Acer Predator CG437K (P) Initial Review (& mini LG NANO85 review)

[Mnky313]

So if you've seen my other posts you know of my plan to replace my 3 1080p monitors with one large 4k display. So far I've tried an LG NANO85 49" and now this Acer Predator CG437K 43".

Mini LG NANO85 Review

The LG NANO85 worked well enough but the problem I had with it was lack of displayport, my laptop has a 2080S in it so no HDMI 2.1 compatibility. I ended up ordering that Club3D adapter and it "works" but has tons of problems, it doesn't work on newer Nvidia drivers & I had other problems like the TV refusing to wake from it's low power/sleep mode & random disconnects. Other than that the TV was great. Once I figured out this ridiculous menus and how to get the TV into PC Mode the input lag was low enough that it wasn't noticeable and image quality was quite good (way better than the old TN panels I had before).

If you have HDMI 2.1 compatibility or just want to use the TV as a ya know.. TV with 120Hz 4k it's actually quite good and especially for it's retail price of ~$550-$600 for the 49" model.
 

Now to the Acer Predator CG437K

 

While this monitor is 4k 144Hz if you want to use G-SYNC or HDR you need to stick to 120Hz. (and anyway mine appears to skip frames at 144Hz). So I'm keeping mine in 120Hz mode.

This monitor uses a VA panel so blacks are very deep but it also doesn't compromise on brightness, DAMN is this thing bright (though this shouldn't be a surprise as it's HDR 1000 certified) but still, I usually keep my displays on max brightness but this this is set all the way down to 30% and it's still a little brighter than my Laptop.

One major downside (and really my only large complaint) that comes with a VA panel is smearing (all of my stuff is black with white text which looks worse than black text on white when moving windows around) There is definitely noticeably more smearing on this display compared to my old TN 144Hz monitor (VG248QE) and even my laptop's 240Hz IPS panel. If I'm being honest this would probably be a deal breaker if I paid full retail price (~$1200-$1500) for this monitor but considering I got it for way less than that and there isn't really any other options in the ~43" 4k 120/144Hz space that aren't VA it's not bad enough for me to consider looking around more.

This monitor also BGR instead of normal RGB layout which can cause problems with text clarity. All I'm going to say is it's not noticeably worse than any other displays I have and is easily readable with 100% scaling from 3-4 feet away.

The monitor also comes with some LED strips that I can only describe basically the same way as James did in the short circuit, they're pretty half assed and were clearly an after thought, I don't use them and neither did the previous owner of this display as they are still sealed....

There's also some other cool additions like this monitor has tons of inputs (2x DP, 1 USB-C w/ DP, 3x HDMI 2.0) and also has a lot of PiP modes if that matters to you, I haven't personally used them yet but It's nice to be able to repurpose such a large display to do many things in the future.  There's also a USB 3.0 hub which again I haven't used yet but it's pretty self explanatory, it's a USB hub.

The stand that came with the monitor is very large and offers basically no adjustments. I'll probably swap it out for a table stand VESA mount (I already have one I was using for the LG TV.) There's spots marked for controllers but it would have been awesome to see something like USBs or a wireless charger built into all that plastic space.

as for HDR I don't really watch and movies or HDR content nor do I have any HDR games I believe. I did try out YouTube's HDR and It pretty good but I'm not the one you want to talk to about HDR performance as I couldn't honestly tell a significant difference between watching an HDR video and watching the same video with HDR disabled. It looks good either way....

Some Notes:

 

I wrote CG437K (P) in the title, this monitor reports as a CG437K P which I thought was a different model than just CG437K but appears to just be the same.

Overdrive is technically adjustable on this monitor and I have it on extreme because it looks like there's a slight bit less smearing but it doesn't appear to make any significant difference with it off, on normal, or extreme. It also randomly decides to NOT let you adjust it, yesterday I couldn't change it on DP at all even after disabling anything I could find and resetting the monitor to factory settings but today it works fine...

Edit: And the overdrive option is greyed out again... No idea why but it's annoying considering there is a slight but noticeable difference when I enable Extreme Overdrive.

I believe this monitor uses the same panel and is VERY similar to both the Asus ROG Strix XG438Q & Aorus FV43U (which someone has reviewed on here).