WHILE TVs have been boasting 4K resolution for several years now, it’s still quite uncommon to find 4K gaming monitors – which is why, when Acer asked if I was interested in reviewing the Predator CG437K 4K gaming monitor, I said “Yes please”.
The monitor is (as you may have guessed) a 4K LED display, featuring a 120Hz standard refresh (although it can be overclocked to 144Hz at the cost of HDR), 4000:1 contrast ratio, HDR 1000, and 1ms response – all solid specs for a quality gaming monitor.
I was particularly impressed with the built in speakers – there are 2x10w of them and the sound they provide is clear, well balanced and distortion free, although they can be LOUD which isn’t helpful when trying to game without the entire house wondering what you’re doing. This is why headsets exist, though (and there’s a 3.5mm jack in the monitor for exactly that use, too)
The actual screen picture quality is very good – it’s pin sharp, the colour range is great, and everything I played on it, from the cartoony brightness of Borderlands 3 to the busy battlefields of Age of Empires III Definitive Edition – looked amazing.
The CG437K is Nvidia Gsync compatible, which is useful if you’re running one of the newer Nvidia cards, and I didn’t notice any issues at all with screen tearing or lagging when testing the display with a laptop or desktop. It is also intended to work with consoles such as the Xbox and PlayStation; the base even has somewhere to put the controllers.
The monitor also comes with its own remote control – which I’ve never encountered before in a monitor – enabling many of its features (including brightness and volume) to be adjusted without having to fiddle around with hidden buttons or the like.
On one hand, yay for not having to fiddle around looking for the controls underneath or on the back of a monitor, but on the other hand, small remotes are yet another thing to get lost in desk clutter or carted away by curious children or playful pets.
While the CG437K has a 144hz refresh, to get it, you need to use not one but two DisplayPort connections. While this isn’t the end of the world – the Nvidia RTX 3070 in my PC has three of them – it is yet another cable that needs to be plugged in, and also seems unnecessary since you lose HDR and HDR is more of a benefit than another 20fps, at least in my view. With one cable, it’s 120hz refresh which is still more than enough for high-quality gaming – to be honest, I can hardly tell the difference between 60 and 90fps, never mind 120fps and 144fps.
There’s also the size and shape factor. A 43in 16:9 monitor takes up a lot of space (the CG437K measures 978mm x 672mm x 98mm, including the stand) and since there’s a practical limit to how far away from it you can sit (on account of it being on a desk), I found it hard to see everything on the screen at once.
With something like the mammoth Samsung G9 Odyssey, the issue was the screen was too wide – but with the CG437K, it’s that the screen is just that bit too tall; not helped by the stand.
Overall it still sounds like the monitor is a must-buy, right? Not necessarily – and it’s not because there’s anything particularly wrong with the Predator CG437K. Quite the opposite – as a straight monitor it is very good and does everything you’d hope a 4K gaming monitor would.
The big challenge here is price – The Predator CG7 monitor has an RRP of AUD$2499, and for less money, you can get the 48in LG C1 OLED TV (RRP $AUD2376), which is not only an amazing 4K OLED display, it has all the Free-To-Air and Smart TV functions, is easier to set up (the HDMI ports etc are easier to access), still has a decent refresh (120Hz) and is a larger screen (48in vs 43in), too
In fact, the only major advantage the Predator has over the LG from a gaming perspective is that it has a matte screen so doesn’t reflect light as strongly as the LG’s screen does. If that’s not an issue for you (and it likely won’t be, depending on how much RGB you’ve got) then there’s really no reason to spend AUD$2499 on the CG437K when you can spend AUD$2376 on the LG and get an 4K OLED smart TV which still has G-sync.
Ultimately, the Acer Predator CG437K is a very good 4K gaming monitor – but unfortunately for it, there’s other products that offer additional features for less money, which makes it hard to recommend this monitor at full RRP at time of publishing as a result.
However, at time of publishing, Acer were running a sale on the CG437K monitor for AUD$1899 – and at that price, it is definitely worth considering, especially if you don’t want TV features and are purely looking for a dedicated gaming/content viewing monitor.
