Huawei… getting into gaming? More like Hu-Are-You right? This is Huawei’s first time dabbling with the gaming market, and what has been produced is a 34-inch ultrawide gaming monitor, boasting a 1440p resolution and a 165Hz refresh rate. From first impressions, it looks pretty remarkable and it’s definitely a welcome sight, having a newcomer to this arena. So, with that all being said, let’s dive into what’s on offer with the Huawei MateView GT gaming monitor.

The Huawei MateView GT gaming monitor has an ultrawide display, with a resolution of 3440 x 1440p and an aspect ratio of 21:9, and is surrounded by very slim bezels, except of course the bottom bezel which is to be expected from any monitor. The screen uses VA technology and is rated 1500R, which isn’t the sharpest curve you can get in gaming monitors, and 1000R curves are becoming slightly more commonplace, but it’s enough to add a pinch of immersion to your FPS and sim racing games. At 34-inches though, the sides of the screen were wide enough to sit in my peripherals, which is again great for added immersion, and the material used here for the panel was actually pretty decent at reducing glare. Bezels are a little thick, and are noticeable when standing away from the monitor, but don’t cause issues when you’re sitting at your desk. It’s a far cry from monitors of old, but definitely not as slim as some of the more luxury Dell monitors coming out.

What’s the major standout feature though of this particular monitor is the built-in speaker attached to the base of the stand. Rather than the standard base found on the MateView, it’s been replaced with a cylindrical speaker. And for a speaker built into a stand, and acts really like a small desk soundbar. It’s not going to blow you away with big boomy audio, but if you’re wanting to watch a few YouTube videos, or Netflix while you’re working, it produces some clear audio for voices. It’s far better than probably every single other monitor with built-in speakers, so they’ve done a great job here. It lights up in a number of different colours and patterns depending on your style and colour scheme which is a nice touch. And speaking of touch, you can raise and lower the volume by sliding your fingers on the light, or tapping to mute. The only nit-pick though is you can’t tuck your keyboard underneath your monitor, as the speaker is pretty thick.

There’s also the dual-microphone setup on top, which can pick up your voice from up to four meters away, which is absolutely ideal for those of you working at a desk and conference calling and all that jazz, but they sound as you’d expect any budget webcam to sound. It’s passable for a Zoom meeting, but you’re not going to want to use them for your live streams. It almost feels like an afterthought for all of us working from home. Get them on there to appeal to a wider audience, rather than just gamers, but hey, they’re there and if you use them great, but I wouldn’t blame you if you ignore them.

The stand itself though is pretty plain. It has a half-cylinder design, lacks cable management and is mostly made from plastic. The circular plate attaches to the monitor on a clip and feels pretty sturdy and I wasn’t worried about the monitor tipping or breaking. The whole thing is pretty sturdy so no worries giving it a knock and overall it looks quite smart on my desk, though you are going to need a big footprint for it. The MateView GT’s width overall sits at around 82-centimetres. It can be wall-mounted too as it’s got a standard VESA compatibility. The monitor while on the stand can tilt and move up and down, but there’s no panning so you’ll have to angle the whole unit if you want it on a slant.

Around the back, you can find two HDMI 2.0 inputs and one DisplayPort. There’s also two USB Type-C inputs, one of which is for dedicated power, and the other is for video and finally a 3.5mm jack input for external audio sources. There’s a nice plastic vanity plate that hides the inputs but does nothing really for cable management once the cables have left the monitor.

It’s not bad going so far, seeing as Huawei are mainly known for their phones and laptops and this is their first attempt at anything gamery. To let you know now, I tested the monitor with an RTX3070 Founders Edition, so depending on your graphics card, your mileage may vary when trying to hit the 1440p ultrawide resolutions at a higher refresh rate. But diving into the more technical side of things, and the Huawei MateView GT, in terms of colour reproduction was actually very good, achieving 100% sRGB coverage, 83% AdobeRGB, 90% P3 and 80% NTSC colour gamuts. It also produced an average of 0.98 on a delta-E score, only falling down when trying to achieve teal like colours, which again is very impressive and at 100% brightness we saw a 3070:1 contrast ratio.

Where it did fall down though is with colour uniformity, where you can see at 100% brightness, dark spots appeared in the lower corners, and a hot spot at the top in the middle, but lowering the overall screen brightness did help with this, but it still tracked. However, saying all of this, in reality, I never noticed or had any complaints with it while gaming or watching media, so while these measurements are what my Datacolor SpyderX produced, it didn’t affect my day to day use of this monitor I was still very impressed with its performance. If you want more information, check out the gallery below.

In terms of performance though in real life? I absolutely loved it. I am finding myself enjoying ultrawide monitors more and more these days, and the added immersion I get from games, especially those compatible with the ultrawide resolutions is superb. My favourite so far has got to be F1 2021 and its cockpit view. It felt great bombing it around Portimao. I also tried some Star Wars Battlefront 2 and some Rocket League and even Raft believe it or not over on the TechNuovo Twitch channel, and even that felt super immersive. I also didn’t notice any screen tearing either throughout my time testing and the colours after I ran it through a calibration using my Datacolor SpyderX, everything looked fantastic. I must admit though, these sized monitors aren’t really for the competitive gamer out there, purely because not all of the screen is in direct eyesight at once, though a game of Warzone, or Valorant is still hugely possible and very enjoyable.

There are a few features inside of the OSD too when you dive into the menus which include Dark Field Control which brightens dark areas inside of games to see people hiding in the shadows, as well as a crosshair you can put on the centre of the screen. Huawei has offered an Overdrive setting in the menu, which combats blurring in motion, which does help somewhat, though if you go all the way up to level 4, things start looking a bit artificial, and if you go down to zero, then you can start to notice blur in faster-paced titles… Doom Eternal, I’m looking at you bro. It’s not as refined as other monitors and that could come down to the fact it’s playing with a 4ms response time, as opposed to the 1ms response times other gaming monitors are able to hit. Single-player third-person titles though like Red Dead or Horizon: Zero Dawn looked great and I couldn’t fault this monitor, or racing games like Forza or something like Flight Sim. They looked awesome! Other menu features include Colour changes for your brightness, contrast, temperature and a low blue light feature and sound which you know, changes the audio of the speaker in the monitor.

I’m going to say now, Huawei has absolutely smashed their first gaming monitor. Sure they’ve got other screens on the market, but for a gaming focussed screen with great resolution and refresh rate capability, and no noticeable input lag, I’m very impressed. I’m not a huge fan of the speaker on the bottom of the stand and would have preferred just a simple T-stand, but I suppose to some it would be useful. Everyday performance for work, when editing videos on Premiere Pro or even gaming, this monitor shone through all tasks thrown at it. It will cost around £499 on the Huawei website when released, so expect other retailers to match that, and it also puts it in line with most other ultrawides out there at the moment, so there are no complaints there either.