An anti-static/antistatic floor or ground mat—also known as an electrostatic discharge (ESD) mat—is a device that protects a piece of equipment or individual electronics like your personal computer, external HDD, smartphone, or printer from ESD. It’s particularly popular among cellphone repairmen and custom PC builders. The components of your computer that’s sensitive to ESD or static electricity include memory devices, expansion cards, CPUs, and motherboards.
Here are our reviews of the 5 best anti-static mats on the market.
Velleman AS9 Anti-Static Field Service Kit
The thing that separates this highly rated antistatic mat kit from the rest is its portability. Even its most critical of detractors admit that it’s a platinum product with few flaws. You get your money’s worth for what it’s made of and gets high ratings all around.
However, pro custom PC builders and cellphone repairmen might wish for a more expensive ESD mat for their workbench to err on the side of caution. You get what you pay for with Velleman because it can get quite fragile. Some critics call it’s material cheap and could get torn with a graze of sharp sheet metal from the desktop frame.
Rosewill Anti-Static Mat with Grounding Wire
As far as costs are concerned, Rosewill is cheaper than Velleman. However, this anti-static mat is also lower-rated than Velleman by double the customers. So it’s more cost-effective than Velleman but is it necessarily better? There are some reviews that allege how the mat was hard to lay flat, which explains the score discrepancy.
However, the majority of customers who used this and rated it high that disagree or took matters in their own hands by placing it face down with encyclopedias pressing upon it. It works fine as a mat in all other avenues, but a handful of users had mats that failed ESD testing nonetheless (which might be a quality control issue).
StarTech.com Desktop Anti-Static Mat
As for the StarTech.com 24×27.5in Beige Desktop Anti-Static Mat (M3013), it’s rated worse than Rosewill and Velleman by even more customers but you can get it at a good discount. In terms of whether it’s more cost-effective or simply lower quality than the other two, you need to take a look at what it offers.
It works decently on the basics of an ESD mat and it’s certainly better than clipping yourself to the power supply to prevent static shock. However, its critics claim it’s a mat that fails the ESD test with infinite ohms per square, stating it’s junk and it offers false advertising. Regardless, it lands on this list of top antistatic mats because the vast majority got something out of it.
Magnify Labs ESD High-Temperature Mat Kit
This 16″ by 24″ emerald green mat is practically an unknown in the field yet even when you take away the discounts of other mats, it’s by an large more expensive than a StarTech.com, Rosewill, and Velleman mat by a country mile.
However, despite all that, it’s also lower rated than nearly all of the mats reviewed so far except StarTech, which is at least cheaper and more popular by virtue of customer reviews. It still ends up on this list of top mats because of its bottle of mat cleaner, ESD grounding cord, ESD wrist strap, and alligator clip (although some disliked this clip for use with a laptop, preferring a grounding to the outlet instead).
Bertech ESD High-Temperature Rubber Mat Kit
As for the Bertech ESD mat, it is a kit with a thick and gray mat, a wrist strap, and a grounding cord. Pretty standard stuff, so it’s curious how it somehow ended up being the most expensive mat of the list. Does it offer something extra? Is it made of better materials than a Rosewill or Velleman to justify its worth?
In terms of quality ratings, it’s about equal to a Rosewill even though fewer customers have tried it out. About a few dozen people find that it works great and it’s worth the expense since there wasn’t anyone complaining about the cheapness of the materials and it has a high resistance with absolute conductivity to boot. The strap attachment buttons and the grounding need work though.
What Are The Hallmarks of the Best Anti-Static or ESD Mats?
Anti-static mats are usually placed under the mouse or keyboard as well as other pieces of equipment to safeguard against static. They showcase their use the most when they’re around computer components that use up a lot of electricity.
- Protects Static-Sensitive Components: The antistatic mat should also make sure that the ESD is reduced to zero in order to safeguard the most static-sensitive components that can give you all sorts of hardware problems that are harder to fix than an OS error. It can even wipe your files faster than a magnet on an HDD.
- Fire Prevention and Explosion Defense: A good ESD mat should assist in fire prevention and outright explosions as you work with flammable material found in certain liquids and gases that might typically surround your PC or PC components. Static shocks plus flammable material equals fire hazards usually.
- Uses Conductive Material That Accumulates Static: The mat should also use conductive material such as PVC foam or rubber that accumulates static while it’s earthed or grounded. This mat is also different from a regular rubber or foam mat because it requires plugging into a grounded electrical outlet.
Conclusion
The cheapest one of the bunch is Velleman, followed by Rosewill, StarTech, Magnify Labs, and BerTech. It gets trickier when gauging which of the mats are the most cost-effective. The less popular mats are the more expensive ones, which makes sense since people buy online ESD mats for the sake of the discounts. However, the cheapest ones, like Velleman, get complaints about the cheapness of its materials and low ESD test ratings.
However, Vellerman and Rosewill remain highly rated for their cost-effective quality (it’s good enough). You get what you pay for, although some might not want to buy a BerTech since it costs roughly 3 Vellermans. Personally, I’d go with the cheaper ones for hobbyist use of mats and the more expensive ones to err on the side of caution and have a longer lasting mat that actually gets better scores on the ESD test.