The Corsair Novablade Pro was the first time I seriously considered ditching cables for fighting games. I’ve used leverless boards and arcade sticks for years, but always wired, always nervous about latency. Two weeks into using the Novablade Pro as my main controller across PC and PS5 – for Street Fighter 6 lobbies, Tekken 8 training, and Guilty Gear Strive sets – I caught myself doing something I never thought I would: trusting 2.4GHz wireless in ranked.
This thing nails so many of the fundamentals – rock-solid wireless, silly levels of customization thanks to Hall effect switches, PS5 certification, a genuinely premium build – that it feels like a bit of a landmark for the leverless space. At the same time, Corsair trips over some surprisingly basic usability problems: no iCUE support, no onboard legend for all the “G” controls, and a setup flow that almost demands you keep the PDF manual open on a second screen.
If you want a tournament-legal, PS5-certified leverless controller that can genuinely run wireless with almost zero compromise, the Novablade Pro is one of the strongest options available. Just be ready to wrestle with its controls and live without software.
Out of the box, the Novablade Pro gives off a very “Corsair keyboard on steroids” vibe. Matte black shell, clean lines, understated RGB accents – no anime artwork or loud branding, just a big, serious slab of hardware that clearly means business. At 1.4kg it feels dense in the hands, heavier than most of its rivals, but solid and reassuring rather than unwieldy. It rides the line between “portable” and “this is my main home controller,” and just about lands on the right side.
Setup is a little different from most boards because of the clever magnetic top plate. Pop that off and you reveal:
The idea is great – everything important is tucked away, and you’re not left wondering where the dongle went in your backpack. In practice, my very first interaction was a bit clumsy: the gap for lifting the top plate is tiny. With short fingernails I had to use a card edge to pry it up. After a few days I got used to the motion, but it never felt quite as slick as it looks.
On the bottom, a full sheet of grippy rubber keeps the board planted on a desk or lap. It barely moved even during frantic Tekken sidestep spam. There’s also a USB cable locking mechanism meant for tournament safety. Personally, these locks drive me up the wall. They usually prefer one specific cable size and play badly with thicker custom leads. If you live at locals and worry about someone stepping on your cord mid-round, it might be comforting. At home, I wished I could ignore it.
The last first-impression detail that stuck with me: Corsair includes a hard plastic cover that snaps over the buttons for travel. For anyone who throws their controller into a backpack with a laptop and a water bottle, this is genuinely useful, not just a nice-to-have.
The Novablade Pro follows the standard 12-button leverless layout and then builds on it. You get the usual WASD-style directional cluster on the left and eight face buttons on the right. On top of that, Corsair adds three extra programmable buttons around the movement area: one above the movement keys and two flanking the Up button.
These extras are fixed; unlike the Victrix Pro KO, you can’t swap them out for spacers. I never accidentally hit them in normal play, even while grinding tight combos, but I can see some players being nervous about any extra surface near Up. If the thought of stray jumps keeps you up at night, this could be a sticking point, even if in reality they’re quite well placed.
Above the main clusters sits a row of function buttons, plus L3, R3, and a touchpad for PS5. Along the right edge, you get five G-Keys dedicated to system-level functions:
These side G-Keys are where the design’s strengths and weaknesses come into focus. They give you a ton of control directly on the device, but:
After nearly two months, I still couldn’t rattle off what each G-Key did without mentally mapping colors to features or checking the manual. If Corsair wants to keep the clean, minimalist look (which I like), at least hiding a tiny printed legend under the magnetic plate would make life so much easier.
Ergonomically, the biggest surprise is the buttons themselves. Instead of the usual low-profile, flat arcade-style caps, Corsair uses tall, slightly domed buttons with noticeably longer travel. They feel more like ultra-light keyboard keys than Sanwa buttons. Pressing them has a deep, soft bottom-out but with a lot of movement on the way down.
The pros:
The cons:
I settled on a 1mm actuation point and, with that setting, the long travel stopped causing missed inputs. I still wished Corsair had physically shortened the throw by about half. Rapid Trigger helps mitigate the long travel (more on that later), but it is still a workaround for a problem that more conventional buttons don’t really have.
The headline feature of the Novablade Pro is its Hall effect switch system. Instead of using a traditional mechanical contact, each button uses a magnetic sensor to detect how far the plunger has moved. That means no physical contact to wear out, but more importantly for players, it means you can pick exactly where the button “activates” and “deactivates.”
Corsair lets you set the actuation distance anywhere from 0.1mm to 4.0mm. There are five predefined steps if you just want “shallower” or “deeper,” or you can go granular with 0.1mm increments using the function keys. In practice, that looks like:
The RGB strip around the chassis and the backlit buttons do double duty here: they’re both decoration and menu. The light strip will change its “fill” to represent actuation distance, and the buttons will flash to warn that an option is about to change. Once you internalize the logic, it works. The problem is that nothing on the device explains what any of this color language means. If you put it down for a week, you will almost certainly need to reopen the manual to remember which effect corresponds to which setting.
On top of that, the board supports:
There’s one very interesting detail for modders: Corsair doesn’t advertise it, but the stock Hall effect switches can be replaced with third-party Hall effect alternatives. Corsair doesn’t sell its own MGX Hyperdrive replacements, though, so if one fails you’re sourcing parts yourself.
All of this customization power is both the Novablade Pro’s best trait and its biggest headache. Once I had everything dialed in – actuation at 1mm, Rapid Trigger on, SOCD set the way I like – the board felt amazing. But getting there, and more importantly keeping it there, is less smooth than it should be because there is no companion software and no screen.
I used the Novablade Pro as my main controller for several weeks across PS5 and PC. Most of that time was spent in Street Fighter 6 ranked, plus a lot of lab time in Tekken 8 and Guilty Gear Strive.
On paper, both wired and 2.4GHz connections run at a 1,000Hz polling rate. Bluetooth, by contrast, is the “for the menu” option; you lose that super-high responsiveness there. In actual play:
To be clear, you still won’t see tournament players relying on wireless. Interference is always a risk in a crowded venue, and TOs are understandably strict. At home, though, where I’m playing from a sofa with the PC or PS5 across the room, the 2.4GHz mode is a luxury that quickly starts to feel like a necessity. No cable draped across the living room, no tugging on ports, no rearranging furniture: it just works and keeps working.
The combination of long travel, adjustable actuation, and Rapid Trigger made the Novablade Pro feel very different from my usual leverless controllers.
Where things got a little dicey was at ultra-low actuation settings. At 0.1mm, the board became almost too sensitive. Simply resting a finger slightly off-center could trigger an input. It’s a mode that makes sense on paper – “fastest response possible” – but in practice it led to more dropped confirms and accidental inputs than anything else. Hall effect or not, there’s a point where human hands are the bottleneck.
One of the few genuinely bad moments I had with the board was self-inflicted but revealing. During a long ranked session, I accidentally hit one of the G-Keys and changed my actuation point mid-match. Suddenly, all my timings felt wrong. Nothing on-screen told me what had changed, just a brief flash of color I didn’t fully register. I only figured it out after exiting to training mode and digging through the manual. Since then, I’ve used “Game Mode” to lock the G-Keys during play and avoid surprises.
That little story sums up the experience well: the hardware is incredibly capable, but the way you interact with its options can get in the way at the worst possible moments.
The Novablade Pro is full-RGB, but in a very Corsair keyboard sort of way. Every main button is backlit, and a light strip runs around the edge of the case. Strangely, you can’t set individual colors for specific keys or the strip. You get pre-made lighting effects and brightness control, and that’s about it.
More importantly, the RGB isn’t just for show. It’s the only feedback system for nearly every setting on the controller. Change actuation, and the strip grows or shrinks. Toggle Rapid Trigger, SOCD, or profiles, and colors shift or blink in specific patterns. It’s clever, but it’s opaque unless you’ve memorized the color code.
This is where the lack of iCUE software support hurts the most. Corsair’s RGB and control suite is well established on PC, but this device exists completely outside that ecosystem. No GUI to see or set actuation per button. No ability to click through SOCD modes on a screen. No simple way to remap anything beyond what’s exposed in hardware. You’re stuck doing everything through key combos and color flashes.
The Novablade Pro really feels like it was crying out for either:
Instead, it has neither. The result is that many of its best features become “set it once and never touch again” options because changing them mid-season feels risky without clear visual confirmation.
Corsair rates the Novablade Pro at around 40 hours of use over 2.4GHz wireless with RGB at full brightness, and up to 200 hours with lighting off. In practice, my experience matched that 40-hour claim pretty closely. Over two weeks of nightly sessions (roughly 2–3 hours per night), I hit low battery right around when I expected.
Battery checks are also handled through the Function key and RGB strip. Press the right combo, and the strip changes color to represent a charge range. It’s crude but workable – not as elegant as a percentage in software, but usable once you remember which color equals which bracket.
You can keep playing wirelessly while charging via USB, which helped when I forgot to plug it in after a long set. A simple battery bank on the sofa armrest kept things going without having to run a cable all the way to the console.
As for wireless reliability, I experienced no dropouts or phantom inputs in 2.4GHz mode, even in a room full of other devices. That doesn’t mean it’s foolproof in a packed tournament hall, but for home use it felt rock solid.
The Corsair Novablade Pro comes in at $249.99 / £229.99, which puts it squarely in the “premium leverless” bracket. If you’re looking for a PS5-certified leverless board, you’re almost always going to be spending north of $200 anyway. In that context, Corsair has positioned this as one of the cheaper high-end options, especially when deals drop it as low as about $199.99 / £159.99.
For that money, you’re getting:
In terms of competitors:
The Novablade Pro slots between those two philosophies. It’s more feature-rich than the Kitsune and more “gadgety” than the Pro KO, but it’s also cheaper than many similarly specced rivals when discounts hit. If you care about wireless and love tweaking hardware behavior, it offers a lot for the price.
After a lot of time with the Novablade Pro, a clear picture emerged of who will appreciate it the most.
The Corsair Novablade Pro quickly won me over on feel and performance. The Hall effect switches with adjustable actuation, coupled with Rapid Trigger, make it incredibly responsive once dialed in. The wireless performance is so good over 2.4GHz that I happily used it for ranked play, which I never thought I’d say about a fighting game controller. Build quality is high, the travel cover is genuinely practical, and PS5 + PC compatibility makes it versatile.
Where it stumbles is in user experience. The lack of iCUE or any software suite is bizarre for a Corsair product this complex. The reliance on color codes and undocumented G-Keys makes its deep customization harder to access than it should be. A simple legend under the top plate or a tiny OLED display would go a long way; a full PC UI would make it a standout.
Even with those frustrations, the Novablade Pro has become one of the few leverless controllers I’d confidently recommend to serious players who also care about home comfort. It feels like a “hardware team knocked it out of the park, UX team never showed up” situation – but the core experience is strong enough that I’m willing to live with the quirks.
Rating: 8/10 – Exceptional hardware, class-leading wireless, and deep customization, held back by confusing controls and missing software support.
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