HomeHardwareFeatures
I spent a week using supermarket own-brand gaming peripherals, and suggest that you don’tThis seemed like a good idea eight days ago
This seemed like a good idea eight days ago
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Asda being what it is (Americans, if you’re unfamiliar, think Walmart with less gun violence), it’s all dirt cheap as well.£17for a full-size keyboard.£16for anFPSmouse. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I ended up taking home a complete starter set (keeb, different mouse, headset, and mousemat) for£45, or about a third of the price of theLogitech G515 Lightspeed TKLthat I’d shortly kick off my desk. Could this be a new frontier in affordable PC hardware, bringing tech to the masses in a way no specialist retailer ever could, or should supermarkets stick to cereal and meal deals? Surely the Asda Tech (real name) 4-in-1 Gaming Kit would have the answers.
Early impressions were pleasantly decent. The mousemat was only slightly more spacious than a postage stamp and the lightning storm decoration on the mouse looked like an infant had just scratched off the coating with the edge of a coin, but the latter also sported multiple thumb buttons and a tangle-resistant braided cable, while the keyboard had an almost refined simplicity to its design. Least impressive was the headset, the rattly plasticness of which stood out even in a box full of rattly plastic, though this too offered padded leatherette and an appealing lightness.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Worries began brewing, however, when I went to plug everything in. First off, the USB connectors on the mouse and keyboard were weirdly enormous, to the extent that I physically couldn’t fit them in adjacent ports on the rear I/O panel. The headset’s wiring solution, meanwhile, was a writhing mass of different plugs: separate 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks, pre-connected to a single 3.5mm combo jack, with yet another USB connector off to the side. This last one couldn’t actually carry audio, either – as far as I could tell, it existed solely to feed power to the thin lighting circles on the earcups.
Still, nothing exploded, melted, or otherwise disintegrated on first contact with a working PC, so that’s good going for peripherals that average out at £11.25 apiece. And once they went on their first real gaming duty, the keyboard in particular proved perfectly adequate. It’s a membrane/rubber dome deal, as you’d expect, but the keys were closer to bouncy than spongy, with a decisive pressing action that made mishits about as rare as on that fully mechanical G515.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Other than a satisfyingly solid click mechanism, it also had the structural integrity of the Mini Cheddars three aisles from where I found it. The thumb buttons felt like they’d either snap or ping off if I pressed too hard, and the matte-finish plastic developed smudgy, greasy marks within days. Also, the DPI switch revealed itself as a big fat fibber: despite the plus and minus symbols, it’s a single button rather than a rocker, and only cycles through the sensitivity options in ascending order. You lie, DPI switch. For shame.
The headset, despite the ropey build quality of its own, did at least reveal some bright spots. The microphone, somehow, was excellent – its voice recording as crisp and clean as my £89 Rode desktop mic, and an instantly audible improvement over the £140 HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless that I usually wrap around the ol’ cueball. And while it hasn’t been as comfortable, I had no qualms at all with wearing the Asda set for a couple of hours at a time.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
The mousemat is a mousemat.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
I did make it to seven full days of using these peripherals, for work and play alike, so I can’t say that they don’twork. I know that’s faint praise bordering on the imperceptible, but before trying this kit, the only way I would’ve thought to get four gaming accessories for £45 would be to buy a pair of needle-proof gloves and fish them out of a skip.
