Packaging

The Thermaltake Level 20 RGB Extended Mouse Pad comes in a chunky box that is over 40 cm tall. The pad isn't rolled up tightly inside the package, which means it'll lay out flat easier and faster than most. The other contents are two small booklets.

Size and Surface

As seen in the pictures above, this pad isn't small. It's designed to fit your mouse and keyboard comfortably, and I show how tiny the Level 20 RGB Gaming Mouse looks on it. Its exact dimensions are 900 mm x 400 mm x 4 mm, which is 31.50" x 11.81" x 0.16".

Flattening the pad out took some backwards bending for usability, but the whole process took me no more than 10 minutes. What you see is the pad before I did, which is why it still looks a bit wrinkled. For such a big and rather thick pad, it lays out flat quite quickly, but the part where the RGB panel sits is somewhat problematic in that regard, though there's nothing a few days of good ol' gravity wouldn't fix on its own.


Surface-wise, this pad is rather rough, even more so than the standard SteelSeries QcK models. Its surface is very nice and even, though; I came across no bumpy spots or other uneven areas while using it—of course, it had to lay out flat first. The roughness initially bothered my wrists a bit, but I got used to it after a while; I used similarly rough pads in the past, so it wasn't hard to adapt. It's definitely more of a "controlly" pad—it's not the fastest, but mice moving across its surface definitely don't feel sluggish or sticky. The glide is rather effortless, but has a lot of stopping power.


I have one main gripe about the surface, which is the Thermaltake logo in the bottom-right corner: it's raised, meaning your mouse will get stuck or simply slow down significantly once it touches that area. I still to this day don't understand why companies go with this sort of branding instead of a completely flat method. Of course, we can say that the logo is not that big, and it's in the corner, but I'm sure some people would still be bothered as they like to use their desktop space as effectively as possible.

Underside

Moving to the underside, the pad's backing is "your standard OEM backing"; a.k.a. the well-known diagonally textured rubber base. It's not the tackiest to be sure, but to be honest, that is not an issue at all at this size and mass—this pad won't be moving around unintentionally.


In this picture, you can see a macro close-up of the texture on the bottom.