absolutely impressed with this iiyama ultrawide with its decent performance, high refresh and great colour, and the number of ports on the back are more than enough for any kind of gamer. It’s a superb monitor and in terms of performance in the ultra-wide market at this size? There’s not really much out there that’s going to beat it.

The post iiyama GB3467WQSU 34″ Ultrawide Gaming Monitor Review appeared first on TechNuovo | Bitesized tech news and reviews.