Subjective Impressions and Testing
General, Everyday Usage
Unless you are an extremely hardcore gamer, a paid professional or a WOW addict, the majority of any peripherals' daily usage rouine will consist of more mundane things than saving the world / yourself / princess from zombies/ aliens / armies etc. To this end mouse made for gaming also has to be comfortable for long-term “normal” uses like surfing the Internet, manipulating photos in Photoshop and even more general “boring” tasks like manipulating your on screen pointer. Over the course of two weeks, this mouse was used as the lone human interface device (i.e. mouse) and this is what we found.
In daily tasks, installing all three 6 gram weights to the base of the unit and using a setting of 1200-1500 dpi seemed to be darn near perfect. It was just as comfortable at the end of a marathon Photoshop and excel chart making session (3 different HWC reviews and about 45 charts) as it was at the beginning. While we would usually use more weight than this for Photoshop, the combination of CS3 and Excel 2007 required a compromise for increased speed. The three distinct profiles really made things a lot quicker as it was extremely easy to switch between a Photoshop macro laden profile and an Excel profile laden with the most used formulas keyed to the different buttons all the while leaving the third preset as a mundane mouse setup.
When it came to Internet usage it did become apparent that three profiles is really not enough as it setting up a fourth profile meant dropping one of the others. For long term surfing (for example while researching the latest technology to come down the pipe and has been vaguely mentioned to me by our editor) setting the mouse at a 45° left leaning angle and remapping the “left mouse button” to COPY and using the remapped right as the left button made research note taking easy. This setup may sound odd but when you have mild Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, changing the repetitive motions even slightly can have huge gains in pain levels at the end of the day. It also repositions a normal “palm grip” into a more relaxed hand position without resorting to lackluster oddities marketed as CTS-friendly mice. The rubber side grips with a nice mid hump make for a very comfortable and pain free hand position.
Gaming Impressions
General usage is all well and fine but for a product labeled, marked and designed as a “gaming mouse", it just doesn't cut the mustard. So, with unrestrained glee we let loose the hounds of war…so to speak and subjected the Ghost to everything from a 12 hours Crysis marathon (an oldie but a goodie when played with much of the eye candy turned on), to opening up the classic version of StarCraft and getting our Zerg killing on.
In the end, we walked away fairly impressed with this moderately priced mouse. The side rubber grips work well no matter how sticky, sweaty or slick our hands got…BUT the top two mice buttons' slick plastic did make us miss a few alien SOBs in later levels of Crysis. We would be almost inclined to purchase high friction tape, scuff the hell out of it so it doesn’t remove layers of skin and apply it to the bottom half of these crucial buttons.
On the positive side, on the fly DPI changes for quick transitions from (low DPI) long range head shots to (higher DPI) mêlée fast twitching was a breeze. Regardless of how fast you like your mouse….this can handle it and leave you wanting more.
Response Rate Testing
This mouse claims response times as low as 1ms, and while it does not come set to this out of the box we did want to investigate just how fast this wee beastie can be. To this end we used the extremely small and resource light program call DX_Mouse_Timer. With the Ghost engine set to it’s max of 1000 we actually were able to get BETTER than 1ms response times from the M8000. We got a peak response of 0.96ms or 1043Hz. Wow…simply wow. We have to admit that we had a sneaking suspicion that this was going to be a case of the
PR department writing cheques the hardware department could not cash. However, we are proud to admit that we were not only wrong but that Gigabyte may have been conservative in their numbers.
