The three pillars of any gaming headset are sound quality, microphone quality, and wearing comfort. The Creative SXFI Gamer offers a ton of all three, making it one of the most complete and well-rounded gaming headsets on the market. If you're after a high quality wired gaming headset and your budget can be stretched to $130/€130, you can safely stop reading this review and treat yourself to the Creative SXFI Gamer.

There's a lot to like here, starting with the sound quality. In stereo mode, the SXFI Gamer sounds balanced and cohesive across the board. It's very clean and detailed, wider than you'd expect from a closed-back design, punchy and fast in the bass region, and generally extremely versatile—you'll enjoy it equally while gaming, watching movies. or listening to music, regardless of your genre preferences. With the Super X-Fi technology turned on, it offers an interesting, immersive surround sound experience, and its Super X-Fi Battle Mode, tailored around multiplayer shooters, gives you a downright advantage over your virtual foes by making their movements, gunfire, and other actions louder and easier to distinguish than game makers intended.

Then there's the excellent CommanderMic microphone, one of the best microphones I have ever came across in my headset-testing career. It sounds great, does a good job with background noise suppression, and has an integrated pop filter. I wish there would be a way to turn off its built-in red LED as I found it slightly distracting during my late-night gaming sessions, though I did get used to it after a week or two and stopped noticing it as much.

The build quality is very good, and the SXFI Gamer is comfortable to wear over even extended periods of time. If you're sensitive to pressure on your head, the inner side of the headband may cause some discomfort as it has next to no padding. It didn't cause any issues for me personally, but you should be aware of this potential issue. What I did have issue with was the supplied USB-C cable. It's a custom-designed Kevlar-reinforced copper cable wrapped in an aluminium and copper shield for durability, as well as a nylon braid for the final layer to improve flexibility. While undoubtedly robust, it causes noise whenever it rubs against something, be it your clothes, arms, or furniture. I didn't find this troublesome while using the headset, and the supplied cable can be replaced with any aftermarket USB-C cable, which doesn't make it a major drawback after all.

As a whole, the Creative SXFI Gamer is a terrific gaming headset. If it fits into your budget, you should seriously consider getting it over pretty much anything else in its price bracket.