Gigabyte Ghost GM-M8000 Gaming Mouse Review

Mouse Software Overview

Installing the software is simplicity itself, as all you need to do is load the included CD and follow the onscreen instructions. When this painless operation is completed, you will notice a new icon on your desktop, and the fact you didn’t have to reboot. This software is simply a way of interfacing with the hardware on the mouse and a way of telling it what you want and how you want it to react to the various mouse commands. More importantly it is not a program which has to be running for you to have access to the advanced features of the mouse. This is unlike most manufacturer's mice as usually the mouse is a "dumb" which means that it needs a running program to interpret the various mouse actions and relay that information unto the Operating System.


You really only need the software to reprogram the 3 mouse profiles and various settings and then you can uninstall it, or even use the mouse on a different system without the need of any more messing around. The onboard memory really is that powerful and the onboard hardware and software really is that good at its job.


Easy installation or no, the interface and ease of use of said software is what makes or breaks a mouse. In the case of the M8000, the software is not only extremely lightweight on system resources but also quite user friendly while at the same time not being limited in its abilities. To get the ease of use part of the equation, many manufacturers release their software with such a limited interface that it looks like it was designed for OS X. This certainly is not the case with this little guy as it may be simple and lightweight but the customization offered in the macro editing is extremely flexible AND robust.

Each button is given its own list of options which cover most normal day to day tasks; however when one of them does not fit your needs, simply selecting edit macro causes a window to pop up where you can quickly and easily make an extremely complex (or simple) macro.


While the macro editor allows for up to 254 actions, it is limited to 127 keystroke/ mouse click commands as each click is registered as a depression and then as a separate release (to allow for multiple keystroke commands like Cntrl+Alt+Delete for example), this should be good enough for darn near anyone. Even better is the fact it appears you are not limited in the number of these macros you can create.

You are of course limited to using a max of 15 macros at a time as the GM-M8000 only has 5 buttons and “only” enough onboard storage for 3 profiles. To our way of thinking, this is definitely not a hardship and if you need more than that we recommend combining this mouse with a keyboard which also has macros. For everyone else, the Ghost should cover all the bases.


Moving onto the second of the four tab options, we come to the sensitivity settings. As with any good mouse you can not only set the X and Y axis independently but you can also increase the polling speed / report rate above the standard rate. In this instance, you can go all the way to 1000Hz or 1ms. We will be checking this claim latter in the review with a simple handy dandy program which reports the polling speed in real time of a mouse (Aptly named DX_Mouse_Timer).


The third tab consists of tweaking the wheel scroll speeds. You can set the vertical and horizontal speeds in precise fashion. It would have been nice if Gigabyte had gone above and beyond this typical setup and had included a drop down box or some other means of selecting how many lines, paragraphs, pages, etc one wheel click would equal. Also on the disappointing side is that to get horizontal scrolling you have to install (on ALL systems this mouse will be used on) a separate small piece of software. In many ways this does take away from the freedom the mouse affords; however as this limitation is only for horizontal scrolling it is a minor annoyance and not one which hamstrings the whole philosophy of zero installation freedom.


The last tab is not really a tab per say as it opens the default Windows mouse properties pop up. This was not unexpected as it is labeled “Windows” and so at least Gigabyte is being honest about it. However, what this tab really does is allow you to set the Ghost to MS Inteli-Mouse compatibility mode. It also allows for more precise scroll adjustment. All in all this last tab does add an extra layer of polish to this setup as some systems, no matter how powerful, do not play nice with all new products. For Gigabyte to not only recognize this sad fact but to take steps to ensure that THIS mouse WILL work says a lot about their underlying commitment to service and customer satisfaction.

Overall the tweakability we saw with the layout and design of this mouse has certainly carried over to the software end of things. While there are a few minor areas for improvement, the fact all this power is wrapped up in such a light weight (resource wise) package which doesn’t even need to be resident to work is impressive to say the least. Over the years we have used many a mouse which while good was quickly discarded due to bad, buggy or bloated software which had to be running at all times. This seems to be the Achilles heel of many companies’ products, and has caused many of these self same products to fall short of our (admittedly high) levels of expectation. Bravo Gigabyte for getting the hardware AND the software right. We are impressed.