HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless Review: A Gaming Headset With Mysterious Battery Life

The word “impressive” is inadequate to describe my encounter with HyperX’s Cloud Alpha Wireless. Most wireless gaming headsets quotation around 30 to 40 several hours of battery everyday living. For this one, HP-owned HyperX offers 300 hrs. You study that right: three hundred. I’ve racked my mind looking for an clarification for how these cans can very last so extensive. I’m at a loss. After applying them for much more than three months, I can report that HyperX’s assert is holding up.

Screening these headphones has been difficult. I ran into a problem I hardly ever have with any gadget—no make any difference how challenging I tried, the battery just wouldn’t die. For the initially two weeks, I made use of the Cloud Alpha Wireless like I would any other headset—a couple several hours every single day even though writing or editing. I failed to even charge them when I took ’em out of the box. Which is when I got curious plenty of to start off logging my usage several hours on a spreadsheet. They have nevertheless to fall to zero p.c, but we will proceed tracking battery life over the coming weeks to see if there’s any trickery afoot. 

The Mysterious For good Battery

Like most gaming headsets, the Cloud Alpha Wi-fi utilizes a USB-A dongle to plug into your Pc or PlayStation 4/5, and the headset communicates with it wirelessly via the 2.4-GHz frequency (up to 20 meters). Contrary to some other headsets, they are unable to join via Bluetooth or with a 3.5-mm headphone twine. Also compared with most headsets, they barely at any time want to be recharged.

When I recognized the headset was nowhere close to dying, I begun placing it as a result of a much more arduous check. I still left it playing tunes continually at 50 percent quantity, even when I wasn’t at my desk. Immediately after practically 24 straight hours of playback, HyperX’s Ngenuity program said that battery lifestyle dropped from 64 percent to … 59. “I’m telling you, it really is jogging off your brainwaves,” a colleague instructed me. 

I’m continuing my checks, even after this critique has been printed. So much, I have logged a lot more than 112 several hours of ongoing utilization, and the Cloud Alpha Wireless has not dipped under 32 p.c. This only includes several hours I logged soon after working with them for a week or two with common use—the actual figures are undeniably even greater.

This type of battery lifetime is unheard of for a wireless gaming headset. It goes past the kind of marginal improvements you may possibly be expecting from new components. If Apple unveiled a new Iphone that lasted three times on a single demand, that’d be an amazing engineering feat. If it introduced a telephone that could final a thirty day period, we might have severe thoughts about how it violated the legal guidelines of physics. That’s the place HyperX has place us in.

Naturally, I questioned HyperX if it could make clear the cosmic wormhole it truly is stealing battery lifestyle from. This is the statement the enterprise despatched by way of e mail: “While HyperX is unable to share whole details [of] the style and design, the Alpha Wi-fi characteristics the latest [integrated circuit] chip technological know-how, a lithium-polymer 1,500-mAh battery, and current dual-chamber technological know-how to make place for the battery.”

The 1,500-mAh battery cell is the only tangible clue right here, but even that’s not incredibly handy. The HyperX Cloud Flight, the predecessor and a now thoroughly unseated pick in our Most effective Wi-fi Gaming Headsets guideline, also has a 1,500-mAh battery. Nevertheless that headset only lasts about 30 several hours.