Cooler Master GP2711 Review (Budget Mini-LED)

The Cooler Master GP2711 is a very interesting monitor, designed to offer a proper HDR experience – with no less than 576 dimming zones – at a very reasonable price, given it is on sale for £379 here in the UK.

It's broadly successful, too. Out of the box performance is decent enough, with the quantum dot layer naturally resulting in a very wide colour gamut, and factory calibration is reasonable – my sample had a slightly warm tint which resulted in a small loss in colour accuracy, but the included sRGB emulation mode works well.

Brightness is also solid, hitting 300 nits in the default settings, but this can be increased to about 600 nits via a ‘Max Brightness' setting in the OSD. Native contrast is also strong for a VA panel, at about 4200:1, and it's great that local dimming can even be enabled in SDR, providing a boost to contrast that can makes games or films pop.

HDR performance is impressive too, especially considering the price of this screen. Cooler Master has worked to improve its HDR accuracy via some firmware updates, and on the latest V1.05, we saw decent EOTF tracking and very high levels of brightness, hitting over 1600 nits in our testing. The 576 dimming zones also work well for most content, there will of course be some haloing and blooming if you have bright elements in a darker overall scene, but again, for the money I haven't had a better HDR experience than what the GP2711 can offer.

Unfortunately, there is a snag, and it's a pretty sizeable one – as good as the HDR is, the GP2711 is let down for gaming by its frankly poor response times. The VA panel used is just too slow by modern standards, with noticeable dark-level smearing even when using an aggressive overdrive mode, and that results in very disappointing overall motion clarity.

It is a shame as otherwise, the GP2711 has really impressed. As it is, I can only see it appealing to a niche audience who are happy to live with the poor motion clarity in exchange for the HDR performance. For a lot of gamers however, the slow response times and noticeable smearing will be enough of a dealbreaker to rule out a purchase of the GP2711, so hopefully Cooler Master is able to improve things going forward.

You can buy the GP2711 for £379 from Overclockers UK HERE.

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Pros

• Impressive HDR experience at an affordable price.
• Decent factory calibration.
• Can hit up to 600 nits full screen brightness in SDR.
• Very strong native contrast that can be improved further thanks to the 576 dimming zones.
• Wide colour gamut thanks to the quantum dot layer.
• OSD is fairly painless to use and offers a healthy selection of settings.
• Decent selection of ports, including KVM support.

Cons

• Poor response times with noticeable dark-level smearing.
• A single overdrive mode is only available when adaptive sync is disabled.
• HDMI 2.0 ports limit refresh rate to 144Hz.

KitGuru says: The GP2711 offers a proper HDR experience thanks to its local dimming zones, but it is badly let-down by lacklustre response times and noticeable smearing.

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