Cooler Master Storm Sentinel Advance Gaming Mouse Review

Subjective Impressions and Testing

General, Everyday Usage

Unless you are an extremely hardcore gamer, a paid professional or a World of Warcraft addict, the majority of any peripheral’s daily usage will consist of more mundane things than saving the world. To this end as good a 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 in your OS of choice. Over the course of two weeks where this mouse was used as the lone human interface device, this is what we found.


In daily tasks, two or three of the 4.5 gram weights added to the base of the unit and a reasonable 1250-1500DPI seemed to be near perfect for most situations. It was just as comfortable at the end of a marathon Photoshop and Excel chart making session as it was at the beginning. Only occasionally did I find it necessary to up the weights to the maximum for precision work in Photoshop. It was during this occasional blip that I wished for even more weight since I had to resort to lowering the DPI (in addition to all 22.5 grams installed) to get it “perfect”. Luckily, this was one of the few times I needed to do this and with all the distinct profiles customized for CS3 and Excel it was extremely easy to switch between a Photoshop macro laden profile and a Excel laden profile to get the job done. This is actually were the different colours of the OctoShade LEDs actually came in handy (especially the forward facing ones) as with just a quick glance I could instantly know what profile was being used.


When it came to Internet usage it did become apparent that 5 profiles really is enough as even with two profiles set for Photoshop and Excel it left one profile “free” for more mundane uses like surfing the web and creating/editing/sending emails. With many mice, for long term surfing I usually have to resort to setting the mouse at a 45° left leaning angle to keep it comfortable, yet surprisingly I didn’t have to do this with the Storm Sentinel Advance. Even after hours of research on the web (and remapping the right mouse button to COPY), I can say this mouse made research note taking down right easy. This may sound odd, as most people can use a mouse for hours without problems, but when you have bi-lateral Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, long-term comfort is hard to come by so this is high praise indeed.

Gaming Impressions

General usage is all well and fine but for a product labeled, marked and designed as a “gaming mouse”…using this product for purely mundane tests is like using a tank to crush a rat. Basically, it’s overkill. So, with unrestrained glee we let loose the hounds of war and subjected the Sentinel to everything from a Crysis gaming marathon to classic StarCraft. When the dust settled this is what was found out about this essential peripheral.


When all was said and done, I walked away with mixed yet mainly positive feelings when it comes to the tech-laden Sentinel. The wrap around rubber grips work well for most situations but with enough grease and sweat it can get slippery. The rubber Cooler Master has opted for reminds us a lot of the rubber used in Logitech gaming mice, so it could use a few dimples to help increase a sure grip. The same cannot be said about the top two mice buttons as they are not rubber coated and the slippery plastic caused a few key shots to miss in FPS games. This is a pet peeve of mine since many gaming mice on the market today pay attention to good palm grip surfaces but the input surfaces are sadly neglected. If you use a more palm grip approach we doubt this will be an issue as your whole finger will be depressing the button. However, if you use a grip approach the tip of your finger may slip and you too may suffer the indignity of being fragged without ever getting a shot off.


On the positive side, on the fly DPI and profile changes for quick transitions from (low DPI) long range head shots to (higher DPI) mêlée combat was down right easy. However, I did find it faster to set different profiles to different DPI levels than mess with the onboard DPI changing tool. This combined with a few short scripts on a couple of the profiles made the game almost too easy. I am sure that with enough practice this mouse could really be an essential tool in any gamer’s arsenal.

Response Rate Testing

As usual, we measured the response rate with the extremely small and resource light program called DX_Mouse_Timer. The Sentinel Advance advertises response times as low as 1ms and it seems to do this right out of the box. The above results were taken right after we plugged this mouse in for the first time and thus we did nor have to mess with any software to get this. As you can see it easily gets better than 1ms and we got a peak response of 0.97ms or 1028Hz. This may not be the highest we have ever seen….but it is still impressive and more importantly just proves that Cooler Master was being slightly conservative in any boasts their PR department may have made about the sensor’s power.