 The Xbox One Elite Controller. What makes it elite? Well, it has a ton of pretty wicked features and almost as much modularity as your buddy's 1990 Civic hatchback, but unfortunately, costs almost the same as well. What are those features? How does it feel? How does it perform? Let's find out. The Master Case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Check the link in the video description to learn more. The truly badass features start with the magnetized interchangeable thumbsticks. The default one is the Xbox One-esque concave thumbstick, and then you have a more PlayStation-style domed top, or last but not least, you have the tall concave thumbsticks, which are great for precision but do feel a bit weird being so tall and make pressing other buttons a little bit more difficult, but if that's your thing, go for gold. Following that, we have the swappable D-pad. The default one is this kind of satellite dish style thing, which I personally felt was kind of weird in many situations. I found myself misclicking on it fairly often, and if I was playing a game where I had to quickly slam a direction on the D-pad, it does have the ability to lift off due to the magnetic nature of its mount. But that's not to say it doesn't have its rightly place. This is hands down the best D-pad I've personally ever used if I was looking to play a fighting game. Not only is it lightning fast to use, but doing moves where you have to roll your thumb around the D-pad becomes a breeze, and hey, if you don't like it, the other D-pad is super standard, and to be honest, I even kind of liked using the D-pad raw without any of the magnetized features on top of it, which actually worked surprisingly well. The last feature in the modular category are the paddles on the back of the controller. They can help improve your gameplay in almost any game that would benefit from you being able to press buttons while both your thumbs are on the thumbsticks, which is almost every game that I know of, but they can also be kind of annoying because it's kind of where you grip your controller, and that can cause accidental inputs which are frustrating as hell. But it's cool, just take some of them or all of them off. It's super easy to do, just rotate them out of their little magnetic sockets. My favorite configuration is with the small paddles in the upper positions and no paddles in the bottom positions. This allows my pinky and ring finger to just grip the controller while my middle finger, pointer finger, and thumb do all the actual input work. The triggers however are undeniably way better. They come with trigger stops switches on the back of the controller, which are awesome. Personally, if I'm not playing a racing game, I find the long travel time and soft ending of the normal Xbox One controller trigger pull to be very unsatisfactory. Engaging the trigger stops will result in a shorter travel distance and sharper stops, which feels way better in anything that is in a racing game, to be honest. The inclusion of trigger stops alone, if it was a unique feature, would have sold me on this controller. Let's take a little break with the hardware to cover some software, which is available through the Xbox Store on both your PC and Xbox under the name Xbox Accessories. Fair warning, gonna get a little bit angry here, but first off, the good stuff. You can change a ton of things, like mapping any button to any other button, which is pretty damn cool and I'm sure very helpful for disabled gamers or just those who love customization. You can change the brightness of an LED or even the sensitivity of either of the thumbsticks or triggers. You might be wondering how this possibly made me angry. Well, Microsoft apparently decided that the PC version of this app just didn't need graphs labeled. Why? I don't know. The console version has the labels. My guess is that it was probably a complete afterthought. Yep, you click on the hardware settings button, then onto left stick, right stick, or triggers, and bam, a bunch of random slidey bars that change some random stuff or buttons that add dotted lines to your graph. I mean, I know they're for sensitivity, but I'm reviewing the product. I knew these were going to be in the menus before I even opened up the software. Also an afterthought was that the default pre-done configs were for console games, yet still shown on the PC version. Does this mean we're eventually going to get more of them than just Gears of War? Hopefully, but I doubt it. I'm tired of the PC afterthought. This may not seem like a big deal, but it feels more like another minor slap in the face and a tease from Microsoft. I mean, come on, guys. You showed these games off on PCs at shows anyways. Just give them to us. And at least give us software that has some freaking labels on it. Okay, rant over. Back to hardware. Yes, there is also the included 3.5 millimeter jack, but that's not actually a uniquely elite controller feature. And before you go run and check your current X-Bone controller, this is a relatively new thing, but it is included in their newer standard controllers as well. To cap things off with the fairly obvious, yes, this is a wireless controller, as you've probably seen by now. It does come with two AA Duracell batteries in the box, so it is ready to rock right away. And if you're a PC person, no, it won't automatically connect to your computer. You do need the Microsoft Windows 10 Xbox controller dongle, which is about $25 US dollars. I don't know if you want to bypass all of that, because honestly, screw batteries. They included a pretty nicely braided standard length nine foot micro USB cable, which in my opinion could actually be a little bit longer because I know a few buddies that have setups that have the couch further than nine feet away from their home theater. But there are always USB extensions. Now I'm seeing loads of early reviews harking about how this thing is so expensive. And they're correct. I'm not saying it's cheap. Of course not. Let's not ignore the fact that scuff exists. A ton of the features on this controller were already available in some way, shape or form, whether you think it's better or worse, that's up to you on a scuff controller. And this is how gamers have been getting these features for a long time. So yes, in conclusion, it costs a load, but it's a relatively similar price to a medium kit scuff controller. And I don't find that the least bit surprising. What I also don't find surprising is that it has already sold out practically everywhere. People love their peripherals. I mean, look at mechanical keyboards. I've definitely purchased a few overpriced versions of those. So pick your poison. If it's too much for you, move on. If you're looking for a premium controller, this might be one to pay attention to. Get razors and other bathroom supplies like Dr. Carver's shave butter and One Wipe Charlie's shipped directly to your door for only a few bucks a month with Dollar Shave Club. There are even high quality razors going all the way up to their Sixblade executive model. That doesn't bother with the frilly crap like vibrating handles or rotating heads because honestly, who needs that? So if you're lazy like me and also want to have a good experience, head over to DollarShaveClub.com slash Linus and sign up to have all of that stuff delivered to your door in the US, Canada, or Australia. I'm going to be using the top left hand corner or right hand corner. Sorry, got that right this time to check out my old review on the Sabre Tooth X-Bars 360 controller.