The CM Strom Sirus 5.1 is first and foremost a headset built from the ground up for gamers. Therefore the bulk of the testing will be from a gaming perspective. For this testing we will play a variety of games including Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

As most users will not be changing this headset for another to listen to music we will also play a variety of tracks from Dance (2Bad Mice), rock (Nickleback), rap (Wu-Tang Clan) and Classical (Vivaldi). We will also put the 5.1 setup to the test by listening through the landings at Omaha Beach (Saving Private Ryan).

Before thoroughly testing the headphones they were used for a variety of purposes for a month before reviewing to sufficiently allow the headset to bed in as testing a brand new headset can sound very different a month down the line, after a period of heavy use.

We will be using our X79 test bench which includes the following components:

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD5 - Realtek ALC 898 Codec
CPU: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GTX560Ti
RAM - 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 1866MHz 9-10-9-27
Power Supply – Corsair TX750M 750W
Hard Drive – Hitachi SATA II 250GB
Samsung F3 1TB
Cooler – Corsair H100
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (sp1)