Gaming Headset Head to Head

We also found that the velvet tended to pick up dust quite visibly and easily, which proved a pain to remove for some of the photos you can see.

The headset has an 8ft (2.5m) cord on it, which proved to be more than enough for our purposes without ever getting in the way. It was a little bit of a hassle to untangle it all at the start of a gaming session, but that's just us being fussy.

The cord also comes with a dongle on it, complete with a clip to fasten it to a shirt to stop it swaying about madly as you jump up and down to your wicked slammin' tunes, dawg. The dongle is slim and light though, so it didn't really annoy us even when we shook it loose of its fastening, something which happened often because the clip isn't exactly the sturdiest thing in the universe. That honour belongs to He-man.

The dongle allows the volume to be adjusted via a wheel, or the microphone to be switched on or off for those times you don't want your clanmates to hear you yell at your Mum to get out of your room.


In terms of sound quality, the headphones didn't let us down. The 40mm drivers in the headphones do the job perfectly, pounding out bass at a decent level but leaving the nuances of music and sound effects intact. We highly doubt that the quality of the sound will drastically improve in-game performance as the blurb on the box tried to insinuate, but the sound quality is good enough to get a thumbs up from us.

The microphone also proved to be pretty solid and the foam on it did a good job of cancelling out any unwanted interference. The wire on it can be moulded to all of the handiest positions and we spotted that there's a little ridge on the male plug that stops it twisting about in the port and moving the microphone away from our mouths. It was a handy little addition to the standard design and one which certainly earns it an extra nod of approval from us.

Unfortunately, the core problems of the headset remain. Mainly it's that the headphones become painful after a few hours, especially for those wearing glasses, and that despite all of Fatal1ty's claims, we doubt these will drastically improve anybodies gaming performance at all.


At around £25, or a much larger $80 in America, the headset isn't massively overpriced for UK buyers, though we'd suggest that those who wear glasses wait for something more comfortable to appear on the market and US users may want to find something with a bit more value for money.

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• Performance
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• 8/10

What do these scores mean?