Coolermaster continues its assault on the gaming space.
Gaming cases, gaming mousemats, and now gaming mice: Coolermaster has set its sights on thoroughly dominating the gaming peripheral space, and so far we've liked the results. The Scout and Sniper cases are solid, its range of mousemats very competitive, and this new Sentinel mouse is a surprisingly good entry into the point-and-click market.
It's design is classic gaming ergonomics - asymmetrical, matte black rubber, and flashy lights. And it hangs together as a comfy choice, too. Unfortunately, it lacks support for your little finger, so you'll either have to uncomfortably cramp it out of the way, or suffer drag from it rubbing on your gaming surface. The physical design ends with an interchangeable weight system, but in practice this has zero impact on use.
And, no, it's useless for lefties - the best mouse for them is still any of the symmetrical Razer designs.
But if you're a real, right-handed person, the Sentinel delivers superior performance to the Razer rodents. Out of the box, the DPI settings lead to either lethargy or twitch overload, but after a little tweaking the Sentinel delivered a solid boost in both speed and accuracy on the Call of Duty 4 killhouse level. We expended less rounds, and were more able to navigate the course. Any mouse that makes Captain Price happy, we like.
At least as good as the performance, though, is the CM software that allows you to tweak the everloving hell out of the mouse's performance. You can adjust the four DPI settings from 800 all the way to 5600, and in both X and Y axes, tweak the colours of the LEDs, record macros and scripts, and set up multiple profiles. Probably the best feature overall is the fact that each profile has an associated colour, so if you play in the dark, you'll know what you're switching between. And all macros and settings are saved onto the mouse itself, so you can take it with you LANs with ease.
It's not perfect, though. Apart from the pinky issue, the mouse's feet seem poorly applied, and the foot material itself a touch buckled and prone to peeling. This wasn't an issue in our testing, but for long term, and possibly heavy-handed use, it's not going to end well.
All up, however, this is a solid mousing choice, and future iterations should see Coolermaster become a serious contender.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010