14 DAY TRIAL // Live mice may be scary to some people, cute to others and repulsive to yet more people, but the peripherals named after them are the most used parts of a PC, right there alongside keyboards. It's no wonder that there are entire design contests focused exclusively on them.
One design contest was sponsored by Gigabyte last year, for the creation of a new gaming mouse. They called it the 2013 Gigabyte Make it Real Mouse Design Competition.
The winner of the competition was a low profile, lightweight device called Raptor. Now, though, it's no longer a prototype.
Gigabyte has decided to run with it, targeting people who want smaller devices but don't want to sacrifice what makes a gaming mouse a “gaming” mouse.
The traits of the Raptor gaming mouse
Besides being smaller than usual (and thus, lighter as well at 85 grams / 3 ounces), the peripheral uses a 400 dpi pro-optical sensor.
It's not quite as ludicrously precise as some of the bigger names on the hardcore gaming market, but it's not like people use 8,200 DPI that often.
Sure, that much may seem cool on paper, but for the most part, you won't have a use for it unless you have a really large TV or multi-monitor setup over which the mouse has to travel huge distances. And in first-person shooters, that's kind of a moot point, though racing and real-time strategy games are a different matter.
Anyway, 4000 DPI should be fine for high-end laptops and single-monitor gaming desktops like, say, the new Alienware Area 51.
And the low weight means that your wrist won't be subjected to undue stress either. True, press releases blow this “problem” out of proportion, since even the heaviest mice don't actually put much strain on your wrist unless you spend a marathon playing games, but it's still good to know that the advantage in the lightweight design exists.
Other perks worth mentioning are the Omron switches which last for 10 million clicks, and the GHOST engine that lets you customize the buttons’ functions and macros, and the 4-stage, on-the-fly DPI switching support.
Availability and pricing
The Gigabyte Raptor gaming mouse, with a dark grey top, blue inner LED and red underside, should sell soon with a weight adjustment system (six little pill-sized tablets you can add or remove at your leisure). Unfortunately, the press release didn't include the product’s price or the exact shipping date.
