AOC Gaming GH401 Wireless Gaming Headset Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The AOC GH401 Wireless Gaming Headset is available now from many retailers, and while it’s on Amazon for as little as £42, some smaller independent retailers are selling it for around £10 cheaper still. However, shipping costs are often added afterwards, whereas Amazon has it on Prime. What’s shocking though is just how good the value for money is here. This is a lovely quality headset, with strong wireless performance and good features overall, and it’s basically forty quid. That’s going to be bloody hard to beat. Especially when everything else in this price range is random named plastic trash.

Overview

There’s no shortage of great headsets on the market these days. Actually, it’s getting pretty hard to find a bad one, so long as you stick with the known brands. Finding quality products at affordable prices, well that’s a little trickier. Turtle Beach are a solid rival for this headset, with their Recon 200 offering a wired but amplified design that I think sounds great. However, the AOC GH401 is truly wireless, and even more so, it has surprisingly good battery life. It performs as well as a headset twice this price would, and it looks the part too.

Design

AOC has done a great job with the aesthetics here, I think the GH401 looks very stylish and very gamer. The black and red thing has been done to death, but that’s also the reason it works for me; my desktop environment is a sea of black and red things. I think the headset looks a lot nicer with this theme than the new AOC keyboard did, which I think had too many design elements going on. However, the headset looks great, and it’s very on-trend.

Build Quality

The build quality is decent too. Sure, some bits are plastic here and there to keep the cost down, but that’s clearly reflected in the price. The huge ear cup design looks great, with lots of very nice padding, a nicely stitched headband, braided cables, and lovely clicky switches on the headset controls. It’s just a nice headset overall, and it’s built to a higher standard than anything else in this price range.

Powerful Sound

The sound quality is good, I really can’t fault it for what it is. It’s just a pair of powerful 50mm drivers running in stereo, nothing complicated, and offering plenty of volume should you have a need for it. The built-in soundcard for the wireless hardware is to thank for that. However, if you’re running it in wired mode, then the power will have to come from your amp or external device, but even plugging directly into an Xbox controller, it still sounded pretty meaty to me.

Should I Buy One?

If you’re on a tighter budget, you’re not going to find a wireless headset that comes even close to this level of quality and features at anything like this price. It’s really hard to beat. That being said, you don’t have to be short on cash just to enjoy this headset. It’s got a powerful sound, decent build quality, and the aesthetics are on point too. Sure, the microphone doesn’t detach as they said, but it’s a minor flaw in an otherwise impressive package.