SteelSeries Arctis Nova 5X Wireless Review

$129.99, 265 grams, and one USB-C dongle that talks to an Xbox, a PS5, a Switch, a PC, a Quest and a phone. That dongle is the reason to buy this headset. I want to say that up front, because the measurements underneath it are not good.

The tuning

SteelSeries quotes 20 Hz to 22 kHz, which tells you nothing. Every headset quotes that. What matters is the shape of the curve between those numbers, and SoundGuys measured it: sub-bass more than 10 dB below target, about 2 dB of excess between 100 and 300 Hz, a dip around 5 kHz, and an over-emphasis running from 6 to 10 kHz.

Translated into what you hear: very little happening in the bottom octave, a thickness in the upper bass that smears engine rumble and male dialogue together, a hole in the presence region where a lot of vocal intelligibility lives, and a hardness up top that gets tiring after about two hours. I have heard worse at this price. I have heard considerably better.

The onboard EQ presets shift that around and they are worth using. What they cannot do is manufacture bottom-end the driver never produced. Filling a 10 dB hole costs you headroom and buys you distortion, so you are choosing which compromise you prefer rather than fixing anything. Pick the preset that annoys you least and stop fiddling.

Imaging is the real problem

RTINGS measured poorly matched left and right drivers on its unit. Objects sit inconsistently across the stereo field and footsteps are harder to place than they should be. On a headset sold on gaming, that is the finding that matters most.

It is also a manufacturing tolerance problem rather than a tuning decision, which means your pair could be better or worse than the one RTINGS put on the rig, and there is no way to know until it is on your head. If you play competitive shooters, buy somewhere with a return window and spend the first evening checking whether the center image actually sits in the center.

What SteelSeries got right

The headset stores your chosen EQ preset internally. That sounds like nothing until you remember a console cannot run SteelSeries GG, so on an Xbox or a PS5 most headsets in this class give you whatever the firmware defaults to and that is the end of the conversation. Here you set it from your phone and it stays put. Separate presets for Bluetooth and for 2.4 GHz is the smarter half of that feature, because the curve you want for music on a phone is not the curve you want for a shooter.

Know the limits. Building a custom curve still requires the Engine section of GG on a computer, Sonar spatial processing is PC only, and Quick-Switch is a source selector rather than a mixer. Take a Bluetooth call and it replaces the game feed instead of sitting on top of it. If you want both at once, that is the Arctis Nova 7X, which does run 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth simultaneously and costs more for the privilege.

Hardware notes

The dongle is too wide. SoundGuys found it covers neighboring ports, and on a PS5 it blocks the front USB-A outright. SteelSeries includes a USB-A to USB-C extension cable, which fixes the problem and hands you one more thing to lose behind the TV stand. Somebody there knew about this and shipped a workaround instead of a narrower housing.

The retractable ClearCast 2.X microphone is clean when it gets a clean signal, and for party chat that is genuinely all you need. There is no foam cover, so it takes keyboard clatter and breath noise straight down the barrel. The cheapest foam windscreen you can find is the obvious first accessory, and it irritates me that a $130 headset makes you buy one.

Battery is the number that holds up under load. SteelSeries rates 60 hours over Bluetooth and 50 over 2.4 GHz. SoundGuys measured 42 hours 10 minutes through the dongle at around half volume. Missing the rating by roughly 16 percent is unusually honest for this category, where I normally expect to see a third of the claim evaporate. Fifteen minutes on the charger returns about six hours, which is the specification that actually rescues a Friday night.

At 265 grams with memory foam pads it disappears on your head. Mostly plastic, which is how it got to 265 grams, and given the choice I will take the light plastic one every time.

Verdict

Buy it if you move between an Xbox, a PC and a Switch and want one headset and one dongle covering all of it, and if your listening is mostly single-player, party chat and music. The platform coverage is real, the onboard presets solve an actual console limitation, and 42 measured hours is 42 measured hours.

Skip it if you play competitive shooters, if you want sub-bass, or if you need phone and game audio running together. And skip it if you only ever game on one platform, because then you are paying $129.99 for a headset with a measured driver mismatch and a 10 dB hole in the bottom end, and the dongle that justifies the price is sitting there doing nothing for you.