SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7x Wireless Gaming Headset Review

Performance – Gaming

I’ve been using the Arctis Nova 7x as my main headset on my PC for the past few weeks. As this is a gaming headset lets talk about gaming performance first. Most of my gaming was done on PC playing Apex Legends. Out of the box I feel like the headset is pretty flat, but luckily we do have the Sonar software. Using Sonar I enabled the Apex Legends configuration as well as Spatial Audio. The sound performance was very good, not only was the sound full and immersive, but the Spatial Audio made it so I was easily able to identify enemies and where they were coming from.

Performance – Music & Movies

Like I said the headset is a bit flat out of the box, so music and movies won’t sound great unless you go into the EQ settings. I listen to a lot of rap and hip-hop so I went ahead and enabled the “Music: Deep Bass” EQ. This made songs like Rick Ross – Not For Nothing sound quite good. The bass in the headset is pretty powerful, but I’ve used headsets in the past that do have a deeper bass. There are not just EQ modes for music, but for movies and even a podcast setting, which is great to see. Even if you don’t find an EQ setting you like you can create a custom one.

Performance – Bluetooth

One really cool thing about this headset is that it supports concurrent connections with the 2.4 GHz wireless and Bluetooth. This means when you are gaming you can be on a work call, be listening to a podcast, etc. It was very easy to pair my phone to the headset. It is also very cool that you have settings in the software to either lower the game sound, or completely mute the game sound when a call comes in. This is great as you don’t have to really take your headset off to take a call when you are gaming.

Performance – Microphone

If you want to know what the microphone sounds like below you will find an audio sample as well as audio samples from many of the microphone’s gaming headsets we’ve tested in the past. This was recorded right into Adobe Audition and has not been edited.

For a wireless gaming headset microphone the quality of the microphone is pretty good, although we have seen better from the likes of the Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless and definitely worse in the HYTE Eclipse HG10. You can still noticeably hear some compression, but the microphone will be good enough for voice calls and in-game chat. Everyone who I talked to on Discord said I sounded fine, but they could definitely tell the difference between this headset and my normal XLR microphone.

HYTE Eclipse HG10

Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless

H3PRO Hybrid Boom Microphone

Drop + Sennheiser PC38X

Edifier Hecate GX

Razer BlackShark V2

Cooler Master MH630

Cooler Master MH650

Cooler Master MH670

Corsair VIRTUOSO RGB Wireless SE

Corsair VOID Pro

HyperX Cloud II Wireless

HyperX Cloud Flight S

Razer Kraken Tournament Edition

Razer Kraken Ultimate

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