I feel you man. I have a $15 keyboard, $10 mouse, and a $20 headset and they all work fine. The only thing that seems like it'd be worth the extra cash is a mouse. Sometimes I find myself wishing I had a couple extra buttons at my fingertips in certain games. Still, what's the point of $200 keyboards and a $100 mouse when the generic versions work just as fine?

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Now the headphones... you get what you pay for. Logitech's sound quality has never actually blown me away but these are a lot more comfortable and higher quality then your 20$ "Walmart" headset. Shit, I'll never use any other mouse or keyboard after my MX Revolution and my Seitek II keyboard. I even have Yamaha bookshelfs hooked up to a Pioneer Elite receiver for my sound my on my rig. Trust me it makes all the difference in the world.

It's really all about getting what you pay for really. I find that the higher end stuff not only looks better but feels better and reacts faster. But that's my own personal 2 cents.

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Oh, I understand the supposed "benefits", they just don't seem to be that big of a deal. Why do I need to pay $200 for a handful of extra "macros" buttons, when I can already make macros for a game and bind them to any number of existing keys on a standard keyboard? Then you get into a mouse's dpi and response time on a keyboard. I understand it's technologically better, but rarely noticeable. Being an avid MMO, FPS, and RTS gamer, I understand how these benefits are *supposed* to work. I;m just saying that, as a hardcore gamer, the $10 hardware gets the job done just as effectively as the $200 stuff.

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55$ from Amazon - [www.amazon.com] - Logitech G11

50$ from Amazon - [www.amazon.com] - Saitek Eclipse 2

69$ from Amazon - [www.amazon.com] - Razer Lycosa

All backlit, all with programmable (sans the Saitek). These three are completely worth it for the dollar.

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I'm not sure about the numbers, but I believe my roommate had a G15 with blue, and a fold-down LCD, whereas my G15 has orange keys and a stationary LCD.

I think it's just this particular generation of keyboard with this color LEDs.

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It could have been a G11 I suppose. He only mentioned it once, I think a few years back, so it may just have been my assumption.

But! At least you confirmed that they've used blue before.

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I "acorn" my mouse, too.

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Take the mice first. Your bog-standard mouse is about 300-400dpi, for many games, this is too slow to compete with. I normally play my games at 550dpi but change it up to 600dpi for certain games with sluggish controls. Before I got my gaming mouse (G5) I wasn't all that great, I could rack up the kills but getting top of a scoreboard was a rare occurance. Since using a gaming mouse however, my performance has increased a lot and I can score myself top spot in around 7/10 rounds.

The reason gaming keyboards are so popular are for a number of reasons. The main reason is that they allow more button presses than a regular keyboard, very useful in gaming. Secondly, they have special mappable keys designed for macros which are extremely useful in RTS games and RPGs such as WoW. Another reason they are good for gaming is that they often have a better layout aimed at gamers which makes pressing the right buttons or configuring your controls a lot easier.

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Oh really?

DPI is not a speed measurement.

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The fact of the matter is that higher DPI results in faster movement of the coursor in most cases, unless you're using a large screen, where the DPI is compenstating for the size. Considering 20"-24" monitors are becoming standard for PC gamers, 300dpi-400dpi would appear to be slow and sluggish as it takes more time to go from one side of the screen to the other.

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What's special about any keyboard?

The only thing you can do is pretty it up unless you're going to get crazy like the optimus maximus keyboard.

And superfluous to you = necessary to someone else.

Food for thought, chew on it.

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My wireless keyboard is spotty, not recognizing about one key press out of 20 on average. My last wireless mouse basically stopped functioning, i.e. it worked about 1 out of every 6 seconds. My current wireless mouse blips out about 2 seconds every minute.

What the hell?

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Wireless is a load of crap for keyboards, mice or headsets. My first PC was prebuilt and came with a wireless mouse and keyboard and they were just plain terrible for gaming. I can't count the amount of times the batteries would just die in the middle of a firefight.

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No taste...just no taste.

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