You may be a bit sceptical of just how valid my opinion is on Saitek products after reading my unending praise of their past products. However, as the Notebook Subwoofer review demonstrates, I know a poor Saitek product when I see one.Fortunately the shiny new Gaming Mouse could not be further from the realm of poor PC hardware – had you thinking for a moment there, eh?
Like the great products that came before it the Saitek PC Gaming Mouse has a beautiful sculpted design and is back on the beaten path sporting a couple the Saitek trademark blue LEDs that any PC case modder will appreciate as a great touch. One of the LEDs flashes when the mouse is moved and the other acts as an indicator for 1600dpi mode. The PC Gaming Mouse comes in a typical black and silver colour scheme to match pretty much all other Saitek gaming peripherals for a co-ordinated desk. It looks great alongside the Gamers' Keyboard and, I imagine, even better alongside the upcoming Eclipse Keyboard which has enough blue light emitting from it to double as a landing beacon.
The usual compliment of Saitek design considerations come into play. For a start all of the black parts of the mouse are thoroughly rubberized, making them extremely comfortable to the touch. The whole design screams quality which is typical for a Saitek product of course. Two buttons are available on the left hand side, plus another one on the right, with the standard 3 buttons and scroll wheel as well. The additional buttons can be customised with the included software which is surprisingly not the polished Saitek programming software we have all come to know and love, but plugs-in to the Windows mouse control panel offering extra tabs for Macro menus, Application shortcut menus and extra button configuration. The top part of the mouse is a smooth solid piece of silver plastic with completely integrated buttons, this makes for a much more solid design with a larger area to press and one less place to get "gunged up". For the lefties out there (I'm one of them) the mouse is near symmetrical so it fits comfortably in either hand.
As mentioned above, the software isn't the best in the world- but it does offer a high degree of programability and an interface that anyone unfamiliar with the Saitek programming software would be able to use immediately. It is possible to bind a button of your choice to a Macro wheel, which allows you to create and run key-press macros, and an Application wheel which allows you to assign 8 applications. These wheels pop-up on the button press and can be navigated with the cursor or mouse wheel. My only real complaint with them is that they are ugly, very ugly, and are precisely not the kind of thing the discerning gamer wants popping up on their desktop.
Set almost precisely in the middle of the top of the mouse is a button marked 1600 dpi, it doesn't take a genius to figure out exactly what it does and it doesn't take a hardcore gamer to see the benefit. In Windows, precision isn't terribly important. But when trying to hit the 1 pixel wide head of a Counter Terrorist the other side of a CS:S map a quick switch to 1600 dpi can make or break the shot. Outside of FPS games the benefit of 1600 dpi is not great, but switching it on rewards you with another ultra bright blue LED to light up your life! If only the tracking light was blue!
The tiny Teflon feet on the bottom of the mouse demonstrate a small but very effective design consideration – the mouse glides over my desk like nothing I have used before. Compared to my Apple Wireless Mouse's "big rubber ring" answer to a foot the PC Gaming Mouse is leagues ahead- and, to think, Apple are the ones world renowned for their design! To demonstrate just how smoothly the PC Gaming Mouse glides I invite you to place it on your desk and blow. (Of course, you are going to have to buy one first!)
The mouse, like all good gaming mice, is wired meaning no waste of batteries or mythical slow response times that avid games will endlessly complain about in any wireless device. Saitek have shown with the Cyborg Evo Wireless and P3000 Gamepad that they are capable of producing solid, long lasting, and responsive wireless devices so I would not be surprised if we did see a wireless gaming mouse, perhaps at the sacrifice of the LEDs like the P3000. Bear in mind however that the lack of wires does not really add anything to a Gamers experience – bar the opportunity to throw the mouse violently out of the window when they are killed 15 times straight in Counter Strike of course. Saitek are walking before they start to run with this one but suffice to say any wireless gaming mouse they churn out is going to cut the mustard into small portions and serve it up on hot-dogs.
Overall the PC Gaming Mouse is another solid, well-designed, attractive and well lit peripheral from Saitek lined up to go perfectly with the new Eclipse Keyboard and be at home alongside the x52 that should already decorate your desk and act as a conversation piece. It is smooth, responsive and clever- giving gamers the on-the-fly resolution option and enough highly customisable buttons to push their "awesome" meter into the red. The slightly below-par software is forgivable and can easily be changed in the future. If you already sit in the dark, the PC Gaming Mouse will add dramatic low lighting to your desk – if you play games with the lights on then you will soon be turning them off to witness the glow!
Philip Howard
Photography coming soon
