Are Premium Gaming Peripherals Worth Your Money?
Table of contents
If you believe the hype, it would be crazy to try and be competitive (or even competent) without sinking several hundred dollars into gaming peripherals before firing up your favorite shooter or log in to the World of Warcraft. Depending on the popularity of your favorite game and the peripheral vendor's opportunity to make some money, you might even find a range of products specifically designed to improve your performance in that particular title.
Of course, there are many more gamers than there are people buying all of this stuff, so the question stands: do you need a desk full of high-end extras in order to be a good player? Do you actually get more kills in Team Fortress 2 by having a higher-DPI mouse? Are you a more effective healer in your WoW raids if you have a keyboard with macro buttons? Or is there simply value in owning a more comfortable headset?
Hoping to test the effectiveness of the most popular peripherals, we decided to fire up a handful of our favorite games and connect a number of gaming products from competing vendors. Then, we compared them against each other and against older, "vanilla" peripherals that most people either received for free with their pre-built PC, swiped from the office, or picked up cheap after allocating more funds to obvious performance-enhancers, like video cards.
The beauty of high-end gaming peripherals isn’t so much that you can be the envy of all of your friends (honestly, who’s going to see you wearing a headset with LEDs on it if you game in your basement?) but that you feel elevated. You’re spending a little money on the luxury of high-end, high-quality computer accessories to prove that you’re not just some chump with 50 bucks to blow on a multiplayer title. You’re the real deal, and you’re not afraid to sink a little green into making sure you have the best experience possible and you’re more competitive in-game than the next person (Ed.: sort of like Air Maxes will add 6" to your vertical, right?).
I’m completely guilty of this. I get lured in by shiny peripherals with flashing lights and features that are probably higher-end than I need. I’ve been known to drop an extra $20 on a “gaming” model of a device because of the claims that it’ll improve my performance when I plug it in, for one reason or another. I was a staunch defender of mice with weight cartridges, even though it’s pretty clear that they don’t add much benefit, aside from giving you another way to personalize your experience.
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Nice review on the Lachesis, Have one myself for arounf a year now. Can't say i've had any of the dust problems you described although I did once have to pull a hair out of the sensor.
Trya good hard mouse mat rather than the fabric type that soak up dust.
Im using a destructor pad from Razer and never been happier.
just for the information, the 64bit problem can be solved by plugging the megalodon into a usb hub instead of directly to the pc. I havent had any issues since.
Surely the XBox 360 should be in there as a gamepad...
Surely the XBox 360 should be in there as a gamepad...
heh. You can tell who commented from the first page! *facepalm*
The Saitek Cyborg keyboard is great. Lighting works especially well since you can choose regions for different coloring, which helps keeps your awareness of the keys at maximum in lighted conditions or at night.
The keys feel good, plenty of feedback, and the wrist ledge is excellent as well as the slant angles allowed.
It's heavy and well made compared to everything else nowadays.
Keys do not wear off, and it is not a grease or debris magnet either.
If you're not a tiny framed spindle handed geek, this is the one to get.
Ah, Gaming Peripherals
), the keys, being some strange, furry, matte black material, gather all the spunk from when I'm jerking off, which I then can't wipe away for risk of scratching the gloss. The blue backlighting of the keys and the black of the keyboard plays a kind of stereogram trick on my eyes at night, and renders them useless during daylight as the LED's aren't bright enough. The CAPS LOCK and num lock (and that other one) buttons LED indicators are so bright I can still see them winking at me from below as I look at the screen. The media section in the top right seemingly has no LED's and as a result I cannot see any of them, and generally just for sh*ts and laughs every now and then, I smush my hand over it to see what happens. I often accidentally press the LED Profile switch and have to cycle back. The hand rest slope bit at the nearest end to my body serves only to annoy and bruise the outside of my wrists. The on-board USB port never seems to work off the bat or at all and the headphone mini-jacks next to the USB port require my typing fingers to fight with the lead that trails over my keyboard to my ears. The USB connector that connects the keybard to my pc, has lots of wickle fwends. There's Mr and Mrs's USB, and the baby twins, Audio and Microphone Jack. They all have lovely days and nights clogging up all my ports like a bad case of the Flu.
I like Razer. Thanks to them I now have anger issues. I frequently smash my fist to my desk in a joyous manifestation of how much my hardware pleases me.
I have actually cried once or twice.
And because said hardware was so reasonably priced, I don't have money to replace it. Yay.
That's probably because I bought this mouse for £42.99 and also the Razer Lycosa Keyboard for £52.99 and also the Razer Goliathus Gaming Surface for £12.99. That's a meagre amount of almost £110.
I like the mouse's eyes.
And the way it stutters and lags and freezes
You want a gaming experience Razer?
I was once playing Half-Life Deathmatch, I got killed.
Lots. Because I couldn't move the crosshair due to a malfunction, the malfunction being that my mouse couldn't be bothered to do what I told it.
The keyboard was once glossy, I cleaned it with a glasses cleaner cloth the day I got it -Oops, I scratched it. I had fun enduring the next year, with a dust covered keyboard (at least I couldn't see the scratches anymore
The Gaming surface, is a massive beer mat.
Which is lovely.
For £12.99.
A cardboard alternative just wouldn't have soaked up my Budweiser drippage like this does.
Spectacular.
It's like they researched it or something.
It gives me rashes.
On my hands.
Oh and if you love it when people dog ear books or your house mat curls at the edges, the gaming surface does it to stop gravity taking the said *beverage of your choice* drippage onto your desk. Obviously.
Oh and the mouse has the same gloss black and furry matte black as the keyboard. There are two actually useful buttons under your thumb. The scroller is cool, lights up and clicks down. But then there are two button on the top, in line with the scroller, nearest your palm though, that I cannot physically reach with the middle finger (that I might use more wisely right now) that I use to scroll and right click. There are two buttons on the furthest side that exactly mirror the useful ones on the other side. These ones are useful too, and I click them with the extra finger I have to the right of my little pinky.
Oh and just to throw it into the mix, the resource hogging config's are useless and assign the strangest things to the most useless keys. For example, the mouse has one of it's numerous buttons assigned to profile change. I love it when I accidentally hit that during a game, or when I'm using Photoshop and drawing a line or dragging something on my desktop and for around ten seconds the mouse is even more useless and I cannot move the cursor. And then my new profile (like its facbook or something) is enabled.
Yeah. I needed this feature so badly, it's why I programmed the first one to do exactly what I need. And also why they gave us those extra buttons. So... wait, was I against or against this feature?
£110 and 18 months later, I'm happily smashing my desk and throwing things around the room. Finding new drivers, new firmware, new tips, new tweaks, new hardware, new software, clean pants and socks, a t-shirt for the day and a shirt for the night, new config layouts/set-ups and new operating systems.
I'm so happy you're happy Razer. Thank you.
Type. Click.
I have Razer Piranha, really good headset.