Verdict: Flimsy build quality, but an excellent microphone.

Mr Wendel had an 'Arrested Development' song named after him, so why not sound cards, motherboards, mice and headsets? This modestly priced Fatal1ty-branded contraption is flimsy but emits and captures some impressive sounds.

The design is well conceived, with a smart, gamer-friendly appearance, comfortable velvet pads that fit over the ear and a detachable microphone so that the headset can be used with an MP3 player without looking ridiculous. However, the build quality is a little disconcerting. The headband flexed to a worrying degree after I fully extended it to accommodate my enormous skull. The rest of the headset seems as robust as the others on test, but the in-line volume control played up during our review, sometimes cutting out the left speaker signal. A bag is included, but we'd choose a more substantial headset if regular travel was on the cards.

The microphone has a brighter high-treble response and deeper bass than the other headsets on test. The accentuated bass tended to increase pops caused by plosive 'B' and 'P' sounds, but it was easy to position the microphone to avoid this, after which it sounded glossy, detailed and the best on test. The headphones were seriously bassy too, producing deep rumbles that no other headset could match. This is a great feature, but the downside is that it tended to overpower higher frequencies. This wasn't much of a problem in gaming action sequences, but dialogue in games and DVDs sometimes became swamped. Some music tracks benefited from the bass-heavy response, but in others it was distracting.

The Fata1ty Gaming Headset lacks the balanced tone of the pricier Sennheiser PC 166 USB set. However, as it's less than half the price, the huge bass is hardly the worst crime. Build quality is more of a concern, which pushes us in favour of Logitech's less exciting but more robust set.

• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

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