Performance
So after spending about a month using the King Series KC91/NB, lets talk a little about how it performed. For starters, much like shopping for beds chairs are completely subjective. A chair that is supportive but soft for a fat guy will be hard for someone who weighs a lot less for example. So going into this you have to keep in mind that I am a larger guy, thankfully though my wife isn’t so the second half of my testing was with her in the chair as well, considering the chair was for her in the first place this isn’t a big surprise.
So first off even just sitting in the KC91/NB the first time you can really tell that this falls into the PC Gaming hair category more than the office chair category that the M-Series does. The chairs are similar in size but the bottom of the King Series chairs grabs you a little more with its side bolstering. This is similar to the F-Series chairs with the only difference being this time around it is designed for my big butt where with the F-Series I was putting 10 pounds into a 5 pound bag. DXRacer advertises this chair to have their softest padding and I could see that but with that it does also have a nice supporting feel, I don’t feel like I’m going to flatten the chair out from use. The side bolstering was comfortable in nearly every situation except when I took the weekend off and played The Crew basically all day and all night, I did reach a point where the side support was a little much, but frankly I shouldn’t have been sitting for that long in the first place. The bottom padding held up well as well, even in the weekend long bender, given my weight this is a worse case situation for the padding, typically most chairs padding would be flat and uncomfortable in a short period of time.
Being able to lean the back of the chair makes getting comfortable in every situation much easier. In addition to that being able to lock the chair when it is leaning back slightly is also great. There are a lot of times where I want to lean back a little without going all the way back and without having to balance myself, this worked perfectly for me. For my wife she actually set the chair with a slight lean right from the start, she had been using the F-Series Console Gaming chair and this was the best way to replicate the same leaned back/sunken in feeling. I did notice that the stock height of the chair does seem a little high, this is most likely related to the large wheels but keep it in mind if you have a hard time fitting under your desk with your current chair. It sits right at where I need it to be for me personally, but it would be nice to have a little bit of a buffer.
As expected I didn’t enjoy the lumbar pillow at all, I’ve tried to use these multiple times and it just does work for me. I thought maybe it was because of my size, but my wife also doesn’t like using it as well. I did put the head pillow to good use but I would prefer that they use the same larger pillow that the M-Series has. This pillow is small and you have to adjust to whatever you are doing where the other pillow design was just there and worked.
I mentioned before that the KC91/NB doesn’t have adjustable armrests like most of the other K-Series chairs. This is part of the reason they were able to keep the cost down on this specific model. For my wife there was no issue at all, she was already used to the same armrest design from the Console Gaming chair. She did comment on the armrests being a little firm, it would be cool if they had more padding to make using them more comfortable. For me the armrests did get in the way slightly. For one they fit a little closer to me where the adjustable armrests on the other K-Series chairs actually have an adjustment to widen the seating area slightly. This became an issue when I would go to sit down, nearly every time the armrests would catch on my pants pockets, multiple times I thought I had ripped my pants. I did get used to it, making sure to sit down a little differently, but more than anything I want to make sure everyone knows about any potential issues, no matter how small.
Last but not least I want to point out that the new lockless wheels are awesome. Typically I prefer to use a roller blade type wheel both because they cause less damage to your flooring but also to roll around easier. The wheels that DXRacer uses are similar to your standard wheel but noticeably larger. For the M-Series they used a similar wheel but with locks. Not having locks means I won’t get locked in up under my desk anymore. As for how the wheels roll, day to day I couldn’t tell the difference between these and a set of roller blade wheels. They roll on our carpet great where a small standard wheel won’t roll at all.