 Welcome to my mousepad buyers guide for gamers featuring my personal collection of mousepads. Kick back and relax, I'm about to blow your mousing mind and explain the real differences that matter between the more well-known pads and mats as well as a couple that aren't. Pinteresters and Facebookies need not apply, just use your desk or something. The Cooler Master NovaTouch TKL utilizes genuine Topher Hybrid capacitive switches and is now available at a more affordable price. Click now to learn more. Okay, so mousepad buyers guide. That's like stupid. Just buy a mousepad in the color that you want, done. That's it, right? Yeah, if you're a noob who plays Call of Duty. Actually, there are subtle differences that have a substantial impact on your mousing experience. There once was a time that mousepads really mattered. Older optical sensors, laser sensors had trouble tracking on a variety of surfaces like textures and colors. So you needed a surface optimized for it. These days, optical sensors can track almost as well as laser sensors on most surfaces. So there you have it. Mousepads actually don't matter. Video over. Well, they might not matter in terms of tracking, but there are things to consider when buying one. Most manufacturers product pages have irrelevant buzz phrases like smooth with maximum glide and control. But come on, that's just not that useful. Well, let's take a deeper dive and see what does matter when buying a mousepad and give you a quick rundown of the various types of surfaces broken down by material. First up are the cloth pads. The QCK has been the most widely used mousepad for pro gamers. Why? Well, you want to be able to stop instantly even when your mouse is flying around. High glide speeds might make it hard to control your aim as the momentum might carry you over your target. The QCK has what I'll call medium to low glide with movements coming to a stop pretty quickly. The liftoff distance is about one to 1.5 CDs high. This is the height that mice will stop tracking when you lift to reposition your mouse. And it as it turns out, mousepads can affect this. Getting back to the QCK, it comes in a variety of sizes and two thicknesses. Thin might offer more speed as the thick might cushion and absorb some of the downward force. But the QCK Heavy can give you a bit more of a consistent experience if you have small imperfections in your desktop. The Corsair Vengeance MM200 has been out for a few years and at first glance looks a lot like the thick QCKs. The liftoff distance is one to 1.5 CDs high, just like the QCK. And it even feels like the QCK with a tiny difference that actually has a big effect. The QCK has a furriness that some cotton t-shirts have, but the Vengeance doesn't. Without the furriness, the MM200 is a smoother surface that feels faster than the QCK. The mousepad also comes in a variety of sizes to fit your needs ranging from the small to the extended edition, which is long enough to cover your keyboard, mouse, and then some. The MM200 comes rolled in a hard cardboard tube like you get with a poster. In my experience, this prevents curling that can happen to other cloth pads that come rolled up in a smaller box package, kind of like the Goliathus package. Speaking of which, the Goliathus Control and Speed from Razer are rapidly gaining in popularity due in part to their Aggressives eSports sponsorship campaigns. The Control has a thick and rough woven texture like a burlap sack, but smoother. Both pads have a braided edge to help prevent fraying and are thinner than most mouse pads. The bottom is green rubber that does a really good job of keeping it from sliding around. The Speed version is more like a regular cloth pad but with a slicker, smoother feel which makes it feel faster than the other pads so far. And according to the Slow Mo, it is actually faster. The Control, despite the coarseness, feels almost as fast. Both the Speed and Control have a liftoff distance of about 2 CD's, so in spite of the graphic and difference in textures, tracking is just fine although some mice do need to be recalibrated to work on the Control due to the rougher, thicker weave. Next up is a throwback to Linus Circa 2009. If you were playing CS back when 1.6 was fresh, you might remember this one. Before the QCK Reign Supreme, the Pure Track Talent was the one associated with pro gaming. But not without controversy. At the time, the print design, particularly the white one, posed a tracking issue for some mice. As I said earlier though, sensors are actually really good now and you probably won't have an issue with it if you've bought a mouse in the last year or two. Here's a picture I tweeted of my desktop. The liftoff distance is higher than the QCK at 2 CD's vs 1 but it's about the same as the other pads so far. The Pure Track Talent is the most comfortable mouse pad I've ever used. It's like super soft on my wrist. It's like silk. It's amazing. It's also got the space for me to swing my arm around and still provides enough stopping speed for my flick shots. In Linus's ancient unboxing, he thought it was too fast compared to the QCK but it's just right for me. It's weird though. I thought it was faster than the QCK too but according to the slow-mo, it's actually kind of slower. Like quite a bit. Anyway, while it lacks the fancy razor braiding, it's still built to last. This is a Pure Track from upstairs that definitely looks like it's been around for years and it still performs. It's super thick and comes in two sizes. Standard, which is actually larger than the extra large for most other mouse pads and a smaller version for desks with limited space. Now, onto the hard pads. They're not as popular but they definitely fill a niche for gamers who demand speed. Because the surface is hard and stiff, force from the movement isn't absorbed and instead goes right into moving the mouse. But just as we've seen with cloth pads, the material plays a big part in exactly how fast the surface feels. The Destructor 2 is made of a hard rigid black polycarbonate with a rubber base that keeps the Destructor from ever moving during normal use. The rough and bumpy texture makes it really really fast. It's among the fastest mouse pads I've ever used. Personally though, I find it too hard to stop precisely and even worse, the lift-off distance is 5 CDs when paired with my Abyssus 2014 mouse. That's five times higher than the QCK. Math. If your mouse doesn't have adjustable lift-off distance, you might actually find it unusable for low sensitivity gaming where you have to lift frequently. On the other hand, I find it great for productivity use and RTSs or MOBAs because of the effortless glide and reduced need for pinpoint precision. Now for an entirely different kind of hard mouse pad, the Myonix Entus 320. It's made of aluminum instead of plastic. It's cold to the touch and the edges can be hard on the wrist and it's got a very very smooth surface. And because of that, it's much slower than the Destructor 2 and only provides meh levels of feedback. The lift-off distance is not that different from cloth pads, so it's definitely viable for something like CSGO. The Funk 1030 is an interesting choice and might be good for those of you who are indecisive or like to change your surface depending on what you're doing. This is a two-piece mouse pad. There's a smooth plastic frame that has rubber pads on the bottom to keep it planted on your desk. And the second piece is the mousing surface that has two different sides. This side is semi-smooth. Flipping it around reveals the rough side that is similar to the Destructor actually. Strangely enough, according to our slow-mo test, both sides provided similar speeds and were faster than the Destructor 2. Relatively new options are hybrid silicone pads. They're called hybrid because they have the speed of hard pads, but the control of cloth. The bottom of the mouse pads all feature a tacky smooth rubber surface that do an amazing job of keeping them on your desk. The surface textures are very similar between the Megasoma 2 and Hero 3D. The pattern is rough but not hard like plastic pads. It's a soft silicone that provides a glide almost as fast as the Funk 1030 and Destructor 2, but with enough control to make stopping flick shots possible. Lift-off distance isn't dramatically affected like it is in the Destructor 2, and their glide speed is comfortably fast. I love the performance of all of the silicone pads, but these are the only sizes they come in and they're simply not big enough for me to use. If SteelSeries Razor Rocket made an extra large like their cloth pads, I'd buy one in an instant. For the visual learners out there, we've handcrafted this chart plotting speed versus control of the mouse pads in the video. Check the description below if you want to take a closer look at the chart and comment below, and let us know what part of the chart is perfect for you. Do you like it hard and fast or slow and controlled? Let me know. I promise I won't judge you much. Like if you liked it, dislike if you still hate me, and if you want to support us, you can find out how in the support us page in the forum. And if you want to talk to me, tweet me at Edzalago. Oh, and don't forget to subscribe.