There is an interesting parallelism between the common mouse and memory, in that once upon-a-time memory was not very cool, it was dressed naked on a green PCB at best, came with no funky heat spreaders, and it certainly wasn't marketed to the same overclocking mad crowd it is today. It's a similar story with our beloved rodents. It's only a recent trend that the mouse has become a cool and important peripheral to a same gaming orientated crowd as high performance memory. The popularity of super-high performance mice aimed at gamers and hardware connoisseurs has grown exponentially, and it's Razer who are most notably responsible for much of this. So perhaps it's interesting to see one of the leaders responsible for the birth of overclockable memory, OCZ, have a stab at the buzz peripheral of the moment- the revered 'gaming' mouse.

The Technology

Pretty much all high performance mice have now moved to laser sensors, with a few exceptions - the Deathadder for example, uses infra-red. Performance-wise, most mice are offering anywhere between 800 dpi to 3500 dpi, but this isn't the only parameter that determines the performance of a mouse, for example, the polling rate is just as important.

The DPI speed of a mouse determines the precision of the movements you make. The higher the DPI the better it should be at accurately tracking your movements. The obvious reason for why this is important is that a quick movement to the top left of a mousepad on a high DPI mouse is much more likely to render its final position more 'on mark' than a low DPI mouse. In general, DPI speed is a good way of determining the pin-point accuracy of a mouse.

The polling rate, also known as the sampling rate, determines how many times per second a sample of movement is taken and registered to the screen. An example - If your polling rate is 10 hz and within a second you had to make a sudden movement to the top left of the screen, the mouse will only be able to register 10 sampling points for that entire movement.

10 sampling points for a polling rate of 10hz

As you can imagine, this amount of sampling points is going to be extremely choppy and under certain circumstancesnot not dissimilar to playing at 10 fps.

The default USB polling rate in Windows XP is 125hz (8ms) so it will sample 125 times per second, but even this is still noticeable to experienced gamers under high fps conditions. Most high-end mice allow for higher polling rates over the default usbport.sys provided in XP, such as 250 hz (4ms), 500 hz (2ms) or 1000 hz (1ms). The polling rate is just as important as DPI, a low polling rate can have the affect of making mouse movements appear choppy in-game. I shall be testing and showing examples of this later in the review.