First Look

The mouse has a black and red motif. Black covers most of it, with red on the sides where the user's thumb and pinky finger rest. The cord is also red with a gold USB plug at the end for increased contact. On the top of the mouse, the scroll wheel changes color based on the DPI setting: off is the lowest, then red, green, and finally blue for the highest DPI setting. The mode button is there, too, to switch between programmable modes.

The Cyber Snipa logo is on the heel of the mouse, along with an illuminated crosshair for effect. There's nothing on the right side but a grip pad for the ring and/or pinky fingers. The left side is quite larger with two thumb buttons at the top of the mouse. It seems like these buttons are too high for most users, but I'll test them out in the Use sections.

The extra glide pads will certainly be handy for user who literally wear out the pads because they're fragging so often, or at least trying. The weights come in a little box which somewhat resembles a revolver chamber. Each weight is 20 g, and there are seven weights. My excellent mathematics skills tell me that this means that the user can add 140 g of weight to the heel of the mouse.

Windows Installation & Use

The mouse is was instantaneously recognized in Windows XP Professional 64-bit, my preferred version of Windows. Of course the left and right clicks work, and the wheel scrolls and clicks, and the thumb buttons moved forward and backward in Explorer and browser windows. The DPI button is software-independent, and simply changes a setting within the mouse. The Macro button was inoperable, and the horizonal axis of the scroll whell was, too—Windows doesn't support that kind of button out-of-the-box.

I installed Cyber Snipa's software to use the macro button and the horizontal scroll. It's pretty flashy, but I don't have much of a need for macros—I prefer to simply use those buttons for what they are: thumb buttons. All of the clicks are configurable using the macro software.

For some playtesting, I opted to try out Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2, and Crysis. During all of the games, I found the DPI switch button to be ridiculously awesome. I did fantastic while sniping in the first two games and tackled the alien baddies with the shotgun and MOAC in the latter. My accuracy was definitely better when the DPI was lower.

However, I did notice something: my thumb buttons didn't do anything! I always bind melee to the rear thumb button and grenade to the front. In TF2, the only the rear is set, and it's my push-to-talk button. I putzed around in the macro program trying to figure out how to workaround this deficiency, but to no avail. Because of this, I highly recommend that users who do use those thumb buttons skip installing the macro software. It might be to Cyber Snipa's advantage to configure those buttons to do the default actions by default rather than waiting for the user to assign them a functionality.

Linux Installation & Use

On Ubuntu Hardy 8.04, the horizontal scroll buttons and the mode button were the only non-working buttons out-of-the-box. They may be configurable, though, so certainly do some searching on Google if the mouse will be used on Linux. Other than that, the playtesting was the same as on Windows.