SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X review

I've put off picking up an honest to goodness gaming headset for an embarrassing reason. In my audio adventures, when I've found a headset that sounds amazing and does everything I want, chances are I'll still set it aside for one very simple reason: It's just not cute enough.

And when a gaming headset does meet my high standards for cuteness, it will likely have had to cut corners somewhere else. Well, I may finally have fallen head over heels for a headset that is both cute and still enjoys many of the features I'd want in-game.

The SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X wireless headset ticks off 'cuteness' with flying colours. Though available in a number of appealing colours, including black, white, and aqua, I am in love with the lilac colourway. Properly purple all over with nary an ugly logo to distract, even the foam pop filter on the detachable mic arm is lilac; it's a pretty pleasing approach to a pastel colourway.

So, full marks for presentation—but does that mean that this is yet another gaming headset that's all style and little else? Thankfully, no.

To begin with, build quality is perfectly pitched for this price point. The predominantly plastic outer shell is not at all creaky and could potentially withstand a tumble or two onto carpet. Adjusting the height and position of the earcups is a lovely smooth motion, offering just enough resistance to hold it in place but otherwise not requiring too much effort to move.

This headset also features a floating headband design, with the headset's 260 g weight balanced across an elastic strip rather than directly upon your bonce. This elastic strap is held in place by two plastic posts on either side of the headset, plus three holes at the ends of the strap itself, which allows you to adjust the position of this band to get it to sit nicely across your noggin. All of this smart design, coupled with the big foam earcups, makes the Arctis Nova 3X an incredibly comfortable headset to wear all day.

In terms of quality, it easily stands head and shoulders above my other beloved, though considerably cheaper purple headset. The JBL Tune 720BT is still gorgeous, but every press of its on-ear buttons betrays its comparatively lacking build quality with a metallic twang. It's also far less comfortable through extended wear.

That said, the $110/£100 Arctis Nova 3X could still learn a thing or two from even this budget, $90/£40 set of headphones. For instance, as someone who wears makeup, I'm missing the option of swappable earcups for the Arctis Nova 3X, or at least ones made from a wipe-clean material like my JBLs. Furthermore, the SteelSeries is surprisingly light when it comes to on-board buttons; on the left earcup, there's only a rounded mute button, a definitely still welcome volume dial, and then finally a single button that handles both turning the device on or off, pairing, plus switching between 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth connection modes.

The headset's relatively lightweight and detachable mic arm makes it easy to take the Arctis Nova 3X out on the go, though the lack of a song-skip or pause button is a definite drawback. The fact that the SteelSeries headset doesn't have an IPX Waterproof rating either should also make you think twice before taking this on a tour away from your desk—my aforementioned JBLs, on the other hand, are rated for a light splash of water resistance.

The SteelSeries' dedicated mute button silences your microphone independent of your video call software settings, though I do keep forgetting I've muted myself this way. Speaking of voice chats, the mic here is perfectly serviceable. The audio quality is fine for voice calls of all kinds, and the detachable arm itself is very flexible while also holding its position well too. However, as you might expect, the mic audio does get pretty bubbly and crunchy if you pull it right up close to your mouth. So, it's definitely not a great bit of kit for any semi-pro voiceover work, but it still offers a funny way to underline the punchline of an in-joke over Discord.

Listen to the microphone test here:

Both the SteelSeries and the JBLs I keep banging on about also offer fast charging, with the Arctis Nova 3X headset specifically offering 9 hours from only 15 minutes of charge time. But hold your applause—the JBL Tune 720BT is comparable on this front too, though its up to 76-hour total battery life comfortably leaves the Arctis Nova 3X's up to 40 hours in the dust. For most, that just means you're going to be charging the SteelSeries slightly more often, but I was surprised by this stark difference of hours given the big gap in price between the two sets of cans.

Alright, enough scene setting—how do SteelSeries' lush lilac listeners actually sound? Fresh out of the box, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X offers a fairly well-balanced though flat sound profile. This default is fine for casual listening, though you're not out of luck if you're looking for something a little richer.

On Apple and Android devices, you can download the SteelSeries Arctis Companion app. When you connect your SteelSeries headset, this allows you to choose from a wealth of game-specific EQ profiles, plus a smattering specifically for music-listening or movie-watching. Besides the music EQ profiles designated 'bright', 'clear vocals', and 'punchy', 'deep bass' was perhaps my favourite of the bunch. To be honest, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X aren't the bassiest cans, but their 40 mm neodymium magnetic drivers do offer a surprising amount of oomph without muddying up the details.

I was less enamoured with the so-called 'clear vocals' EQ profile, which seemed to shift the vocals off to the side while crushing down everything else around them. The clear dialogs and immersion profiles for movie watching offer much crisper vocal sound without smudging out any audio detail as far as I could hear. Otherwise, I liked the music listening experience so much that after hitting repeat on the soundtrack again, I did start to wish I had played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for the first time while wearing this headset—Une vie à t'aimer just hits different with the deep bass EQ profile.

You can also create your own custom EQ profiles too, though this requires yet another bit of software, namely the SteelSeries GG desktop app. Besides EQ noodling, this software also allows you to fiddle with how much mic monitoring sidetone you'd like to hear to reassure you that the mic is actually picking up your voice and you haven't accidentally muted yourself via the on-ear button again. Handy!

After tweaking an EQ profile to your heart's content via the intuitive parametric UI, you can then import the profile into the phone app via your SteelSeries account. If you've already got a lot of SteelSeries kit, this shouldn't be a hassle, but I personally prefer a lighter-weight software experience that doesn't require an account just so I can tinker with my peripherals.

Anyway, Clair Obscur is one of a healthy selection of games that enjoys its own dedicated EQ profile here—DOOM: The Dark Ages is another. Given how, in my last review for the Razer Clio gaming chair headrest speaker, I dove into Doom Eternal for the first time to test out its specific THX spatial audio sound profile, it seemed only right that I do a spot of shield-bashing here too.

Taking to a soggy battlefield in DOOM: The Dark Ages, I found the game-specific EQ profile sounded oddly crunchy over a Bluetooth connection. Taking a closer look at Steelseries' recommended parametrics in this game-specific EQ profile, I could see that a lot of the treble-y, top-end frequencies have been dialled right down—this went some way to explaining the heftier low-end that emphasises footsteps and gun shots, though it didn't necessarily account for the kind of hollow sound overall that I was hearing.

One could argue that a deep-fried sound profile makes sense for combat against the hordes of hell, but I was unimpressed with the game-specific profile for Hi-Fi Rush for similarly finger-lickin' reasons. Something definitely wasn't adding up—for one thing, I was having a much more enjoyable listening experience via Bluetooth on my phone, not to mention how Spotify on my PC was seemingly unaffected by whatever deep friend nonsense was going on in-game. To narrow things down, I tested the Bluetooth connection on another machine. The weird compression persisted even after a reboot, and also after swapping to my JBL headphones.

I reached out to SteelSeries directly and, alongside a gentle reminder to ensure the Arctis Nova 3X's firmware was up to date via the Engine tab in GG, I was told that the sound distortion I was experiencing could be due to two EQ profiles being accidentally applied at once via the GG software. This is possible because Sonar offers digital processing at a software level on your PC, while the Engine portion of the program directly interacts with the settings of the physical headset itself—so that's two different 'layers' where an EQ profile could be applied.

I was advised to double-check that the Engine tab was set to the Flat EQ profile before I dove back in-game. It turns out that Dolby Atmos can have a similar effect, stacking an EQ on your sound output before it even passes through your SteelSeries GG settings. In that case, applying the Flat EQ profile in both the Sonar and Engine tabs should help.

I was also told that the difference could be down to which Bluetooth codec your device uses—for example, the original Nintendo Switch only supports the standard SBC Bluetooth codec. SteelSeries also supports better quality, low-latency Bluetooth codecs such as LC3, but not all of my devices are going to be able to make the most out of that.

EQ stacking is an annoying quirk of the GG software, but easily addressed. Once I crossed those peaks and dotted those valleys, I found that the in-game audio over a Bluetooth connection was significantly improved, if not just a little sibilant and compressed around the top-end frequencies. And, to reiterate, this isn't a problem I'm encountering while listening to my tunes over Bluetooth either on PC or my phone—it's just in-game.

Anyway, after all of that, then I took the 2.4 GHz mode out for a spin, and I discovered what the Arctis Nova 3X is really all about. The dongle included in the box comes with a USB-C connection for consoles, but can be slotted into another dongle like a Megazord for a USB-A connection. Thankfully, SteelSeries GG's EQ profiles play much better over the Arctis Nova 3X's low-latency 2.4 GHz connection, ultimately offering audio quality that really is banging.

Listen to the poetry reading microphone test here:

Over a 2.4 GHz connection, in-game audio is clear, detailed, and wonderfully immersive. For instance, Hi-Fi Rush enjoys a subtle bass boost that brings the rhythm running through its heart to even more vibrant life without upstaging the details of its brash soundscape. DOOM: The Dark Ages is bolstered by its own game-specific EQ profile, too. Gibbing demons is all the more immersive for one thing, as you really hear the viscera splatter across environments that could've done with a deep clean long before all hell broke loose. The slayer's footfalls enjoy a real sense of heft here, too, making it an absolute joy to crash through Khalim and beyond; with my lovely lavender listeners, I really do feel like the chunky green guy himself.

And as for my beloved Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, well, let's just say I'm seriously considering a new game plus run—gotta scoop up those baguette weapons sometime, right? Long, winding story short, 2.4 GHz mode is the way to play if you're at all interested in SteelSeries GG's game-specific immersive EQ profiles. While my experience with these over Bluetooth left me pretty grumpy, all was forgiven as soon as I plugged in that 2.4 GHz dongle. It can feel like a faff to remember to pack a dongle for wireless headphones, but this really is the connection where the Arctis Nova 3X is at its best.

Otherwise, there's still a lot to love about this comfortable, not to mention stylish, headset—but is it the best gaming headset out there? For a start, it's definitely not boasting the beefiest wireless headset battery—that honour goes to HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless—though fast charge does go some ways to making the up to 40-hour battery feel less like it's holding you back.

That said, the similarly priced Turtle Beach Stealth 600 (Gen 3) offers twice as much play time alongside fast charge. But when it comes to comfortable all-day wear, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X has our top pick for the best mid-range wireless gaming headset beat, thanks to its overall lighter weight and floating headband design.

If comfort and versatility really are your chief concerns, plus you don't mind spending just a little more, the SteelSeries Arctis GameBuds remain our favourite earbuds for gaming, offering great sound from absolutely tiny 6 mm drivers. But do they come in purple, though? Apparently not, instead limited to black and white colourways alongside the double-take-worthy 'Glorange'. So, for my money—and my carefully curated colour scheme—the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X are still the ones to beat.

Best gaming headset 2025

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1. Best overall: HyperX Cloud Alpha

2. Best budget: Corsair HS55 Stereo

3. Best wireless: HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

4. Best mid-range wireless: Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 3

5. Best audiophile: Beyerdynamic MMX 330 Pro

6. Best wireless audiophile: Audeze Maxwell

7. Best for streaming: Audio-Technica ATH-M50xSTS StreamSet

8. Best noise-cancelling: AceZone A-Spire

9. Best earbuds: Steelseries Arctis GameBuds