Gigabyte M32UC Monitor Review

The Gigabyte M32UC has a simple design with a matte finish, and it fits into any environment nicely. The front bezels are thin on three sides, but there's a small gap between the bezels and the first pixels.

The build quality is good. The flat base stabilizes the stand well, and even though there's a bit of wobble, it isn't a big issue. There aren't any noticeable issues with the plastic materials either. There's a bit of flex to the back panel, but this is common, and it's not likely to cause you any issues.

The ergonomics are okay. It's fine if you want to adjust the screen for yourself, but without swivel adjustment, it's hard to turn the screen for someone next to you. The back of the monitor is plain, with a uniform matte coating and no RGB bias lighting. There's a quick-release button for the stand, and there's a hole in the stand for basic cable management.

The flat stand supports the monitor well, but it takes up a bit of space. There's a bit of wobble, but it isn't too bad.

You can control the OSD using the joystick button at the back of the monitor. There's also a dedicated button for the KVM switch.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B upstream cable
• Three different power cables (Type B, I, and J)
• User manuals

The Gigabyte M32UC has good contrast, resulting in deep blacks in a dark room. There's no local dimming to improve contrast, so blacks aren't as deep in bright scenes in HDR or at high brightness levels.

This monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The brightness in SDR is excellent. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare, and it maintains its brightness consistently across different content, which is great. These results are from after calibration in the 'Custom 1' Picture Mode, with the backlight at max.

This monitor has decent brightness in HDR. It gets bright in HDR, but without local dimming, highlights don't pop against the rest of the image. Unfortunately, it doesn't track the PQ EOTF very well, as most scenes are a bit too dark. It also has a slow roll-off at the peak brightness, so it doesn't let highlights get the brightest they could. These results are with HDR enabled, and there are no picture settings in HDR on this monitor.

The Gigabyte M32UC has an okay horizontal viewing angle. However, the image looks washed out from the sides, so it isn't ideal for sharing your screen with someone next to you.

The vertical viewing angle is mediocre. The image appears washed out if the monitor isn't at eye level.

This monitor has great gray uniformity. All four sides of the screen are a bit darker than the center, but this isn't very noticeable with regular content. There's very little dirty screen effect in the center, which is great for browsing the web or playing sports games.

The black uniformity is decent. There's some backlight bleed along the top and bottom edge, but the center of the screen is fairly uniform and looks good in the dark.

The accuracy before calibration in the sRGB mode is good. The sRGB mode locks colors well to the sRGB color space, and most of them are accurate. That said, the white balance is off, particularly with bright whites, and the color temperature is on the cold side, resulting in a blue tint. Gamma doesn't follow the sRGB target curve well either, as most scenes are darker than intended. Using the sRGB mode locks many settings, though, including Overdrive, so if you want access to those settings, you'll have to use another mode with oversaturated colors, as you can see here.

The accuracy after calibration is fantastic. There are minimal inaccuracies, and calibrating it fixes the color temperature and gamma.

The Gigabyte M32UC has an excellent SDR color gamut. It displays almost all of the sRGB color space used by most current desktop and web content. For professional content creators, it has decent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, but it can't display the full range of greens, and reds are oversaturated.

The HDR color gamut is decent. It has good coverage of the most commonly used DCI-P3 color space, so most HDR games and movies look vivid and lifelike. It has good tone mapping in the DCI-P3 color space, but it has worse tone mapping in the wider Rec. 2020 color space.

The HDR color volume is decent, but it struggles to display bright and dark colors very well.

Thanks to the high pixel density, this monitor has fantastic text clarity, even in apps that don't support ClearType or if you choose not to run the wizard. The matte coating adds a slightly hazy look to the screen, so the image isn't as sharp as glossy coatings.

The Gigabyte M32UC has good reflection handling. The matte coating handles moderate amounts of glare well. It also gets bright enough to fight glare, so visibility isn't a problem in most well-lit rooms.

The gradient handling is fantastic. There's almost no banding in any shade. Although advertised as an 8-bit panel, this model accepts a 10-bit signal and displays it well, so it's most likely using 8-bit + FRC, but we don't have a way of confirming that.

Your graphics card needs to use Display Stream Compression (DSC) to reach the monitor's max refresh rate. It also has an optional overclock to boost the refresh rate to 160Hz, but unfortunately, using it disables VRR, and there are some issues with it too. If you enable it on your PC and switch to another source, it stays on, and the only way to disable it is by going back to your original source. This can be problematic if you want to switch to a gaming console, as you won't be able to use VRR with the overclock on.

If you want a 4k monitor with a higher 240Hz refresh rate, check out the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 S32BG85.

On top of supporting FreeSync VRR and G-SYNC compatibility, it also supports HDMI Forum VRR.

The motion handling is decent across the VRR range. There's smearing and blur at any refresh rate, and there's more inverse ghosting as the refresh rate drops. Although the 'Balance' and 'Smart OD' settings perform the best at high refresh rates, the 'Picture Quality' setting is the most consistent across the VRR range. The 'Smart OD' setting acts as a variable overdrive, and some of the settings have such high CAD that they pass the limits of the chart, but you can see an alternative chart here.

The refresh rate compliance is good. Its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame, but it isn't as bad as some other monitors.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 160Hz is good. You need to disable VRR to reach this refresh rate, and motion looks fairly sharp, but there's still noticeable blur and smearing with the 'Balance' overdrive setting.

The CAD at 120Hz is good. Like at the max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive is 'Balance,' but it has more inverse ghosting.

The CAD at 60Hz is unremarkable. The 'Picture Quality' overdrive has blur and inverse ghosting, and turning it off results in less inverse ghosting, but then there's more blur.

This monitor has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. Unlike most monitors, you can enable this feature at the same time as VRR, but only up to 144Hz, as the overclock disables VRR. Using this feature helps reduce persistence blur, but it also causes image duplication.

Unfortunately, this monitor has noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates. It looks worse than what the score represents, and as you can see in the video, it's most distracting in dark scenes. This is typical of VA panels, and the best way to reduce this is either by setting a frame rate cap or disabling VRR altogether.

The Gigabyte M32UC has a completely flicker-free backlight at all brightness levels, which is great if you're sensitive to flicker.

This monitor has very low input lag for a responsive feel.

There aren't any compatibility issues with the PS5, but because the HDMI ports are limited to 24 Gbps of HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, 4k @ 120Hz signals are limited to chroma 4:2:0 instead of 4:2:2, which slightly impacts text clarity, but not gaming performance.

The Gigabyte M32UC supports all formats from the Xbox Series X|S. Keep in mind that the console doesn't support HDR with 1440p or 1080p signals, so this isn't a limitation of the monitor.

The USB-C port supports a few advanced USB-C features, including DisplayPort Alt Mode and 15W for charging supported devices, but it isn't enough to charge laptops.

Unfortunately, there are a few strange issues when using this monitor with macOS. To unlock the maximum refresh rate, USB-C Compatibility has to be disabled from the monitor's OSD; otherwise, you're limited to 60Hz. Unless you have the overclock enabled, macOS thinks this monitor has a 2560x1440 native resolution. That said, it flickers at the top of the screen if you have the overclock enabled and leave it set to a fixed 144Hz refresh rate. For best results, leave the overclock enabled and limit the refresh rate to 120Hz.

The Gigabyte M32UC has a few additional productivity and gaming features. It also supports Picture-in-Picture or Picture-by-Picture, allowing you to display two sources at once. Some of the other features include:

• Virtual Crosshair: There are four virtual crosshairs to choose from. Unlike software virtual crosshairs, these can't be detected by your games.
• Frame Rate Counter: Displays the current number of frames per second received from the source.
• Black Equalizer: Adjusts gamma to make it easier to spot other players/enemies in the shadows.
• KVM: The main feature of Gigabyte's M Series monitors, the KVM button at the back of the monitor allows you to quickly switch from controlling one device to another, with just one keyboard and mouse, by connecting them to the back of the monitor instead of your PC.
• Dashboard: This feature allows you to display vital statistics from your computer, including CPU and GPU temps, fan speeds, memory usage, etc.