Date: September 4, 2007 - Author: Nate Marion
Saitek might not be the first name to come to mind when contemplating a gaming mouse purchase, but after taking a look at their 1600DPI and 3200DPI offerings, the message is clear: Saitek has the capability to be a real threat to the better known competition. These mice are not perfect, but we are on the right track.
Saitek is currently one of the biggest names in PC peripherals world-wide. Everything from joysticks, steering wheels, game pads, mice, web-cams and more. If you can plug it into your PC, there's a good chance Saitek has been making it since 1993.
Most of you probably know Saitek from the Eclipse and Eclipse II keyboards that have been extremely popular amongst gamers and PC enthusiasts, or from their extensive line of game pads and joysticks.
Today we're going to test drive two of Saitek's gaming mice, the low end 1600DPI and high end 3200DPI models, which together cover a lot of ground in terms of features and prices. Those of you not eager to pay the price of the new Logitech G9 may appreciate some of the features you get with the 3200DPI laser mouse, and the 1600DPI mouse has some impressive driver functionality that anyone can appreciate.
We'll start off with the lower end model, the Saitek 1600DPI Gaming Mouse.
Don't let the packaging fool you – the box might seem tame, but there is more here than you might guess at first glance.
The box explains that we've got a 1600DPI LED optical mouse with 6 buttons, adjustable DPI, advanced drivers, ergonomic design and flashy LED backlights.
The package contains the mouse, driver CD and a list of Saitek's support centers across the world.
The mouse is comfortable to hold, light and easy to slide around. There are two LEDs inside the mouse, one at the base under your palm which is always on, and one underneath the center button in the top that lights up when the 1600DPI setting is enabled.
Another LED located up near your fingers might've given the light the better wrap-around effect, but the 1600DPI light does the job and there's not much reason to have the mouse set to 800DPI instead of 1600DPI.
The shape of the mouse certainly isn't breaking any new ground, but it is light and comfortable to use for both right and left-handed people. It was never uncomfortable to hold or maneuver during gaming, browsing, reviewing, etc. The finish is plain, un-cushioned plastic, but it gets the job done and doesn't make my hand sweat.
The mouse wheel is pretty basic, but is easy to rotate and offers a comfortable amount of resistance.
The lights look pretty spiff, but one thing that might annoy some users is that the always-on LED in the base flashes whenever the mouse is moving.
There are two thumb buttons on the left side, and I would like to point out that for my large hands, these thumb buttons are placed very well – I am able to press both of them easily from my natural position. This will of course vary from user to user.
There is also a side button on the right side, which I find very hard to use unless holding the mouse left-handed. For lefties, this button is very well placed.
The four feet may be small, but they get the job done admirably. This mouse was extremely easy to slide around on both an Icemat and a Ratpadz GS.
To install the mouse, I simply plugged it into my already running system. It was immediately detected and began functioning as any mouse should. Things got a lot more interesting when I installed the SST software on the driver CD, though. It turns out that you can assign macros and combination key-presses to some of the buttons, and create/save any number of profiles.
The macros can be of any length, as well. I just typed this entire sentence, including punctuation and some back-spaces, with one press of the scroll button. Seriously. These mouse drivers offer more programming flexibility than some of the gaming keyboards out there – you can even assign different macros or key presses to the release of a button.
Here I have shown the three main menus that allow you to assign functions to button presses. The Keypress editor allows you to select a key combination to be used when the button is pressed. The Macro recorder allows you to program several different key presses with adjustable time delays between them.
The advanced editor allows you to program macros and key presses to be activated on both the press and release of a key. In the main window you can see an example of a long macro, two key combinations, and a press/release function. Saving and loading profiles is very straight forward.
The main limitation with these drivers is that only the two left thumb buttons, the scroll button, and the right side button can be programmed, and as far as I know, there is no way to change profiles other than using the Windows taskbar icon to load the profile you want – i.e. you can't change profiles while in a game, and you can't assign profiles to automatically load when a given program is run.
After reading through the SST manual, I noted that there are also certain software features that the mouse does not use (at the time of writing) such as shift-states, which would allow each programmable button to hold multiple different commands, effectively allowing a user to change between two or three profiles during a game.
Although the implementation of the SST driver software is somewhat limited with respect to this mouse, it still provides a huge number of options for the user, and I think that drivers like these are a big step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed when I started using this mouse was that the left-click button is very stiff. Contrarily, the right-click button feels great, so I'm wondering if I received a slightly defective mouse.
Aside from this glaring annoyance, the Saitek 1600DPI gaming mouse was a pleasure to use. I played several games including Supreme Commander, FEAR, STALKER, Counter-Strike: Source and Dawn of War, and also spent plenty of time surfing and performing general office tasks.
While gaming the mouse displayed smooth, accurate tracking on both the glass surface of the IceMat and the rough textured Ratpadz GS. The mouse is very light and easy to move, and aside from the stiff trigger button, it never felt clumsy.
The buttons were responsive when pressed and I never had a problem with too much acceleration or lifting/lowering the mouse. The advanced driver functions were very useful – for example, I specifically appreciated the ability to crouch and lean with one button while playing STALKER.
Surfing the web and other general PC use is no problem for this mouse either. The scroll wheel feels natural and the tracking was great.
The Saitek 1600DPI gaming mouse, despite it's no-nonsense design is surprisingly feature-packed, thanks to it's drivers. It also has tracking performance on par with every other 1600DPI optical mouse I've used. If you're looking for an inexpensive mouse with great performance and good drivers, this mouse is worthy of consideration.
Now, we're also going to take a look at Saitek's high end laser mouse, marketed to gaming enthusiasts and sporting some additional hardware features.
The packaging is pretty exciting and does a nice job of highlighting the features. You can see that this mouse has quite a few tricks in it's bag, including a 3200DPI laser sensor with adjustable DPI, adjustable weight and friction plates, and several programmable buttons. Some technical specifications are also noted, particularly 20G maximum acceleration, 40in per second maximum speed, and a USB refresh rate of 300 refreshes per second.
Inside the box we have the mouse and driver CD.
The first thing that should be apparent is that this mouse is much wider than then most other mice. If you have small hands, you may not appreciate this, but I have pretty large hands and think that it's pretty comfortable and easy to hold.
This mouse has a lot more bling than it's 1600DPI brother. On the top of the mouse you can see that there are the usual right-click and left-click buttons and well as a standard scroll wheel, a DPI rocker switch that can be used to adjust the DPI both up and down from 800DPI to 3200DPI, and also a mode button. This button is used to toggle between two modes, which are essentially two different button maps and sensitivity settings for the mouse which you can program using the driver software. The current DPI is indicated by a series of blue LEDs, and the current mode is indicated by red LEDs.
On the left side we have the standard two thumb buttons, which are located fairly well but are a little too difficult to press in my opinion. There is no thumb-rest to speak of, but the grip material here is nice and didn't cause my thumb to sweat.
There isn't anything of interest on the right side of the mouse.
The Saitek logo on the rear has some multicolored LEDs behind it and will light up in several different alternating colors. As you may be able to see, the palm rest appears slightly textured but is actually quite flat. The mouse is comfortable to hold in your palm, although the clear-coated plastic does tend to cause my skin to sweat.
On the underside we can see that Saitek have taken a page out of Logitech's book and included quite a few adjustable weights. Despite the mouse's fat bodied design, it doesn't weigh much at all, so the adjustable weights are very useful.
There are also reversible base plates with differently proportioned sliding surfaces meant to be able to vary the amount of frictional resistance by changing the contact surface area. In practice the base plates made no discernible difference on either an IceMat or the Ratpadz GS, as the mouse was very easy to slide regardless of which sliding surface was used.
After seeing the drivers that were included with the 1600DPI gaming mouse, I have to say that I was disappointed with the drivers included with the 3200DPI laser mouse. The interface is extremely dumbed down, and although you can still enter macros, keystrokes and key combinations, you can no longer save and load profiles, nor program what happens when a button is released.
One new driver feature appears to be some variant of the shift state, in the form of two modes which you can toggle between by using the mode button. This gives you the ability to program up to two different actions for each button, and switch between them on the fly. While this feature is definitely useful, some will prefer the ability to assign functions to a button release, and the inability to save and load profiles is a huge oversight – I have no idea why Saitek didn't simply use it's existing SST driver software for this mouse instead of reducing it's features to such a degree.
In this main window you can assign key presses including combinations, and you can also assign macros. Another piece of functionality mysteriously stripped out of these drivers is the ability to adjust the time delay between keystrokes in a macro – with these drivers, the macro is executed with the exact timing that was used to program the macro, which you can't see.
The top program, for example, is used to kill myself in CS: S, but I had to type it out very fast in order to get it to work well. Even so, the execution of the macro often seems slow. One other thing I want to note is that I was not able to program a button such that holding it would act as holding down a key – for instance, setting one of the buttons to talk over CS: S did not work properly because holding the mouse button did not function like holding the talk key.
Here you can set the sensitivity for both mode 1 and mode 2. It looks like Saitek forgot to label mode 1.
The shape of this mouse took some serious getting used to, but after a few days I was pretty comfortable with it and able to hold my own in a death match. I played several games including FEAR, STALKER, Counter-Strike: Source and Dawn of War, and also spent time doing general office tasks and web surfing.
While gaming the mouse was very easy to move regardless of the friction plates being used. I removed most of the weights and found the mouse very comfortable to work with. Most of the buttons were easy to press and were responsive, however as I mentioned before the two thumb buttons were the exception – I had trouble consistently pressing the correct thumb button. The tracking was very good from 800DPI to 3200DPI and I never had a problem with acceleration or lifting/lowering the mouse.
I will say that I didn't have much use for 3200DPI – with standard sensitivity 3200DPI sent my cursor clear across a 1920x1200 screen in ~0.75" worth of movement. Even with a 30" LCD panel I think 3200DPI is overkill. Sure, it can be used if you turn down the sensitivity, but I honestly can't tell the difference between 3200DPI on low sensitivity vs. 1600DPI on high sensitivity.
Needless to say that with so many DPI and sensitivity options this mouse performed very well for general computing and web browsing. The thumb buttons can be set to forward/back in your browser, which could be nice.
After using the 1600DPI gaming mouse, I can't help but think that while the 3200DPI laser mouse might offer some useful additional features like adjustable weights and more DPI options, it falls short in terms of driver functionality, and it's strange shape will probably be unattractive to many people. The mouse itself works well, but at it's higher price point I would hesitate to recommend it because the drivers lack simple functions like saving/loading profiles and keeping a key pressed down.
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