Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 review: Glorious ultrawide value for money

Iiyama is best known for offering good-value monitors, and the GB3467WQSU-B5 is a classic example of this. Part of the Red Eagle gaming range, it boasts a curved 34in 3,440 x 1,440 panel and a price tag of just £376. For that sort of money, you’d normally end up with something pretty vanilla with a 2,560 x 1,440 panel like the (admittedly impressive) AOC Agon AG325QZN.

There’s no two ways about it: the GB3467WQSU-B5 ticks an awful lot of boxes for the budget-conscious gamer. With a 165Hz refresh rate, a surprisingly versatile stand and a plethora of I/O ports, this Iiyama monitor has what it takes to knock the impressive Huawei MateView GT (34in) from its position as our favourite budget ultrawide – and earns itself an easy recommendation in the process.

Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 review: What do you get for your money?

The heart of the GB3467WQSU-B5 is an 8-bit, 34in 1500R curved VA panel with a 165Hz refresh rate, quoted 0.4ms MPRT response time and a 3,440 x 1,440 110dpi resolution. Regarding active sync, the GB3467WQSU-B5 officially supports AMD’s FreeSync Premium, but Nvidia’s G-Sync worked perfectly well.

I’d argue that 34in 21:9 1500R (that’s a slice of a circle with a diameter of 3m) is the sweet spot for the size and shape of a gaming monitor: wide enough to make the game environment immersive and expansive, but not so wide that the periphery is essentially wasted space. It’s also an area you can easily see all of while sitting at an average size desk.

Beyond that, the GB3467WQSU-B5 is a pretty basic affair. There’s no fancy ambient lighting system, dramatic design choices or colour applique. It’s either a strength or a weakness of the GB3467WQSU-B5 (depending on your point of view) that despite being part of a gaming monitor range, it doesn’t really look like a gaming monitor. It’s an anonymous affair that could pass as an office monitor at first, even second, glance. It’s entirely black and entirely plastic – but that’s fine, because it feels every bit as well made as the £1,400 Acer X32FP.

Physically it’s par for the course for a 34in monitor, measuring up at 809.5 x 585 x 290mm and weighing 12.4kg. The stand is mostly made from plastic but is none the worse for that, and the tips of the slender feet are only 450mm apart at the front, so it doesn’t take up too much desk space. There’s a cable tidy on the back of the stand pillar.

When it comes to adjustment, you get 45° of swivel, a 90° pivot both left and right (something absolutely not a given on a 34in curved monitor), tilt between -5 and +23° and 150mm of height change. That’s a good range.

The 100 x 100mm VESA bracket is covered by a screwed-on mount, but since that in turn attaches to the stand with a simple slot-and-screw mechanism, it doesn’t give much away in terms of convenience to the more common quick-release stand attachments found on other monitors.

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Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 review: What type of connections does it have?

I’d describe the array of I/O ports as comprehensive but unexceptional. You get two HDMI 2.0 and two DisplayPort 1.4 video inputs, a USB-B upstream data port and four downstream USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports. Audio output is via a standard 3.5mm stereo jack.

Given the price, picking holes in the connection list seems a bit harsh, but I’d have liked to see the HDMI ports supporting the v2.1 standard to ensure VRR support for the latest generation of consoles. The lack of USB-C is similarly a shame, but not a disaster given the gaming skew.

All the ports are on the back facing downwards. Moving two of the USB-A ports to one side or the other would have been a considerate move.

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Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 review: How good is the image quality?

Iiyama claims a maximum brightness of 550cd/m², but the highest I managed to record was 415cd/m². That’s still more than enough to qualify for the VESA DisplayHDR 400 tick of approval, and who knows, maybe there’s a combination of settings that can wring that extra 125cd/m² from the panel, but as we’ll see the menu system is not exactly conducive to such explorations.

In tandem with a black point of 0.1255 cd/m² that 415cd/m² is still enough to generate a 3,307:1 contrast ratio on this VA panel, and combined with decent colour gamut volumes – 115.4% sRGB, 79.5% Adobe RGB and 81.7 DCI-P3 – the end result looks impressive.

I didn’t expect much colour accuracy from the GB3467WQSU-B5, primarily because it doesn’t have any standard display profiles, not even sRGB, but I was pleasantly surprised by the score of 1.8 versus the sRGB profile. That’s not a stellar result, but it falls comfortably between 1 and 2 which is realistically the most you can expect from a monitor not designed for professional colour accuracy.

For an affordable curved panel, the uniformity measurements were good, with 18 of the 25 swatches falling inside the recommended luminance tolerance level. The seven that only registered as within nominal tolerance all lay across the bottom of the display and in the upper right corner. The ISO 14861 measurement showed the five swatches on the right all exceeding recommended tolerance but not by enough to be an issue to anyone other than a professional doing colour-critical work.

Motion handling isn’t bad for a 165Hz display, but it is more reflective of the low cost. There’s more ghosting and smearing to be seen in test media than I’d have liked to see from a gaming display, and the 5-level overdrive and 7-level motion blur reduction don’t do much to reduce it. Engaging MBR reduces the brightness, and it can’t be used with FreeSync or G-Sync running, which further limits its usefulness.

I can’t say I ever noticed the ghosting when actually playing games on the GB3467WQSU-B5, but it is something to be aware of if you play games prone to showing it. If you fall into that category, then the Blur Buster’s endorsed ViewSonic Omni XG2431 is where you should spend your £400 because its motion handling is superb.

This being a high-contrast VA display, HDR performance is relatively good given the spec, but I should note that regardless of what you do with the Windows HDR setting, you need to engage HDR manually on the monitor. Strangely, the HDR switch is in the Set Up menu rather than one of the three display-related menus.

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Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 review: Are there any other features I should know about?

The 2 x 2W speakers do a better job than the numbers suggest. Maximum volume from a pink noise source measured at a distance of 1m was a perfectly decent 79.8dB(A), and there’s no distortion whatsoever, even at maximum volume. The problem is that there’s not much in the way of bass, which makes for a thin and unsubstantial soundscape.

The menu system isn’t the most logically arranged. For instance, the various display settings are spread across three separate menus. Navigation is done via a small toggle joystick and a selection of buttons behind the right-hand edge of the housing. It’s not an ideal setup, as the toggle is at the top of the stack and too high to be reached easily.

You can alter arguably too many picture settings in the menu system, including the hue, gamma and saturation, the sharpness of the display (best left alone, in my experience) and the image quality at the edge of the display, though this seemed to make little if any difference.

There are so many interlocking features that the user guide has a matrix of what works with what. I’d suggest that if you need to print something like that, you’ve made your menu structure too complex. If you do want to spend time digging around in all those menu settings, there are three user-definable presets available for you to store your preferred combinations in.

Strangely, amidst the plethora of features, there isn’t a frame rate counter or crosshair option, though there is a black tuner to make it easier to pick out people camping in the darkness.

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Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 review: Should I buy it?

The Iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B5 doesn’t excel in any one area as a gaming monitor, but given the price, you shouldn’t really expect it to. For the money you get a thoroughly competent 34in curved UWQHD monitor with a display that’s bright and colourful and motion handling that’s perfectly acceptable. The 4-port USB hub and versatile stand are also big positives at this price. The only real issues are the bass-light speakers and the awkward menu arrangement and navigation, but once you set it up and connect it to some external speakers, you’ll probably have little interaction with either.

If you need USB-C, you might want to consider the identically specced Huawei MateView GT instead – but this is the only instance in which the MateView comes out on top.