Razer Gaming Peripherals

posted March 24, 2021, by Andrew Biedron

One of the most hotly debated topics within the gaming community is which company makes the best gaming peripherals. Generally this is referring to mouses and keyboards, but it can also include headsets, microphones, mouse pads, and other things like that. As expected, there is an exorbitant amount of options for where to get your gaming equipment, but there are a few select companies that always float to the top, such as Logitech, Razer, and Corsair. Personally, I have chosen to use Razer peripherals.

Before I get into everything, I’m going to give you a quick rundown of some terms that would probably be otherwise very confusing. DPI, which stands for dots per inch, is how fast your cursor moves in response to your physical mouse. An actuation point is how far you have to press a key on a keyboard before it actually registers that you pressed the key. RGB is when you have colored LED lights inside a piece of hardware. It’s called RGB because light uses a combination of Red, Green and Blue to create everything else. Usually, they can be set to a color of your choice and quite often can be set to change automatically too.

About 4 years ago, I built my first gaming PC and my 15 year old two button mouse just wasn’t cutting it anymore. So for my birthday, I got a Razer Basilisk. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s definitely for gaming. Like most mice, it’s wired, has a left and right click, and has a scroll wheel. However, it has two small buttons right under the scroll wheel and three more on the left side where your thumb rests that you can bind to various functions or a key on your keyboard. It also has an adjustment for the sensitivity of the scroll wheel, which goes from very clicky to spinning freely. A slightly weird feature is that you can set the DPI of the mouse anywhere from 400 to 16000. Given that most mice are at about 800 DPI I have no idea why it goes that high, but it is quite funny in games to spin in circles at the speed of light. Even after four years of constant use, it’s still working great.

The next logical step after a new mouse was a new keyboard. My old one was a shallow mechanical keyboard with virtually no actuation point, so just barely touching a key would register as a press. This resulted in a lot of accidental button presses that may or may not have lost my teams a lot of games. Considering how much I liked my Razer mouse, I decided to stick with the brand and get a Razer keyboard too. When shopping around, I also had to make sure that they had tall keys with a large travel distance and a very distinct actuation point so that I wouldn't press any keys when I didn’t want to. Keeping these things in mind, I eventually settled on the Razer Huntsman.

The Razer Huntsman is very much designed for gaming. The keys have a really large travel distance and the actuation point is a good way down, pretty stiff, and it’s really loud, so you know exactly when you press a key and it’s really hard to do it by accident. I can put some surprisingly heavy things on it without pressing any keys. If I rest my Chromebook the long way on my keyboard, no keys get pressed. The Huntsman also has opto-mechanical switches, which is a version of actuation that uses light. When you press a key, it allows a laser to hit a receiver, which then instantly sends the signal that the key was pressed. This design is faster and much more durable than a normal mechanical keyboard. While the opto-mechanical switch can be smooth and silent, Razer designed it like a mechanical switch with a stiff and loud actuation point for a better gaming experience.

Another thing that I love about Razer equipment is the RBG. The mouse has lights in the scroll wheel and underneath a logo underneath where your palm sits, and the keyboard has lights underneath every key. You can customize these lights in a large number of ways. You can set them to a static color, or give them an effect such as cycling through the colors, blinking individual keys on and off randomly, or sending pulses out from the keys you press. You can also overlay effects as well as put them on individual keys, so you can create some really cool RBG effects on your keyboard and mouse.

Recently, I got a Razer headset called the Razer Kraken Ultimate and a Razer mousepad, but I haven’t used them enough to be able to say much about them yet. I got the headset because it has a built in microphone, and also provides a more immersive gaming experience (theoretically anyway). The mousepad is supposed to serve as a consistent surface for my mouse so that it always moves smoothly and accurately. So far, they are performing equally as well as my Basilisk and Huntsman, and if I feel like I can I’ll write another post about those at a later date..