Office chairs come in a variety of designs, the traditional padded leather works great for meeting rooms and feel great when sitting on them for an hour or two. The reason most modern offices aren’t full of them, that’s because they’re not great ergonomically. If you spend 6+ hours a day on a chair, you want it to fit like a glove, to be cool when you use it (usually mesh), and feature reliable wheels.
When it comes to your home office, you want a chair that meets many of those same criteria you get during your 9-5. Gaming chairs bounce of the comfort offered from the racing seats in your car. While sliding along your desk won’t provide the same geforces as taking a round about at 60km/hrs, it makes lots of sense to take the bones of a racing seat like a Recaro or Sparco and bolt on a 5-start of office wheels on the bottom of it.
Firstly the height of the chair is fantastic, designed to accommodate a taller person like myself at 6’3, the high backrest means you’re whole back is supported, not just the lower half. While there’s no fancy 4-way electronic lumbar adjustment like the latest cars, the lumber support built into the DXRacer fits me perfectly.
The level of adjustment is exactly what you want to make it comfortable for you and to perfectly match the ergonomics of your desk. The arm-rests are 4-way adjustable. That means you can pull the trigger on the outside and adjust the height and the range of adjustment here is fantastic, you can lower them to fit under your desk, or raise them to fit over your desk, perfect if office space is limited when the chair is not in use.
You can push a button inside to adjust or close or far the armrests are from you, enabling you to rest your elbows closer or further away depending on your preferences. Next is the other button on the inside, but this one’s at the front. Press this to slide the arm rest back or forward, these control how close to your body, closer to the keyboard your elbows are. The last of the 4 adjustments is a simple twist which enable you to angle the arm-resets in three different positions – straight ahead worked best for me.
Moving to the base, the chair’s height adjustment is controlled by the lever on the right. Just pull it up to adjust the height (it’ll lower with your weight on it, or stand and the chair will raise). The chair has a healthy range of motion in the vertical, although it isn’t the highest I’ve used. The lever on the left releases the base so you can lean back, I assume for a casual gaming experience with a controller.
Finally there’s a level on the right of the backrest. Pull this upwards and lean back to adjust the backrest angle (note: this doesn’t change the base angle like the last lever). This is where you really dial in the right angle, personally I like a more upright seating position, but some who like a more relaxed feel can certainly recline. The maximum backrest angle is actually kind of crazy, so far I can only imagine its useful for those with roof-mounted TVs to watch Netflix.
The DXRacer comes with 2 pillows, one I use and one I don’t. The top is fairly common with these racing-style gaming chairs. It gets strapped over the headrest, to bring a soft, pillow-like experience fro your head, which supported your neck, making sure you are good for a serious gaming session online with your mates.
The second is a lumber-support pillow that I found uncomfortable to use, so I ditched it.
The final design element to talk about is the hole in the backrest. Often this is 2 holes, which really reflects the car version of racing buckets. The difference with the seats in the car is that it plays a functional role. Should you decide to upgrade to a 5-point racing harness at take your car to the track, these holes allow you to feed the belts through. In the office, you’re just never going to do this.
I’m someone who has a couple of racing sims with racing belts on and this works well as strapping into a simulator helps trick your brain into thinking you’re really behind the wheel of a fast car. In the office, we’re not really fighting for this illusion, so it’s really just ticking a box of racing-style seats, but could definitely be skipped.
