Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review

The Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX ($149) is a wireless gaming headset designed to pair with your Xbox console or your PC. Nacon pitches the Rig 800 Pro as premium gaming headset that's light enough to wear all day, and enduring enough to game all night without worrying about the battery. 

After a few months putting it through its paces, I can tell you that Nacon's headset does offer excellent battery life and is comfortable enough to wear for hours without complaint, like many of the best wireless gaming headsets on the market.

But what really matters is the performance. After you read this Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review, you'll see why I think it's a great headset for Call of Duty players who like to chat with their teammates — but a little less valuable for folks who play games without a lot of bass-heavy action in them.

If you want a model that works with PlayStation consoles instead, Nacon also sells a Nacon Rig 800 Pro HS headset that's effectively identical to the HX model we review here, except it works with PC and PlayStation 4/5 instead of Xbox consoles.

Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review: Design

The Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX looks like a simple, no-nonsense gaming headset. It comes in any color you want, so long as it's black, and is almost entirely plastic, save for some padding on the headband and earcups. While the plastic felt a bit flimsy to met at first, after several hours of wearing the headset, I'm confident that it's both comfortable and sturdy enough to stand up to sustained wear.

Mounted to the left earcup is a boom microphone that switches off automatically when you swing it all the way up, making it easy to know when your mic is live and when it's muted. The microphone itself isn't detachable but it is bendable, so you can move it around until you zero in on the optimal placement for your voice.

All the controls are on the rear of the left earcup, and while there aren't a ton of them, there are enough that it will take you some time to learn what they all do. Starting from the bottom of the left earcup, you'll find a micro-USB port for the charging cable, a microphone button for adjusting gain, a volume knob, a power/pairing button and, finally, a dial to control what mix of chat audio and in-game audio you're hearing. They all work well enough, once you get the hang of where everything is and which does what.

In terms of durability, the plastic body of this headset feels sturdy enough that it should last at least a year or two, barring any especially harsh drops or tumbles. Hopefully, the pop-out nature of the earcups' sizing mechanism (more on that shortly) makes it more likely that if you do drop this headset, popping an errant earcup back into place should be easy enough. But in my months testing this headset, it never broke or displayed any noticeable wear.

Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review: Comfort

The Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX is a bit more comfortable than its edgy black plastic exterior might suggest. Even in its default configuration the headset is big enough to fit on my overly large head, albeit with a bit too much tightness for my liking. 

Luckily I found it easy enough to resize the headset to fit more comfortably. Each earcup is adjustable one size up or down, although the mechanism for doing so is a little tricky to figure out. 

The trick is to pop the tiny piece of rectangular plastic which protrudes from the earcup through one of three rectangular cutouts in the headset, which makes the earcup itself pop free. You can then reattach the earcup to any of the three rectangular cutouts on each side of the headset, allowing you to make the headset larger or smaller than the default middle setting.

The earcups themselves sport thick rings of foam, and are large enough to make my normal-sized ears feel snug and cozy in the Rig 800 Pro HX. The padding makes the headset comfortable enough that I had no trouble wearing it for up to four hours at a stretch while wearing glasses, although longer than that tended to give me a light headache. 

Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review: Performance

Across hours of testing this headset in games such as Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 and Battlefield 2042, I had no issues with the microphone, which reliably communicated what I said, and switched off when I swung it up away from my face. As far as the sound quality on the other end, my teammates claimed I sounded intelligible, but clearly like I was using a headset microphone. 

As far as sound quality goes, the 40mm drivers on the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX do a great job of making explosions and gunfire in games like Battlefield and Call of Duty sound loud and impactful. This is where the headset shines, and with Dolby Atmos enabled, it's an excellent pair of cans for games where you shoot things up with your squadmates.

However, in my experience, the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX is less well-suited to games with more nuanced and varied soundscapes. I spent hours testing the device across both an Xbox Series X and a gaming PC, in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Forza Horizon 5 and Marvel's Midnight Suns. I found the Rig 800 Pro to be a completely serviceable headset in every game, delivering all the sounds I needed to hear when I needed to hear them. But it really only shines in games with guns or other loud, percussive bass notes. 

Elden Ring, for example, sounded worse through the Rig 800 Pro than it does through my TV's built-in speakers. While high-pitched sounds (like steel striking steel or magic spells firing off) came through clearly enough in the headset, the gentle background music and plodding footfalls of the protagonist sounded strangely muffled to my ears. In Marvel's Midnight Suns, the voice acting sounded good, but the music and sound effects again sounded strangely muted, as though I were hearing them through a thin layer of wood. Cyberpunk 2077 sounded a bit better across the board than Elden Ring, but here again the headset really only shines when you're firing guns, or hearing the bass-heavy combat music kick up. 

When listening to music from artists such as Johnny Cash, John Coltrane, The Coup and The Mountain Goats, I had a similar experience. The Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX is a decent headset for listening to music, and you'll hear every note, but rarely did tracks sound as good as they do through a decent pair of speakers. Bass and sound in the low end of the spectrum sounded best to my ears. Vocals and treble, on the other hand, didn't always come as clearly through the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX as they do through my ~$40 pair of Jlab earbuds. I was able to compensate for this by cranking the volume up, but that feels like an inelegant and potentially ear-damaging solution.

The Rig Pro 800 headset does a good job of emphasizing bass and treble, but anything in the midrange tends to sound a bit muffled. This is hardly a dealbreaker, but it does mean I can recommend this headset only to a very specific group of people: PC and Xbox owners who want a reliable headset for shooting the breeze with friends while shooting stuff in games. 

Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review: Features

The Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX doesn't have the sort of in-depth software that competitors like the SteelSeries Arctis 7 offer, so you don't have a lot of options to customize how it sounds. You simply plug the base into a USB-A port (on either your PC or your Xbox), grab the headset and go. But what the device lacks in software functionality it perhaps makes up for in terms of useful hardware features.

First and foremost, the base of the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX includes a slot for a USB-A dongle that you can slide out and place into another device you want to use wirelessly with the headset. Personally I set it up so that the headset charging cradle sits on my desk plugged into my PC, with the USB-A dongle slotted into my Xbox Series X. This way, the headset works with either device interchangeably. Note that the headset connects wirelessly only to the USB dongle, not the charging base station. As such, if you want to use the headset with your PC, you have to pull the dongle out of your Xbox and slot it back into a USB port on your PC.  

Nacon claims that wireless connection to the headset is lag-free and extends up to 33 feet. In my personal experience it is lag-free, but I don't know about 33 feet of distance — I was lucky if I got maybe 30 feet away before the headset started to cut out and lose connection. The real problem is with doors and walls. Perhaps the Rig 800 Pro HX could easily extend 33 feet or more away from your Xbox with no issue, but as soon as you walk around a corner or go into another room, be prepared for potential audio problems.

Another feature I found eminently useful is the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX's long battery life. The manufacturer claims it offers up to 24 hours of battery life, and while I can't say for sure whether I got 14, 16 or 20 hours of total use time, I can tell you it lasted long enough that every time I picked up the headset, it was ready to go.

This is even more impressive when you consider that I reviewed this headset over months and months, never once charging it, and oftentimes leaving it sitting on my coffee table for weeks at a time. Yet every time, as soon as I picked it up and powered it on, it was ready to go. Long battery life is hardly a must-have feature when charging the headset is as simple as leaving it sitting on the cradle, but it's an impressive feat nonetheless.

Once I did plug the device into the base station to charge, however, it took well over two hours to fill up on juice. You can also charge the headset by plugging it in directly via the micro-USB port, but it's hard to imagine why you'd want to if you still have the base station handy.

As functional and reliable as the Rig 800 Pro is, I can't help but wish this $150 headset offered some of the features you can find in similarly priced competition. As much as I like the simplicity of the USB dongle (just plug it in, turn the headset on, you're good to go) and don't miss the hassle of pairing via Bluetooth, having said Bluetooth functionality would make the Rig 800 Pro a far more useful headset. Personally, I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and music while playing games, and having the option to pair the headset to my phone would have gone a long way toward justifying the price tag.

Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX review: Verdict

I like the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX well enough that I'm happy to pick it up any time I'm about to hop into an Xbox game with friends. After wearing it for hours on end, it's comfortable and enduring enough that I'd happily recommend it to anyone seeking a no-nonsense, no-frills headset for Xbox and PC.

But when you look at the competition, the Rig 800 Pro becomes harder to recommend. It costs as much as a Razer Kaira Pro, for example, yet fails to match the feature set of Razer's headset. And the SteelSeries Arctis 7P/7X, one of our top picks for the best gaming headset you can buy, costs the same as the Rig 800 Pro, yet works with more platforms and offers more features than Nacon's headset.

If you want a great wireless gaming headset for playing action games with pals on Xbox and PC, the Nacon Rig 800 Pro HX is a solid choice. But you can do better for the price.