Pros in the Making: Investing in High-End Gear

Key Takeaways

• Good gaming gear is essential for reaching your full potential as a gamer. Cheap and low-quality gear can hinder your performance and slow down your progress.
• The right gaming mouse is crucial for accurate aim and precise inputs. Different types of games may require different types of mice, so choose one that suits your gaming style.
• Upgrading to a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor can greatly improve your gaming experience. A good monitor complements a good gaming mouse for optimal hand-eye coordination.

What you use to play your games could be stopping you from reaching your full potential. We’re here to show you what gaming gear you’ll need to get good at your games.

How Gaming Gear Affects Your Gaming Performance

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Having good gear doesn’t make you a good gamer. However, if you’re a good gamer with bad gear, your hardware can hold you back.

Cheap, unresponsive, and terrible quality gear can severely hinder your performance and slow down your progress toward becoming the best you can be. It might be worth spending a little bit more money on things that will last longer and help you reach your full potential.

Gaming Mice: Translating Your Real-World Movements Better

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A good gaming mouse is extremely important, as it’s your direct connection to your game. You want your movements in real life to be translated into the game as accurately as possible to ensure that your aim goes where you want it.

However, it’s not just about a good gaming mouse. It’s about getting the right gaming mouse. The right gaming mouse for an FPS player might be different for a MOBA or MMORPG player. The things you need to look for in an FPS mouse will apply to most other games, but you might want more buttons in addition to that for games like MMORPGs for easier access to many inputs.

If you don’t have a good mouse, you’re seriously hindering your performance by having imprecise inputs, potentially making you miss crucial split-second clicks. Whether it’s to land a skill in a MOBA or line up a headshot in an FPS, you want your mouse movement to go where you want it to go.

Gaming Monitors: Improve Performance With More Visual Information

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If you’re still running a 60Hz monitor while your PC is churning out more than 100 frames per second, you’re missing out on a lot of information that your computer wants to give you. While it gets pretty expensive to get a 360Hz monitor to see every single frame your PC churns out, getting at least a 144Hz monitor will make a big difference to your experience.

We suggest checking out some of the best 165Hz monitors , though. 144Hz monitors are becoming a thing of the past and the new gaming baseline is 165Hz.

Besides the refresh rate of your monitor, you should also pay attention to the response times. You should aim for a monitor with at least 5 ms or less response time. If the response time of your monitor is slow despite having a high refresh rate, you’ll end up with a lot of ghosting and blurry images that will hurt your accuracy.

A good gaming monitor goes hand in hand with a good gaming mouse because of hand-eye coordination. The sooner you see something on your monitor, the sooner your hand can react and hit the right targets.

A Good Gaming Controller: Precise Inputs and Accessibility

Even on PC, some games are best played on a controller or gamepad. Fighting games, souls-likes, racing games, console-ported games, and a bunch more may benefit from controller use. Some Apex Legends players even prefer playing on a controller over a mouse and keyboard on PC.

If you’re a controller or gamepad player, you already know that your inputs go through that one device. This makes a good controller incredibly important, and the right one can depend on your play style and the games you play.

The top two most important things to have on a controller are a hall-effect analog stick and extra back buttons. A hall-effect sensor is less likely to have stick drift, which can lead to unnecessary analog stick movements when precision is what you need.

Stick drift can be annoying for racing games like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo, where having stick drift means you’ll need to increase your deadzone and reduce the usable input area. Having extra buttons will also make your ring and middle fingers more useful instead of using something like a claw grip, which can be strenuous on your hands.

Good Headphones: Hear the Right Details

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When it comes to headphones, we advise against any gaming-labeled ones. You can buy headphones with amazing sound while still having enough money to buy a good microphone. Companies usually jack up prices with unnecessary gaming features that you’re not likely to even use.

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You can get way better alternatives to gaming headphones like in-ear monitors (IEMs), open-back headphones, or just good closed-back headphones. Open-backs and IEMs are some of the best gaming options as they’re lightweight. Open-backs in particular can be worn for long sessions and don’t trap heat like closed-back headphones.

You don’t need special “gamer” sound tuning on your headphones. In fact, if the sound signature is relatively flat, you’ll be getting more accurate sound than bass-boosted gaming headphones.

Gaming Keyboards: Improve Responsiveness

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For most games, keyboards are often the least crucial piece of equipment. You’ll find that gamers just buy a mechanical keyboard and call it a day. However, there have been great gaming-focused innovations for keyboards, like super shallow actuation points and hall-effect analog sensors.

A good keyboard is essential for games that require millisecond precision for movement inputs. Hall-effect keyboards, on the other hand, are a beast of their own. While you can’t take advantage of analog inputs for every game, keyboards like the Wooting 60HE can give you controller movement while still having precise mouse aim.

Raise Your Skill Ceiling by Having the Right Gaming Equipment

If you’ve been playing well with gaming gear that isn’t top-tier, imagine how much better you could be with the right gear. Your skill ceiling is decided by a few factors like your personal capacity, the game’s limitations, and your equipment’s limitations.

Maximizing your personal capacity should be your goal if you want to get good. Getting the right gaming gear will give you space to improve more easily.