Logitech G13 Review
The Logitech G13 Advanced Gameboard is a great gamepad for gamers to add to their setup. With a natural contoured design, the G13 provides much more wrist comfort than most keyboards during long gaming sessions, while providing all the necessary keys in the right places.
At just about $60, it’s hard to get more bang for the buck out of a gaming accessory.
The Logitech G13 features onboard memory for saving up to 5 ready-to-go gaming profiles and keeping them saved on the gamepad itself.
As with all of my favorite Logitech gaming products, the G13 has completely customizable backlighting with a full color spectrum to pick from and manual brightness controls.
The gamepanel LCD is very convenient for displaying just about anything - game stats, PC resources, media player info, RSS feeds, new emails, and more.
Keyboard Features
This gamepad features 25 programmable keys and a programmable joystick, alongside the ability to set up custom button profiles for any game or program you wish, and the ability to create custom macros on the fly.
With 25 programmable keys, the G13 gives you everything you’d really need from a keyboard for gaming, in about half the size!
If you have a bulky keyboard like me (the Logitech G510, actually) it can be difficult to find room for an extra gamepad on your desk, but it’s well worth it.
Keys G4 and G10-12 are automatically programmed to be your WASD keys and have very comfortable finger indentations for being used as such. This makes it very easy and comfortable to find your way back to your movement keys when pressing other buttons.
It would be nice to see some sort of rubber gripped caps on these keys for better control, but that’s just an extra feature - not something that hurts the product’s core performance.
If I’m honest, I’m not sure I understand the intended purpose of the joystick on the G13. It’s placement is very convenient - in the bottom right and is perfectly where my thumb falls on the gamepad, surrounded by two mouse-click-like buttons, but I can’t seem to integrate its use into my gaming.
This isn’t a formal, multi-directional joystick but simply a 4-way directional pad, basically. By default, the directions are programmed to WASD, but to me this doesn’t provide any benefit.
My thumb only naturally falls on the joystick if my other fingers are on WASD, and controlling movement from two different sources just doesn’t work and doesn’t seem to be beneficial.
An idea I had was to use it as a quick weapon switch in shooters and other games, by allowing me to switch from jumping with the G22 key to quickly switching weapons with a flick of the joystick, but this proved to be much more inaccurate than using the mouse’s scroll wheel as I’m used to.
Build Quality
The 8’ cable that comes on the G13 gamepad is very useful. Since I do a lot of recording in my setup, an overall goal is to have my PC as far away from the microphone as possible. Unfortunately, most keyboards and other desktop devices don’t come with very long cords and I’m constantly stuck using USB extensions and hubs - which isn’t an ideal setup. The 8’ cable allows me to run the G13 right next to my keyboard and mouse and it still reach the USB port it needs to be plugged into.
Logitech has spoiled me with the cloth braided cable on their G430 headset, so it would have been absolutely amazing to see it on this device as well, but I understand why it would not be included.
This gamepad is heavy and rugged, and I love it. Every keyboard I’ve ever owned (including Logitech’s G510) has slid all over my desk no matter how good the grips they put on the bottom are. The G13 has 6 grips at the bottom, all covering a pretty large amount of surface area. It’s heavy - comparable to full keyboards - and stays in place.
Considering keyboards slide around while pressure is applied to a much wider surface area, the G13’s refusal to budge an inch whilst I put all the pressure I can on it is amazing.
The natural contour and rubber wrist rest is an absolute lifesaver to me with this device.
I suffer from chronic joint and muscle pain in my hands and fingers as well as a cyst under the tendons in my left wrist, so repetitive keyboard use and gaming is actually very hard on my hands.
However, the raised angle and support the G13 gamepad provides on my wrist is very comfortable and makes long gaming sessions infinitely more tolerable.
I honestly don’t see myself using standard keyboard layouts while gaming for quite some time while I have the Logitech G13 as the G13 is so much more comfortable to use.
Other Concerns
Going from using a keyboard for as long as I have to using a gamepad for the first time introduces a huge learning curve - much like the learning curve one experiences going from playing with a controller to a keyboard and mouse.
It took many, many hours of play to really get the hang of utilizing the custom layout properly, and I’m still occasionally getting lost in the keys or rebinding my layouts.
I’m experiencing a strange incompatibility (on multiple PCs and different versions of Windows) within the Logitech Gaming Software while using both my Logitech G510 keyboard and the G13 gamepad. The profiler software wants to apply the same profile across both the G510 and the G13 gamepad. This wouldn’t be a huge problem overall, except if I program a key to a shortcut on one device (for example, I’ve always had G7 on my G510 set to run Gyazo to take a screenshot) it doesn’t work properly on the other device.
I’ve not quite sure how to fix this, if it’s possible, but it hasn’t caused me any major problem. Typically a gamer is either going to have a standard layout keyboard and a gamepad, or a gamepad with extra programmable buttons, not both.
I should be replacing my G510 with a mechanical keyboard soon, so this issue won’t be a problem for me anymore.
Conclusions
PC gamepads are a hard thing to sell without having used one first. I never saw the point of them until I used the G13.
As I said before, thanks to the wonderful contoured shape, rubber wrist rest, indented WASD keys and heavy, rugged feel, I don’t know how I’m going to go back.
For just $60 - the standard price for much lower-end devices than this - it’s hard to argue with a device that could completely change the way you game.