SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless vs Logitech G635 7.1 LightSync: which gaming headset is best?

The best gaming headsets are real game changers, pun fully intended: they’ll transform your in-game audio and deliver the most incredible immersion you’ve ever experienced. They’ll increase your situational awareness in stealth and sniping; boost your adrenaline in action games; and make driving games so realistic you’ll think you can smell petrol.

The SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless are our current pick of the best gaming headphones, but at around £300 they’re a premium product with a price tag to match. Logitech’s G635 are much more affordable, largely because they aren’t wireless, and with 7.1 surround they promise to deliver really immersive audio for a fraction of the price you’d pay for the Pros. Are they a better buy? Let’s explore the two gaming headsets’ strengths and weaknesses.

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SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless vs Logitech G635 7.1 LightSync gaming headset: design and comfort

The Arctis Pro Wireless look and feel like premium headphones, mixing aluminium alloy and steel to create a sturdy but exceptionally comfortable headset – although the metal frame may be a little tight  for gamers with larger heads. The ear cups are roomy, well padded and soft.

The Logitech clearly comes from the same design family as its other G Series accessories. The G635 has a futuristic design with customisable lighting, a useful mic LED that lets you know when it’s live and large diameter ear pads that you can remove and wash. The cups are padded with sports mesh padding and there’s more of the same on the headband. It’s very comfortable for gaming.

SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless vs Logitech G635 7.1 LightSync gaming headset: audio performance

The 2.4GHz connection of the Arctis means you don’t suffer from the latency that plagues Bluetooth headphones, and sound quality is excellent with a well defined soundstage and crisp highs, mids and lows. It has DTS Headphone:X v2.0 virtual surround for immersive audio and it is particularly good at higher frequencies, its high-density neodymium drivers reproducing frequencies up to 40KHz instead of the usual 22KHz – although as human hearing tops out at around 28KHz in laboratory conditions and high frequency hearing deteriorates as we age, that’s perhaps not a key selling point here.

The Logitech G635 has 7.1 surround sound audio but doesn’t reproduce frequencies only bats can hear: its frequency range is a fairly typical 20Hz to 20KHz compared to the 10Hz-40KHz of the Arctis. That means it’s a little more middy than the Arctis and it lacks some low end, but it’s still a perfectly credible performance for the money.

SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless vs Logitech G635 7.1 LightSync gaming headset: specs, features and options

The Arctis suffers from one big problem: it doesn’t support any Xboxes. If you’re a PC, Mac, PS4 or PS5 gamer, though, you get 12m wireless range, noise-cancelling on the mic and 20 hours battery life.

The Logitech is wired so doesn’t have the range of the Arctis but it does have fun programmable lighting and Close Combat featuring Embody’s Immerse technology, which uses AI to enhance the sounds you want to hear such as enemy footsteps or reloading. That’s only available for Windows 10 and costs £3.59 a month or £14.39 a year.

The Arctis Pro has a ClearCast bidirectional microphone for high-quality spoken audio (ideal for recording YouTube videos or Twitch streaming) while cancelling out background noise, and you can enhance your experience with a transmitter base station accessory that enables you to adjust your audio to suit your platform and games.

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SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless vs Logitech G635 7.1 LightSync gaming headset: pricing and verdict

The wireless version of the Arctis Pro is considerably more expensive than the Logitech: it’s £299.99 while the Logitech has a RRP of £129.99. However, the wired version of the Pro is closer at £199.99. If money’s a key consideration, the Logitech is the headset to go for here. But it’s not the best headset of the pair. 

The Arctis Pro Wireless are the better headphones: they’re better built, feel more premium and have excellent wireless capability. You can’t use them to light up your head but their deeper bass and more accurate treble means they deliver a much more nuanced sound. The Logitech headphones aren’t bad, but the Arctis Pro Wireless are brilliant.

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