TL;DR: If you don’t need an extended mousepad or an extra large desk mat, the Vaxee PA series of mousepads is for you. The PA series is the perfect balance of fun, unique, and good value in a mousepad. Between $20 and $40, the Vaxee PA is the best budget to mid-range cloth control mousepad I’ve tried.
This is just a mousepad review, and I’m not Brian from BadSeed Tech, but I’ll do my best to tell you everything you need to know about the Vaxee PA series. Before I get too far ahead of myself, it’s important to note that all the designs within the PA series are identical. The Vaxee PA Outset, Zygen, FunSpark, and other designs are all the same exact mousepad. I have the Vaxee PA Outset design, a geometric design with nearly 50 shades of gray. Sorry, it’s more like four-to-six shades but I had to make that pun.
The Vaxee PA series makes up several mousepad sizes and price points. For $21.50, you can purchase the medium 380mm. x 262mm. mousepad. This is what I have, and it’s sufficient for web browsing and workstation applications, but not fast-paced games. At $30, the standard Vaxee PA size of 470mm. x 390mm. becomes an option. This size is suitable for FPS games, but if you’re an absolute flicking god or you play with a really low DPI, I’d get a larger pad. Those are the only sizes Vaxee offers, but there are seven design options, and you can pay an extra $10 to have your name printed on the mousepad.
Right off the bat, I’ll come out and say it. The Vaxee PA Outset is the best mousepad I’ve ever owned. But that’s not saying much. The only pads I’ve owned or tested prior to this are the SteelSeries QcK Prism XL, HyperX Fury S, and Razer Goliathus Mobile Stealth. The only one that could compete with the Vaxee PA is the ubiquitous QcK, but even that doesn’t match up. Let’s get into why the Vaxee pad is so good.
First of all, there is no edge stitching on the pad, which makes it very flat. The stitching on the pad itself is very tightly woven, making it harder, stiffer, and less flexible than many other cloth pads. However, the qualities that make it more similar to a hard mousepad do not detract from the cloth pad feel. Simply put, it’s a very soft cloth control pad with a good element of speed once you get going. It takes a bit of force to start moving the mouse, but from there it’s a very smooth experience. These aspects translate into a pad that is very controlled for flicks but speedy enough for comfortable continuous glide. Reviewers of this pad often say that it doesn’t play well with bad mouse feet, so if your mouse’s stock feet are bad, I’d recommend aftermarket skates such as Hyperglides, especially to offset the controlled feel of the pad.
The Vaxee PA series has one of the better rubber bases I’ve seen. Unlike the slick HyperX Fury S, the PA is grippy and won’t slide around on your desk. Out of the box, the pad must be unrolled and flattened, which is annoying. My pad took only a few minutes to sufficiently flatten out to the point where I would feel comfortable playing FPS games on it.
The elephant in the room is that you’ve probably never heard of Vaxee until this review. But if you spend a few minutes looking at cloth mousepads on r/MousepadReview, you’ll learn about it pretty quickly. Vaxee was founded by some of the original founders of Zowie, which explains the good quality of their products, as well as the fact that the PA line is a G-SR SE clone. On a side note, it looks like their mice are also obvious Zowie clones with more colors. However, the Vaxee PA series seems to have fewer durability issues than the G-SR SE if Boardzy is to be believed. It is not coated, so it could wear down over time, but it has very few issues with temperature changes unlike some pads. The Vaxee brand seems to be foreign and pretty new in the space, which explains the website with very minimal information and marketing.
There’s honestly not much more that I could say about the Vaxee PA lineup. If you prefer cloth mousepads over hard pads and you like more control than speed, the Vaxee PA series is a great option. It’s just a really high-quality pad at an affordable price point.
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