Our favourite 5* gaming chair just got a comfort upgrade

You’re not experiencing déjà vu — we have looked at Secretlab’s Titan Evo chair before. It’s become one of our favourite chairs thanks to its versatility: it has features that make it great for gaming, but the low-key design and sheer comfort levels make it a perfect office chair too. It’s also the top gaming chair in our guide to the best office chairs for back pain.

What’s new here is the NanoGen Edition. Secretlab's research and design team has worked overtime to create an artificial leather material and foam cushioning that deliver the killer combination of comfort and durability, both of which are essential during both intense gaming sessions and the rigmaroles of desk-bound work.

Comfort & ergonomics

Secretlab has made no secret about the NanoGen material here — in fact, it’s made a song and dance about its next-gen leatherette. Does it live up to the hype? If I’m completely honest, I didn’t notice it when I first removed the chair from the box, but the more I used it, the more I realised that yes, the company has achieved what it set out to do.

Like high-end leather, NanoGen has a luxurious smoothness and warmth, but it still has a certain rubberiness that could never be confused with the real deal. However, it feels comfortable against bare skin, without the sweaty stickiness that can occur with organic materials.

Beneath the NanoGen skin sits a NanoFoam cushion (Secretlab really likes using the word ‘Nano’). NanoFoam aims to find the Goldilocks zone of cushioning: not so firm that it’s uncomfortably hard, but soft enough to be supportive. To achieve this, Secretlab has made use of the cold-cure foam from its other chairs, but added a layer of soft microfoam on top.

The result of this dual-layer approach is a little more sumptuousness, maybe not noticeably so, but there’s a firm level of support. If you can imagine sitting on a juvenile manatee, you’re probably somewhere in the right ball park — malleable but solid.

It’s business as usual throughout the rest of the chair, with a few minor refinements, such as a slightly taller central strut for more ground clearance. It’s also meant to come with upgraded plush arm rests, although my review sample came with standard PU foam ones. I want my fuzzy armrests, dammit!

Armrest envy aside, Secretlabs’ overall if-it-ain’t broke approach works because it’s still fundamentally one of the best chairs I’ve ever used. Everything about it feels firm and measured; there’s a little give to the whole unit to support movement. The whole backrest reclines to almost dentist-chair flatness, so you can relax and something I really like is the way that it can lean forwards a little, too, to support more intense close-up work and gaming sessions.

The backrest comfort and lumbar support can be set via two knobs on either side of the chair, the arms move up and down, side-to-side, and rotate via switches that lock them in place, and the magnetic, memory-foam headrest is such a work of simple genius that you wonder why no one’s thought of it before.

It’s so perfect that it’s almost as if Secretlab couldn’t think of anything else to upgrade, so it just came up with the NanoGen and NanoFoam materials so they could increase the price tag. More on this later.

Design & aesthetics

Visually, this isn’t hugely different to the non-Nano Titan Evo: it’s a hunk of slightly menacing darkness that looks a little like a gatekeeper from a high-tech RPG. It’s in keeping with the Titan’s gaming chair nature without going for the plasticky racer bucket-chair look, and a soothing white edition is available, but you might be better off looking at a more graceful mesh chair if you find it visually unappealing.

There are some minor upgrades here to the way it looks: the Titan Evo NanoGen edition replaces the slightly cheap glossy plastics of the original with a classy matte finish, and the NanoGen material itself has an unpolished, microtextured finish that looks low-key high-end.

What’s missing with the NanoGen edition is the massive range of licensed chairs so you can show your allegiance to your favourite cultural phenomenon: Batman, McLaren racing, Game of Thrones, Overwatch. This probably isn’t something that most Creative Bloq readers would be interested in (correct me if I’m wrong), and you can still pick up Secretlab ‘skins’ that wrap around your chair.

As it stands, it’s a decent, distinctive chair that will fit into home and business office environments, even if it does err towards the gamier side. It’s worth noting that Secretlab’s Atlas is the company’s more mature task chair, designed for calmer office environments, with soothing colour schemes and a slightly more passive silhouette.

Specs

Assembly

Secretlab has made the assembly process for the chair as straightforward as possible — open the box and you’ll find a large, foolproof instruction card. The steps required are fairly minimal, but aligning the backrest with the buttrest is probably a two-person job. One thing to bear in mind is that the width of the armrests can only be set via bolts, so it’s a good idea to try and get them in the right place first time.

It’s a good idea to build the Titan Evo NanoGen Edition on whichever floor it’s going to live on, because its 35kg weight and bulky size make lugging it up stairs a colossal workout. Secretlab also makes it tricky to get to the bolts, which is what gives the chair its seamless look, but also makes disassembly a more convoluted process.

Price & value

The NanoGen upgrade bumps this Titan Evo into a higher level of budget chairs, bringing it in line with perches such as Hinomi’s H2 Pro and the ErgoChair Plus.

While not as gamer-focused, these chairs feature more refined designs and better adjustability in some cases. There is nothing wrong with the Titan Evo, though, and it's arguable that it's worth more than Secretlab has been charging for it because it's such a nice chair in the first place.

Should you buy?

The big question here is not whether you should buy the Secretlab Titan Evo, but whether the NanoGen upgrades are worth the extra cash — the standard edition is $549 / £449, but the NanoGen tech bumps the price up to $799 / £639. Which seems like a lot, and, if I’m honest, I don’t think it’s worth an extra $250 / £190 because the chair gets so much right without it.

Of course, if you love the Titan Evo’s design and can afford the NanoGen upgrade, it’s worth it for just a little extra comfort — but those on a smaller budget can stick to the standard edition without too much NanoFoam FOMO.