Best walking pads for gaming desks

The WalkingPad A1 Pro, on two published figures that are specific to this use. Its minimum speed is 0.5 mph, the lowest in the category and half the 1 mph floor KingSmith publishes for the C2 and Z1 - and at a gaming desk the bottom of the range is where you live, because your hands are occupied. It is also the only KingSmith pad with any published decibel figure at all, stated as under 65 dB, which is the only evidence available in a room with an open microphone in it.

At the slow end of the speed range, for a lot of games, plausibly - and we are not going to tell you it works for yours, because that depends on what your hands are doing rather than on a specification. What the specifications do tell you is which machines have a slow end worth using. KingSmith publishes 0.5 mph for the A1 Pro and 1 mph for the C2 and the Z1. That gap is the difference between a shuffle you can aim through and a walk you cannot.

Probably, to some degree, and the published record cannot tell you how much. Six of the eight pads we track publish no noise figure at all. The two that do are the A1 Pro at under 65 dB and the Lifepro PacerMini at less than 60 dB, neither with a stated distance, speed, load or test method. A desk microphone is closer to the machine than a phone is, and it runs for hours rather than minutes - so if an open mic is part of the setup, we would treat the two machines with a stated figure as the only candidates.

That is a width question and it has a published answer. The pads we track run from 20.4 inches wide (WalkingPad C2) to 25 inches (Sunny TreadPad and Lifepro PacerMini). A mid-tower case is commonly 8 to 10 inches wide, so on a 48 inch desk with the tower underneath you are choosing between the tower and the widest pads, not fitting both. Measure the clear floor width between your desk legs before anything else - and if the tower can move onto the desk or a stand, the whole problem goes away.

There is exactly one published figure in this category to answer that with, and it is a machine limit rather than advice about you: KingSmith's FAQ states one hour at a time for a walking machine, followed by about half an hour off, and says the automatic stop after long use is by design rather than a fault. Most gaming sessions outrun that, which means a long night is walking blocks with the machine resting between them, not four hours of continuous belt.

For a lot of gaming setups, yes, and we would rather say so than sell you a belt. If you play seated with a controller, an under-desk bike or elliptical keeps your hands completely still, puts no footfall into the floor, and does not care how fast the game gets. A pad is the better answer when the point is to accumulate walking during slower games or long queues. The ranking for the seated machines is a different page because the criteria are different.

A mat does two things worth having here and one thing it cannot do. It keeps the machine from creeping on a hard floor and it protects the floor itself. What it will not do is quieten the motor, because that noise is airborne rather than structural. We rank mats on published thickness and size, and the honest finding there is that none of the four we track publishes its own weight.