- Razer’s first gaming chair includes a suite of features found on the most premium chairs on the market.
- The exclusive active lumbar support system helps the chair stand apart from the crowd.
- At $499, it’s cheaper than some of its most well-known competitors.
Razer is nothing if not prolific when it comes to expanding into new product classes. Name a type of gaming accessory and I’m willing to bet that Razer has a product in that category. Gaming chairs — which, like it or not, are a very real and very popular thing — have been around for quite a while, so it seemed like only a matter of time before Razer came up with its own entry.
The Razer Iskur is it, and like many of Razer’s products, it has a couple of killer features that ultimately set it apart from the hundreds of other options on the market.
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Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way right from the top: Razer’s Iskur features a design that will be extremely familiar to anyone who has shopped for or owned a gaming chair in the past. For whatever reason, gamers have gravitated toward the “racing seat” style of office chair — DXRacer being the first brand to take that form factor and run with it — and the Iskur follows that trend as well. However, once you get past the fact that it has a similar silhouette to so many of the other gaming chairs out there, the Iskur has a lot to offer.
Razer products are often cited for their high build quality, and that extends to the Iskur. Assembly takes all of about 15 minutes, tops, and once you have the chair put together, you can tweak all the settings to your liking and be ready to roll in just a minute or two. This isn’t like the average Amazon-bought office chair that is going to take you an hour to put together. It’s basically 90% assembled the moment you open the box.
As far as the feature list goes, it has all the adjustment options you’d expect from a high-end office chair, and then some. The “4D armrests” are particularly nice, allowing for a wide range of options as they can go up and down, side-to-side, and angle inward or outward based on your preference. Other chairs have armrests with similar capabilities — Secretlab, another popular brand of gaming chairs, has similar armrests on its chairs — so Razer definitely isn’t the first, but the armrests feel undeniably good.
If you’re looking for something that the Iskur offers that no other chair can match, take a gander at its lumbar support system. Gaming chairs aren’t exactly known for being great at promoting posture. Most gaming chair manufacturers toss in a lumbar pillow that sits on the back of the chair and, well, that’s about as good as it usually gets. Razer decided to switch things up and make the lumbar system a functional part of the chair itself.
The Iskur’s backrest has a built-in, piston-driven lumbar support system that is controlled via a small handle situated on the underside of the seat. When you release the handle, the lumbar section pushes outward and meets your back.
You can adjust it however you want — if you don’t want it, you can just push it into the back of the chair and leave it there — and in my own testing, I’ve found it to be quite comfortable. It definitely prevents me from getting into my normal slouched posture (it’s a problem) and while I can’t say if it’s rendering any medical benefits for me, I can safely say I would rather have it than not have it.
The Razer Iskur will inevitably draw comparisons to chairs from Secretlab and DXRacer, among others, but as far as quality and features go, it can safely stand on its own two (five) feet. As for the aesthetics? Well, that’s going to be a sticking point for some people.
The Black synthetic leather and firm foam padding are quite comfortable and feel like they’ll last a long time, but the neon green accents and stitching will definitely turn some people off (a white leather / black accent combo would have made me swoon) but it’s a Razer product, and that’s kind of their thing. I do have to give them some style points for doing a sort of “snake belly” pattern on the lumbar system because let’s face it, it just looks cool.
At $499, the Iskur isn’t the cheapest gaming chair on the market, but it’s also far from the most expensive. Most chairs with similar feature sets fall anywhere between $450 and $600, and none of those chairs feature the active lumbar system and, depending on the brand, you really don’t know what you’re getting in terms of build quality. Razer’s new chair definitely has the build quality in the bag, along with a nice set of features and a three-year warranty in case anything goes seriously wrong.
With hundreds of options out there and more companies entering the gaming chair fray seemingly every month, the Razer Iskur is an easy recommendation for your home office.
