The best budget gaming accessories for 2023

PC gaming can be a lot of fun, but it can also be pretty expensive. And we don’t mean the games themselves – any gamer worth their salt knows you can just wait for a Steam sale, or grab a slew of great titles on Humble Bundle. Building a dedicated desktop can be pricey, and gaming laptops can take a real bite out of your wallet. One aspect that doesn’t have to bankrupt you are gaming accessories. It’s possible to kit out your rig with some of the best headsets, keyboards and mice on a budget, and we’ve got a few recommendations to get you started.

Gaming headsets

Turtle Beach Recon Spark

Turtle Beach

Turtle Beach Recon Spark

The Recon Spark has been one of my favorite headsets for years because it offers solid audio both in its cups and mic, plus it’s comfortable, sturdy and cute.

The Recon Spark has been one of my favorite headsets for years; in fact, it was my daily driver in the Engadget office. There are some good reasons for that: it offers solid audio both in its cups and mic, plus it’s comfortable, sturdy and cute. It might not be wireless, but you can just plug it into almost any desktop or laptop and not have to worry about driver compatibility or installing software or anything like that. It’s also a great option for kids.

Logitech G733

Logitech G733 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Headset

Logitech G

While the Recon Spark might be my preferred work headset, the one I use at home is the wireless Logitech G733. It sounds great, has a phenomenal battery life and just the right amount of bling, with bright colored LED strips in the front and a customizable fabric headband. I use it for playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friends on Discord, as well as recording the occasional podcast. It’s been around for a few years, but that just means that you can get this headset for under $100 at some retailers. If it’s still too rich for your blood, check out the similar G435.

SteelSeries Arctis Nova 1

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Best budget computer speakers: $100 or less

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Tech tool offers police ‘mass surveillance on a budget’

By GARANCE BURKE and JASON DEAREN

September 2, 2022 GMT

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.

Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used.

The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.

“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.

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This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that investigates the power and consequences of decisions driven by algorithms on people’s everyday lives.

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The documents and emails were obtained by EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the files with The AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software in about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according

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