You have a great gaming laptop, but it's probably not complete yet. After installing a few of your favorite titles, you're ready to jump in, guns (or wands) blazing. But what about the accessories? To get the best experience, you'll need a sweet gaming headset; a wicked-fast mouse; and a sharp, colorful monitor to put on your desk — plus other goodies like a mechanical keyboard and a powerful router.
Here are our favorite laptop gaming peripherals for use both at home and on the road.
Boasting 11 programmable buttons, a textured grip and a hand-friendly shape, the Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum is one of our favorite gaming mice. A jack-of-all-trades device, the Spectrum can handle just about any gaming genre you can throw at it, with stellar performance. Gamers who prefer a heftier piece of hardware can add the included 3.6-gram (0.13 ounces) weights. You can also switch between resistant or near-frictionless movement.
If you prefer a mechanical keyboard to using your laptop's built-in keys, you should take a gander at the Razer BlackWidow Chroma. And you should take a long, loving look at it. Using Razer's Synapse software, you can map up to 16.8 million colors to the keys along with macros. The device also offers on-the-fly macro recording, which should come in handy for fans of massively multiplayer online games.
Say what you will about the Xbox One-versus-PS4 debate. Most gamers — console or otherwise — prefer the Xbox One controller when it's time to start button-mashing on a PC. The input device is lauded for its ergonomically friendly design, snappy button feedback and grippy analog sticks, which come in handy for those of us with sweaty hands. Typically, you'd need a USB cable to use the controller on a laptop. However, thanks to the Microsoft Xbox One Wireless Adapter, gamers can snip the cord.
The most powerful gaming laptop in the world can be rendered inert without a solid network connection. That's where the Amped Wireless RTA2600 Athena router comes in. The device has a funky sci-fi look and is highly configurable, allowing owners to transform it into a wired device or tweak the power settings, so it doesn't broadcast past the walls of your house. In terms of performance, you can expect the router to push 2.35 Gbps of data over 2.4 and 5-GHz bands, allowing it to stream video and music on multiple devices while supporting a couple of computers passing content back and forth.
