I have something special for you today. This is the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed wireless earbuds. If we look at the front of the box, yes – the HyperSpeed means that it can be connected wirelessly with that dongle – and that is the main selling point, because Bluetooth actually sucks when it comes to audio, particularly due to massive audio latency caused by the necessary buffer.
And this Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed fixes that. I am actually very excited for this pair of earbuds because it packs a whole lot more feature than the other similar earbuds that I have.
Unboxing
Let’s start with the unboxing. The box in itself is in a rather typical Razer fashion. We have the bright Razer green at the side and the product’s image is printed at the front. Opening up reveals an envelope that houses the user manual – which we’ll go through later – and also the Razer stickers.
Underneath the envelope, we have the earbuds themselves. We’ll put aside for now.
Under that, we have the accessories. In this case, we have a straight USB-C to a right-angled cable, and it is also nicely braided. I personally won’t use this cable, but it’s here if you need it. That 90-degree angle connector is really nice, honestly.
We also have this tiny box here that houses the S and L eartip sizes. The M size is already pre-installed.
Earbuds themselves
Back to the earbuds themselves, it’s actually very simple in terms of the design. It’s in a matte plastic design, has a RAZER branding at the top, and we have the pairing button and USB-C port at the bottom. This USB-C port is actually very important as it does more than just charging.
Pressing that pairing button also lights up the RGB bar to show the battery charge left as well. Yeah, it’s Razer, RGB is absolutely necessary.
I was quite perplexed by the width of the earbuds, but I went “ahhhhh” as soon as I opened the case. We have the two earbuds and the HyperSpeed USB-C dongle is in the middle.
The earbuds are pretty simple in terms of design, but they’re surprisingly lightweight. The bulb is pretty comfortable, and there are two microphones – one at the back of the stem and another at the end of the stem. There is another bass port and I think the proximity sensor is hidden there too.
I have to say though, taking out the earbuds is rather difficult. The angle of how the earbuds sit inside the case and length of the stem makes it rather awkward to maneuver in and out of the case. The dongle… it’s even more difficult to take out. It actually plugs into the slot, literally clicks into port – because there is an actual USB-C connection to be made between the dongle and the case. More about this later.
That HyperSpeed dongle
And that dongle is the main selling point of the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed. We can take out the dongle, then plug it into everywhere – and it’ll work. I tried multiple different devices.
PC works.
Mac works.
Android devices work.
iPhones should work, if it has a USB-C port.
ROG Xbox Ally X with CachyOS works.
Nintendo Switch 2 works.
Funnily enough, with the dongle plugged into the case, we can actually just plug a USB-C cable to the case and it’ll work that way too. This way, we can actually charge the case at the same time. It’s a neat feature, honestly.
Audio latency tests
Now, let’s talk about the audio latency a little. Bluetooth is not made to handle high bitrate – even audio is considered high bitrate. So, what our phones do now is to build a buffer to avoid any sort of interruption in the audio stream. With this 2.4GHz HyperSpeed dongle, it cuts away the entire Bluetooth protocol and it streams directly from the audio source to the earbuds, hence no buffer, hence no audio delay – or at least minimal, since it still has to go through the whole deal of encoding the audio, transmitting to the earbuds, then decoding and playing the audio. That’s a story for another time.
But, back to the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed. We can calculate the audio delay by using the very useful, yet free, audio latency tests by Superpowered. It tests the time taken for a round-trip of a beep sound.
So, I tested with Bluetooth. We’re getting around 413ms average. In terms of audio latency, it’s actually terrible. Playing any game with this latency is just disorienting. Then, we plugged the dongle, switched it to HyperSpeed mode, and did the test again. Immediately, the latency dropped to only 137ms. Yes, only 137ms – more than half of the Bluetooth audio delay. In my opinion, anything lower than 150ms is acceptable for games.
Then, we tested once more with the dongle plugged into the case – and the latency is basically the same, I also tested with the case opened and closed – and it doesn’t matter. Still about the same 137ms.
I also tested with and without ANC as well, and the audio delay is again, basically the same. While 137ms is low in terms of audio latency, it’s not really the lowest in terms of the audio latency. Some people will say that this type of latency isn’t good enough for rhythm games, but there are many rhythm games that has audio delay compensation settings anyway.
Features
Now, in terms of the features available, I have to say – they’re quite… they have a lot of features but they’re… kinda rudimentary? Should I put it that way?
So, let’s start with the app first. We can download the Razer Audio app and it does offer a few different options in the app, but they’re there. So, first one is the Quick Connect. Basically, if we have multiple different devices connected via Bluetooth. I have two devices connected, so there’s two devices shown up on my app.
We can also change the input source here, but it’s a one-way street. Once we switched over to the 2.4GHz, the app just stops working until we manually change it back to Bluetooth mode.
Then we can also change the ANC modes. It’s pretty basic as there’s ANC on, AND off, and also ambient mode. That’s it.
We also have EQs. There are three presets, but we can also customize it however we want. I’d say the flat EQ sounds a bit muffled. The music EQ sounds a lot better, and I ended up using that, but the treble isn’t particularly the best.
Then, we also have the Do Not Disturb mode that blocks all calls while gaming in 2.4GHz mode, and also an auto-pause feature that uses the proximity sensor on the earbuds themselves.
What’s surprisingly here is that… the gestures, we can only turn them on or off. We cannot customize the gestures as they’re all fixed, and honestly, the gestures are pretty difficult to use. It’s quite complicated.
We can just outright disable all of them, which luckily does not affect the triple-tap to change between Bluetooth and 2.4GHz dongle mode. Thank you Razer for doing this.
We actually do have yet another app to customize the earbuds – and that’s through the Razer Synapse app. The settings are basically the same, but just in a desktop UI. By the way, there’s also a preview version of Synapse for Macs too.
So far, there’s no firmware update for the Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed yet, so we’re reviewing it as is.
Sound quality
Let’s also talk about the sound quality. I did two for you – one with the flat EQ, and another with the music preset EQ. Have a listen here.
I have to say, the sound quality is quite decent in the music mode, all things considered. I do have to say that the treble is really lacking the sharp and high-pitched frequencies, which is surprisingly okay to me. That makes the music less screechy and less annoying/tiring to listen to.
To have a listen to how the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed sounds, watch the video at the top of this review.
Battery life
As for the battery life, I personally don’t have a solid number at hand – but I can tell you that it can last far more than 4 hours easily with ANC turned on. Seriously, my handhelds ran out of battery while the Hammerhead still hammers on – so I can triple-tap it and change back to Bluetooth mode for some music.
Should you buy the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed?
So then, should you buy the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed? Honestly speaking, this is one of those rare wireless earbuds with a dongle for low-latency audio. So far, I only encountered a handful of them throughout my entire job as a reviewer.
What Razer did here is actually very good. It has really low latency for gaming, has multiple ways to connect to your devices, and also supports all the devices that I have with me. I played games using this pair of wireless earbuds and had a great time with it – particularly when I can get low-latency wireless audio with pretty good ANC as well.
My only real complaint is that the dongle and the earbuds are pretty difficult to get out of the case due to its awkward angle and how tight the dongle plugs into the case – but other than that, it’s basically perfect.
Low-latency audio is the reason why I always carry around a pair of wired earbuds. It’s clunky, yes – but necessary. With the Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed, I can finally fully ditch my wired earbuds.
Razer does offer another variant of this – and they call it the Hammerhead V3 X HyperSpeed. The difference is that the V3 X does not have a removable 2.4GHz dongle, and the case itself is the 2.4GHz dongle. It works, but kinda clunky if we can to connect the dongle on a handheld device as we’ll have to dangle the dongle on the device. Yeah, that’s a sentence.
As for the price, they’re honestly not too bad. If you need a pair of really low-latency wireless earbuds – especially for your handhelds, then this Razer Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed is the one to get.
- Hammerhead V3 HyperSpeed @ RM599
- Hammerhead v3 X HyperSpeed @ RM399
