The M32U Monitor: A High-End Display with Advanced Features

One of the standout features of this monitor is its ability to display two pairs of display devices, either four pairs for USB or two pairs for the type C port. This means that you can use the same connector to output both display and data, which can be particularly useful in certain situations. For example, if you're using a laptop as your primary device, it's often dumping an insane amount of data to the screen, so having the return path is not always necessary. However, when you need to switch between devices, such as from a gaming desktop to a console like an Xbox One S, the KVM feature can be a real game-changer.

The KVM (Keyboard, Video, and Mouse) feature on this monitor is much more handy than you might realize. In addition to being able to switch between different display devices, it also allows you to control your mouse and keyboard with ease. This means that you can use the same cable to connect both your gaming console and your computer, making it a highly convenient feature for gamers. The KVM button on the back of the monitor makes switching between inputs incredibly quick and easy.

One of the things that sets this monitor apart from others in its class is its ability to support 4K at 144Hz with five gigabit USB on a type C cable. This is a real challenge, especially when you're trying to connect long cables or use high-speed devices like consoles. However, with the right cable and configuration, it's possible to achieve this level of performance.

The monitor also has a number of other features that make it stand out from the competition. For example, it uses Display Stream Compression (DSC) for its HDMI output, which allows you to send 120Hz video over HDMI. This is particularly useful when using consoles like the Xbox Series S, as it's not yet possible to send 120Hz video over HDMI.

In terms of color accuracy, this monitor has a number of features that make it well-suited for tasks that require precise color reproduction. For example, it uses IPS technology and has a high level of sRGB coverage (95%) when in Srgb mode. However, if you need to use custom color profiles or modes, the monitor allows for that as well.

One thing that's worth noting is that the monitor doesn't provide Power Delivery over its USB-C port, so you'll still need to connect your laptop with another cable to power it. This might be a drawback for some users, but overall, the monitor's features and performance make up for this limitation.

Finally, it's worth mentioning the monitor's mounting solution. The Level One forms are designed to provide flexibility and adjustability, making it easy to position the monitor in your workspace. Whether you prefer a desktop or laptop setup, these arms can help you find the perfect angle and positioning for your monitor.

The Samsung G7 is one of the nearest competitors to this monitor in terms of features and performance. While it has a different panel type and uses a different mounting solution, its price point is significantly higher than this monitor's. However, with the pricing gap narrowing, this monitor becomes an increasingly attractive option for those who want high-end features without breaking the bank.

Overall, the M32U monitor is a high-end display that offers advanced features and performance at a competitive price. Its KVM feature, 4K at 144Hz support, and IPS technology make it well-suited for gaming, color-accurate work, and other applications that require precise image reproduction. Whether you're a gamer or just someone who wants a high-quality monitor for everyday use, this is definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI'm here with something pretty exciting it's a follow-up to a monitor that I bought last year yes there's a refresh you already know the model but the gigabyte m32u you arm Edition type c built-in KVM built-in KVM what oh yeah we'll talk about that IPS UHD 144 Hertz IPS even yes this is the monitor that's designed to clamp onto the side of your desk it doesn't come with a foot comes with an arm now don't worry this monitor has standard Visa 100 millimeter mounting but the stand it comes with is designed to clamp to the side of your desk as opposed to having a foot for your monitor which is cool but the features on this monitor are basically the same as what we saw last year we've got a USB type-c DisplayPort two HDMI a USB 5 gigabit that's 3.1 gen 1 with three type A ports that are also five gigabit out the back of this monitor there's no USB 2 ports or side USB ports or anything designed for hid or anything like that but the KVM aspect of this can be really good if you are switching between a gaming computer and a work laptop for example now gigabot in their instructions they say to leave the monitor in its foam until you get the foot mounted or in this case the arm mounted that's good advice because if there's any little imperfections or defects or a tiny little screw left on my desk I'm currently damaging the LCD screen not good it is actually a pretty clever arm mechanism the first part to understand is that depending on how thick your table is it is adjustable even Beyond just the length of the screw I have a particularly thick Butcher Block desktop here that we use for the videos it's going to work out fine he wanted to be tied against the back of your desk and the thing fully installed now here's the cool thing I couldn't show you before cool is that and it's hot adjustable a little bit if you wanted to do a portrait configuration you can the stand really doesn't give you a lot of vertical clearance if you want to do that but it is doable you do have a few inches of height adjustment plus you've also got the tilt so you can move the monitor closer or farther away really easily I like this arm design it's short of using a double hinged pneumatic arm you're not going to get much better than this definitely a plus fit and finish and feature set let's do some performance testing helping us through the latency analysis and testing is Andrew's OS rtt tool good job Andrew Tech Team TV now as far as the display itself goes not really a lot seems to have changed since my original review of course the market for monitors has changed substantially since then this monitor is still a premium price point but it does offer some pretty cool features for the panel itself it does offer an srgb mode which is still the most accurate mode one of the things that I was a little bit critical of originally was that in the srgb mode it's a little locked down that's still the case here although with this particular panel I was not able to bring the the red green and blue lines in line with the appropriate brightness when I pick the srgb mode it was running at a brightness of about 30 or so which was a little bit dim for both the spider 5 and my new spider 6 for my color calibration so a little frustrating if you pick one of the custom modes you can dial it in and get pretty much just the same srgb color accuracy actually a little better if the colorometer is to be believed but sort of weird that the only thing you can really control in srgb mode is brightness I guess they assume that if out of the box it's factory calibrated for srgb that you won't really need to do that and it is pretty good out of the box like if you don't have any color calibration stuff just set art as the srgb mode in the OSD and adjust the brightness up a little bit and you're good to go I used 65 for my particular panel to bring it up into what was most accurate I'm also retesting the panel here since it's been on for a little while at this point just to see if that makes a difference because sometimes it does now in terms of our usual gaming monitor gaming test test the panel like I say a lot has changed in the last few years whereas this was class leading in terms of being an IPS panel which is good for color accuracy but also unprecedented speed out of an IPS panel for gaming and anything else that you might want to throw at it it was a really good all-rounder that's still really too true I mean I I think this is definitely an 8 out of 10 monitor maybe 9 out of 10 in some regards the problem is that there are a lot of gaming displays out now if you're more interested in just gaming panels that will respond faster we can see that with our OS rtt benchmarks the results here are really good for an IPS type panel and if you disable overshoot then it doesn't actually overshoot anything and you're able to maintain your color accuracy and everything else if you do turn on overdriver running it at a lower setting for my eye visually you're able to maintain how clean the text looks during text scrolling but it's a little bit more rough when you dial it up so that the overdriver gives you a little bit better response time it's always a little bit of a trade-off but how cool is it that you can do that in software as opposed to having to pick I'm going to buy this panel and be locked in with my choice forever you can use this type of a panel and go in the on-screen display and change okay okay this week I'm going to try to get a lot of work done I'm going to go in the on-screen display and I'm going to pick that I don't want any overdriver function it's not going to overshoot and it's going to be the best best accuracy as far as colors go other times you can say nope I'm off this week I'm going to do a bunch of gaming you can go in the OSD you can use the overdriver function and at least for the first couple of settings in the overdriver menu it gives you five levels of overdriver it's pretty good then yeah you can get a little bit better response time for gaming other panel types will definitely still be even better but there you go the problem for gigabyte is that the bottom is kind of falling out of of these markets for Ultra Premium monitors this is a more of a workstation monitor that can gain and gives you some work features especially the KVM feature but is more work oriented let's say and it does a pretty good job with that it has one of the better on-screen menus they put a lot of work into it a lot of Manufacturers don't bother with the on-screen menu the out of the box defaults are saying it comes with freesync premium Pro which is turned on and as far as I can tell that is actually working correctly so your freesync premium Pro experience with this panel will be very good the pixel density like philosophically I like 32 inches with 4K the number of pixels per square inch like how big is stuff at 100 scaling is basically the same on 32 inch at 4K as it is 27 inches at 1440p I really like the pixel density at 2560 by 1440 and a 27 inch panel I really like the pixel density at 32 inches with 4K you can run 100 scaling I know some of you have super human sight and can see 4K and 27 inches I'm not talking to you I'm talking to the normal human beings if you're a little bit older you might find that you prefer you know 37 inches 40 42 inches with the native 4K yes you can use display scaling that's getting better all the time but it's still a little bit of a dumpster fire on both windows and Linux especially on Linux if you're mixing your display scaling or one display has some display scaling and the other one doesn't it's just there's there are pending patches for that that have never been picked up and it is really it's a tragedy to see that on the Linux side but for productivity and code and just having a beautiful monitor that's easy on your eyes this panel is it and the accoutrement around the panel is pretty unique with the features that gigabyte bundles now for the KVM function that's pretty interesting let's take a look at that for me to demonstrate the KVM mode you're going to need a laptop with a USBC DisplayPort alt mode when you could use HDMI HDMI as an option but then USB input is a little bit of a problem you need something that goes to type c for the USB input which is a little weird you'll need a type A to type B cable which is bundled with the monitor you could use a type c to B that would work as well and then you need to connect your devices I've got my my laptop and my gaming desktop wait laptop gaming desktop there we go instead of connecting my keyboard and my mouse my other USB peripherals remember there's three type A ports on the underside of the monitor you connect your peripherals to the Monitor and so the monitor is connected to the computer and the monitor is connected to this computer via USBC which provides display and USBC although the thing to keep in mind with USBC is it's reduced bandwidth when you're in DisplayPort alt mode when you're in DisplayPort alt mode you're technically in a mode where it's using two of four pairs for display and two or four pairs for USB but display is bi-directional like mostly the laptop is dumping an insane amount of data to the display so it's not really using the return path so most of the time that's okay except when it's not your mileage may vary I mean 4K 144 Hertz plus five gigabit USB on a type c cable it's a real challenge now the KVM feature on this monitor is much more handy than you might realize in addition to being able to switch between a type c display device where you get both USB and display on a single connector and our gaming desktop and being able to run our gaming desktop with the full fat 144 Hertz no problem a little bit more of a challenge on a laptop you'd probably do 90 to 120 hertz your cable quality and length is going to matter a lot but that's a story for another day you can also use it in another mode or use the USBC Port just for USB input so you could use a type A to a c or a c to C cable to come from something like a PS5 or an Xbox now one tiny note is that it uses display stream compression for the HDMI and so you can do 120 hertz from the Xbox series s but I'm not a console gamer and so I think the PS5 is still a little bit of an issue if you're looking for 120 hertz but this display can do 120 hertz at on the HDMI side with the Xbox the newer Xboxes so yay and of course you know freesync premium Pro so of course you get that the KVM feature really super handy and once you're devices learned about the monitor switching between them is reasonably quick now the KVM feature alone is worth at least a hundred dollars and uh it's just because there's a dedicated KVM button on the back of the monitor you hit the button boom it changes inputs but you can program what inputs you want to switch between even though it's got four inputs you can really only switch between two because it's only got two USB inputs the USBC is combined display and USB or you can tell it in the menus use the USB side of the USBC connector plus an HDMI connector so if you wanted to switch between a console like an Xbox One S and your gaming computer you totally can but this with the USBC connection combination USBC and display it is pretty painless to switch between desktop and laptop some nice stuff I wish more monitors had this feature to be honest this is a little bit of a differentiator oh and one final note about the USBC connection doesn't provide Power delivery so you're still going to need to connect your laptop with another cable in order to power it which actually is probably a good thing the USBC power delivery has a whole other can of Madness looking at you Surface Pro laptops but uh it's probably better they don't and there we go with the color test now something that I didn't make more clear last time previously in the other review is that the srgb mode gives you basically 100 coverage of srgb but this is because the monitor is capable of 90 of the DCI P3 space which is actually around 125 percent of srgb it's weird color spaces is an interesting thing so just bear in mind that the srgb mode will actually cost you a little bit of The Punchy contrastiness I guess but you can support a fully 98 99 srgb mode no problem if that doesn't float your boat then you don't want to use the srgb mode you probably want to use one of the custom modes and use your Colorimeter to dial it in as before there's a color profile it's already on the level one forms for this panel but also an updated one so overall the panel really hasn't changed since my previous review it's just the mounting solution which is pretty cool it's a high-end monitor it's good for work and play but the competitive landscape has changed one of the nearest competitors to this monitor the Samsung G7 has a bazillion Zone dimming array thing different panel type and it costs more than this panel still but the pricing Gap has narrowed somewhat I still don't know that I would recommend a non-ips type panel for people that are interested in color accuracy but an IPS panel that can game is still pretty valuable although other Technologies other than you know IPS and VA are kind of in this Grudge Match and uh you know maybe the the LED based Technologies are coming to save us all I don't know but I don't know I just like playing with a monitor stand Commander stand is fine I'm one of this level one this is a quick look at the arm edition of the m32u from gigabyte signing out you find me in the level one forms foreignI'm here with something pretty exciting it's a follow-up to a monitor that I bought last year yes there's a refresh you already know the model but the gigabyte m32u you arm Edition type c built-in KVM built-in KVM what oh yeah we'll talk about that IPS UHD 144 Hertz IPS even yes this is the monitor that's designed to clamp onto the side of your desk it doesn't come with a foot comes with an arm now don't worry this monitor has standard Visa 100 millimeter mounting but the stand it comes with is designed to clamp to the side of your desk as opposed to having a foot for your monitor which is cool but the features on this monitor are basically the same as what we saw last year we've got a USB type-c DisplayPort two HDMI a USB 5 gigabit that's 3.1 gen 1 with three type A ports that are also five gigabit out the back of this monitor there's no USB 2 ports or side USB ports or anything designed for hid or anything like that but the KVM aspect of this can be really good if you are switching between a gaming computer and a work laptop for example now gigabot in their instructions they say to leave the monitor in its foam until you get the foot mounted or in this case the arm mounted that's good advice because if there's any little imperfections or defects or a tiny little screw left on my desk I'm currently damaging the LCD screen not good it is actually a pretty clever arm mechanism the first part to understand is that depending on how thick your table is it is adjustable even Beyond just the length of the screw I have a particularly thick Butcher Block desktop here that we use for the videos it's going to work out fine he wanted to be tied against the back of your desk and the thing fully installed now here's the cool thing I couldn't show you before cool is that and it's hot adjustable a little bit if you wanted to do a portrait configuration you can the stand really doesn't give you a lot of vertical clearance if you want to do that but it is doable you do have a few inches of height adjustment plus you've also got the tilt so you can move the monitor closer or farther away really easily I like this arm design it's short of using a double hinged pneumatic arm you're not going to get much better than this definitely a plus fit and finish and feature set let's do some performance testing helping us through the latency analysis and testing is Andrew's OS rtt tool good job Andrew Tech Team TV now as far as the display itself goes not really a lot seems to have changed since my original review of course the market for monitors has changed substantially since then this monitor is still a premium price point but it does offer some pretty cool features for the panel itself it does offer an srgb mode which is still the most accurate mode one of the things that I was a little bit critical of originally was that in the srgb mode it's a little locked down that's still the case here although with this particular panel I was not able to bring the the red green and blue lines in line with the appropriate brightness when I pick the srgb mode it was running at a brightness of about 30 or so which was a little bit dim for both the spider 5 and my new spider 6 for my color calibration so a little frustrating if you pick one of the custom modes you can dial it in and get pretty much just the same srgb color accuracy actually a little better if the colorometer is to be believed but sort of weird that the only thing you can really control in srgb mode is brightness I guess they assume that if out of the box it's factory calibrated for srgb that you won't really need to do that and it is pretty good out of the box like if you don't have any color calibration stuff just set art as the srgb mode in the OSD and adjust the brightness up a little bit and you're good to go I used 65 for my particular panel to bring it up into what was most accurate I'm also retesting the panel here since it's been on for a little while at this point just to see if that makes a difference because sometimes it does now in terms of our usual gaming monitor gaming test test the panel like I say a lot has changed in the last few years whereas this was class leading in terms of being an IPS panel which is good for color accuracy but also unprecedented speed out of an IPS panel for gaming and anything else that you might want to throw at it it was a really good all-rounder that's still really too true I mean I I think this is definitely an 8 out of 10 monitor maybe 9 out of 10 in some regards the problem is that there are a lot of gaming displays out now if you're more interested in just gaming panels that will respond faster we can see that with our OS rtt benchmarks the results here are really good for an IPS type panel and if you disable overshoot then it doesn't actually overshoot anything and you're able to maintain your color accuracy and everything else if you do turn on overdriver running it at a lower setting for my eye visually you're able to maintain how clean the text looks during text scrolling but it's a little bit more rough when you dial it up so that the overdriver gives you a little bit better response time it's always a little bit of a trade-off but how cool is it that you can do that in software as opposed to having to pick I'm going to buy this panel and be locked in with my choice forever you can use this type of a panel and go in the on-screen display and change okay okay this week I'm going to try to get a lot of work done I'm going to go in the on-screen display and I'm going to pick that I don't want any overdriver function it's not going to overshoot and it's going to be the best best accuracy as far as colors go other times you can say nope I'm off this week I'm going to do a bunch of gaming you can go in the OSD you can use the overdriver function and at least for the first couple of settings in the overdriver menu it gives you five levels of overdriver it's pretty good then yeah you can get a little bit better response time for gaming other panel types will definitely still be even better but there you go the problem for gigabyte is that the bottom is kind of falling out of of these markets for Ultra Premium monitors this is a more of a workstation monitor that can gain and gives you some work features especially the KVM feature but is more work oriented let's say and it does a pretty good job with that it has one of the better on-screen menus they put a lot of work into it a lot of Manufacturers don't bother with the on-screen menu the out of the box defaults are saying it comes with freesync premium Pro which is turned on and as far as I can tell that is actually working correctly so your freesync premium Pro experience with this panel will be very good the pixel density like philosophically I like 32 inches with 4K the number of pixels per square inch like how big is stuff at 100 scaling is basically the same on 32 inch at 4K as it is 27 inches at 1440p I really like the pixel density at 2560 by 1440 and a 27 inch panel I really like the pixel density at 32 inches with 4K you can run 100 scaling I know some of you have super human sight and can see 4K and 27 inches I'm not talking to you I'm talking to the normal human beings if you're a little bit older you might find that you prefer you know 37 inches 40 42 inches with the native 4K yes you can use display scaling that's getting better all the time but it's still a little bit of a dumpster fire on both windows and Linux especially on Linux if you're mixing your display scaling or one display has some display scaling and the other one doesn't it's just there's there are pending patches for that that have never been picked up and it is really it's a tragedy to see that on the Linux side but for productivity and code and just having a beautiful monitor that's easy on your eyes this panel is it and the accoutrement around the panel is pretty unique with the features that gigabyte bundles now for the KVM function that's pretty interesting let's take a look at that for me to demonstrate the KVM mode you're going to need a laptop with a USBC DisplayPort alt mode when you could use HDMI HDMI as an option but then USB input is a little bit of a problem you need something that goes to type c for the USB input which is a little weird you'll need a type A to type B cable which is bundled with the monitor you could use a type c to B that would work as well and then you need to connect your devices I've got my my laptop and my gaming desktop wait laptop gaming desktop there we go instead of connecting my keyboard and my mouse my other USB peripherals remember there's three type A ports on the underside of the monitor you connect your peripherals to the Monitor and so the monitor is connected to the computer and the monitor is connected to this computer via USBC which provides display and USBC although the thing to keep in mind with USBC is it's reduced bandwidth when you're in DisplayPort alt mode when you're in DisplayPort alt mode you're technically in a mode where it's using two of four pairs for display and two or four pairs for USB but display is bi-directional like mostly the laptop is dumping an insane amount of data to the display so it's not really using the return path so most of the time that's okay except when it's not your mileage may vary I mean 4K 144 Hertz plus five gigabit USB on a type c cable it's a real challenge now the KVM feature on this monitor is much more handy than you might realize in addition to being able to switch between a type c display device where you get both USB and display on a single connector and our gaming desktop and being able to run our gaming desktop with the full fat 144 Hertz no problem a little bit more of a challenge on a laptop you'd probably do 90 to 120 hertz your cable quality and length is going to matter a lot but that's a story for another day you can also use it in another mode or use the USBC Port just for USB input so you could use a type A to a c or a c to C cable to come from something like a PS5 or an Xbox now one tiny note is that it uses display stream compression for the HDMI and so you can do 120 hertz from the Xbox series s but I'm not a console gamer and so I think the PS5 is still a little bit of an issue if you're looking for 120 hertz but this display can do 120 hertz at on the HDMI side with the Xbox the newer Xboxes so yay and of course you know freesync premium Pro so of course you get that the KVM feature really super handy and once you're devices learned about the monitor switching between them is reasonably quick now the KVM feature alone is worth at least a hundred dollars and uh it's just because there's a dedicated KVM button on the back of the monitor you hit the button boom it changes inputs but you can program what inputs you want to switch between even though it's got four inputs you can really only switch between two because it's only got two USB inputs the USBC is combined display and USB or you can tell it in the menus use the USB side of the USBC connector plus an HDMI connector so if you wanted to switch between a console like an Xbox One S and your gaming computer you totally can but this with the USBC connection combination USBC and display it is pretty painless to switch between desktop and laptop some nice stuff I wish more monitors had this feature to be honest this is a little bit of a differentiator oh and one final note about the USBC connection doesn't provide Power delivery so you're still going to need to connect your laptop with another cable in order to power it which actually is probably a good thing the USBC power delivery has a whole other can of Madness looking at you Surface Pro laptops but uh it's probably better they don't and there we go with the color test now something that I didn't make more clear last time previously in the other review is that the srgb mode gives you basically 100 coverage of srgb but this is because the monitor is capable of 90 of the DCI P3 space which is actually around 125 percent of srgb it's weird color spaces is an interesting thing so just bear in mind that the srgb mode will actually cost you a little bit of The Punchy contrastiness I guess but you can support a fully 98 99 srgb mode no problem if that doesn't float your boat then you don't want to use the srgb mode you probably want to use one of the custom modes and use your Colorimeter to dial it in as before there's a color profile it's already on the level one forms for this panel but also an updated one so overall the panel really hasn't changed since my previous review it's just the mounting solution which is pretty cool it's a high-end monitor it's good for work and play but the competitive landscape has changed one of the nearest competitors to this monitor the Samsung G7 has a bazillion Zone dimming array thing different panel type and it costs more than this panel still but the pricing Gap has narrowed somewhat I still don't know that I would recommend a non-ips type panel for people that are interested in color accuracy but an IPS panel that can game is still pretty valuable although other Technologies other than you know IPS and VA are kind of in this Grudge Match and uh you know maybe the the LED based Technologies are coming to save us all I don't know but I don't know I just like playing with a monitor stand Commander stand is fine I'm one of this level one this is a quick look at the arm edition of the m32u from gigabyte signing out you find me in the level one forms foreign\n"