Of course, the Sova isn’t just for PC gaming — it’s also a fast and comfortable way to queue up music or videos to watch on your TV, compared to relatively clumsy mobile and TV apps. You may need to find a spot to keep it — the sideways placement shown above doesn’t work too well with a mouse attached — but having it accessible can be something of a time saver. Using the Sova is surprisingly comfortable. The cushions spread the weight of the unit across your legs, while still allowing for some much-needed airflow. The compact keyboard layout ensure that your arms can be held almost straight ahead, rather than being stretched out in either direction, and the height of the unit is just right too. You already own everything you need to get started - all that’s left to add is the Sova. Comfort Tested Gaming The last and most important part of the design are the modular wrist rest and extendable mouse pad units. While no plan is in place to offer different styles of mouse pads or additional cushions, TechRadar was told that 3D-printer schematics would be provided to print your own modules. We liked

The Sova is also a little messy. With three cables potentially in play — one from the Sova to your PC, one for your mouse and one for your headset — you need to rely on good cable routing to keep things tidy. You might consider a wireless gaming mouse or headset to maximise the portability of the setup. Wrapping up The Turret, on the other hand, wasn't nearly as stable when I tried it out for myself during my CES demo, and the mouse mat area also felt a lot smaller than what you get on the Sova. What's more, while the Turret has the added bonus of coming with a bundled Razer Mamba Wireless mouse, the magnets it employs to hold it in place when it's not in use often got in the way when it actually came to playing games with it, and it often felt like I was struggling to move it where I wanted. There are no such restrictions with the Sova, and for once Roccat's tendency towards the big and bulky side of peripherals actually works out in their favour. At 16 feet long, the Lapdog’s included cabling is more than enough to get you where you need to go. But with that power supply, it begins to look a little kludgey. Given its rigidity, the cord is also hard to store when not in use. The Sova is a comfortably expansive device, spanning the width of an average couch cushion. It’s divided into three zones, with an integrated keyboard in the upper left, a palm rest in the lower left and a mouse pad on the right side. The palmrest and mousepad are formed from plastic panels, which can be removed by pushing them up from the bottom. This presumably opens the door to functionally or aesthetically different alternatives, perhaps even made by third-parties or 3D printed at home. I think the layout of the keyboard is particularly well-chosen; it’s compact but still includes all keys sans the number pad, ensuring simulators and other in-depth titles can still be played without issue.Roccat will offer at least two types of keys in when the final product comes out sometime next year. The Sova is supported by four cushions which clip into the underside of the unit, allowing the unit to lie flat on your lap without discomfort. On the side, there are two USB ports and one micro-USB port that's used to charge the Sova. Battery life sounded a bit low in the 6-8 hour range, but supposing that the charging cable is long enough, you could just plug it into the wall when you're running low on juice. A four metre cable connects the Sova to your computer, including the integrated keyboard and two other USB peripherals (e.g. a mouse and headset). Routing options are provided to keep your cables tidy, including a mouse bungee that can be placed along the periphery of the Sova to meet your needs.

The ROCCAT Sova Gaming Board is the pinnacle of comfort, field tested with hundreds of hours of play specifically to accommodate couch gaming. Everything from the highly ergonomic shape built from a durable fibre/plastic blend, the cushioned underside parts, to the perfectly placed wrist-rest ensure that everything from a single game to marathon play feels exactly the same - effortless. The Sova was designed from the ground up to replace the desk and make a lap-and-couch combo the perfect match. I got a Switch. Then I tried Stadia because the Switch doesn’t have enough processing power for bigger games. Then Stadia died. The problems seem never-ending: I want to play Call of Duty with a coworker, but he’s on a PlayStation, but I want to play first-person shooters with a keyboard and mouse! But I don’t want to spend even more time holed up in my office. I like playing in my living room, making myself a small nest of nacho crumbs on the sofa, yelling and drinking beer with my spouse. Also, like a console, my gaming PC in the living room puts guardrails on what might become a self-destructive habit. As long as your console is in the living room, in full view of everyone eating dinner and doing homework, you can’t really plonk down on the couch and fire up Mass Effect when you’re supposed to be walking the dog or doing laundry or anything else that a working full-time mom of two young kids should be doing.Now there's no beating around the bush here - the Sova is absolutely massive. Measuring 280x646x37mm and weighing 2.35kg, it's a lot heftier than, say, the sleek Razer Turret, which has a fold-away mouse mat for easier storage, and it's a bit of a faff to make room for it on our coffee table once I'm done playing. But since it’s powered, you need a separate power supply, which has to snake its way across the room from your computer. keyboards are popular because they only shrink or remove a few keys compared to a TKL; most of the space saving is done by reducing the gap between different areas of the keyboard and placing keys like Insert, Delete and Home in a single column on the right side of the keyboard. However, these changes mean that finding replacement keycaps is sometimes difficult.