I'm not sure niche brands would be able to change the industry like this.



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This week I've been: trying out the X3 Superstrike and Sensei Pro gaming mice, as well as a new Logitech Hall effect keyboard.

What comes to mind when I say 'big brand competitive gaming mouse'? If you're anything like me, that particular Rorschach test will make you spit out the word 'expensive.' That response isn't wrong, either: just look at the big releases we've had this year.

There was the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike: $180. The Razer Viper V4 Pro: $160. The SteelSeries Rival Pro and Sensei Pro: each $180. And there's an X3 Superstrike now, too, which is $200. These are some very expensive mice.

In previous years, I would have taken a dimmer view of this. Especially given the impressively competitive rodents you can pick up from niche Chinese brands these days. The $89 Mchose K7 V2 Ultra+, for example, is a Razer Viper V3/V4 Pro clone that performs very well and is plenty comfy.

And to be honest, even if fancy big brand mice are top-tier build quality, it's still a heck of a lot of money to ask for. The Rival Pro, Sensei Pro, and Viper V4 Pro specifically are truly fantastic on the build quality front, with the latter being practically flawless and cheaper than the rest, but they're all still very expensive.

So why isn't my view quite as dim as it could be? Because all of these releases have pushed the competitive gaming mouse scene forward in a way that probably only big brands can—both in terms of being able to absorb risk and also get new tech into as many hands as possible with big marketing campaigns.



In the case of Logitech, we have probably the most radical tech of all three: haptic-inductive (analogue) clicks. Then there's Razer, which has changed the way the sensor reports its data to save battery. And SteelSeries offers a few new things: primarily ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless connectivity and some changes to how it does polling (there are hot-swappable batteries, too, but those aren't completely new).

Analogue clicks let you adjust where the mouse button actuates, meaning you can have less time between deciding to click and actually clicking. It also lets you use rapid trigger, where you can re-click your mouse button as soon as you start to lift up on your previous click.

FrameSync is a technology that syncs up the mouse sensor's snapshots with when its microcontroller hands off that data to your PC. This means fewer sensor snapshots are required to maintain the same responsiveness, which ultimately saves battery.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) lets your mouse connect to its dongle wirelessly over different frequency bands to the usual ones, supposedly improving reliability. "True" 8K refers to how, at 8 kHz polling, the mouse doesn't batch together data but sends one packet for one receipt.

Logitech's Haptic Inductive Trigger System (HITS) combines, well, haptics and induction, of course. The result is the ability to change how much you need to press down your mouse button before it actuates and registers a click, with the haptics there to ensure you get the feeling of a click wherever you set it to.

Read more about the technology underneath the Superstrike

Logitech was the first to market with this tech. In fact, the company's head of engineering told me, "We knew we had a golden nugget in our hands... so we took all the shortcuts we could." Which probably goes some way towards explaining why an improved X3 Superstrike was released just seven months later—a fact that must surely sting some early X2 Superstrike buyers.



Since Logitech launched the X2 earlier in the year, we've seen that Keyhcron has been cooking up the "next gen mouse switch" which lets you choose between optical and magnetic within one switch, though its click feeling is static, meaning you won't be adjusting it to perfectly align with the actuation like with th...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

What do you think about this?