Roccat Khan AIMO

Is RGB lighting and high-res audio enough to make this king Khan?

- Phil Iwaniuk

Can you hear the difference? That’s the million dollar question when it comes to this new model in Roccat’s RGB-lit range. Boasting 7.1 high-resolution audio support, it can articulate surround sound and sparkling lossless audio at the same time. And, inevitably, it does all that while emitting colored lighting of your choice after loading up Roccat’s Swarm software and programing in a set of hues that speak to you. Figuratively, of course; the AIMO lighting system is intelligent enough to synchronize with other compatible peripherals—Roccat’s AIMO keyboard and mouse—but it stops short of actually giving those colors their own voices.

In many ways, high-res audio is a natural bedfellow with PC gaming’s other obsessions: frame rate, refresh rate, and image resolution. It’s an inexorably bound aspect of the hobby, to strive for the absolute best, whether it has any tangible benefit on your experience or not. In that sense alone, the Khan AIMO’s audio chops are a selling point.