Razer Mamba Gaming Mouse

Test Setup

Here’s a short list of hardware that will be used when putting the mouse through its paces:

To give the mouse a thorough testing the following programs will be used:

 

Results

 

Adobe Photoshop

Many users complain about poor tracking making it difficult to carry out the necessary tasks during photo editing. Cutting out a rendered image is one such task, therefore it had to be undertaken. To my surprise the Mamba performed well, far above my expectations. The MX Revolution used to do this well, but the Mamba walked all over it and then some.

Simple tasks like selecting items in the toolbar, creating brush strokes and cloning all became effortless thanks to the superior tracking of the 3.5G laser sensor.

 

Mozilla Firefox

Browsing the web was a pleasurable experience at 5600DPI. Generally when a laser mouse exceeds 3000DPI you find yourself moving past the area you intended to stop at, or clicking only to find that the mouse cursor has moved and your click hasn’t registered. This is not the case with the Mamba. Every target was hit and every link was successfully registered as if the Mamba’s life depended on it.

Opening tabs can be a burden on some mice, requiring a hard press down on the scroll wheel to initiate a new tab. The Mamba did this with ease. It was almost like it could predict your next move, and execute it perfectly below your fingertips.

Moving forward and backward between pages was much like any other mouse, but the clever positioning of the side buttons meant that switching from one button to the other was very efficient. The thumb rests on both buttons and can be moved with ease to the desired button as and when necessary.

 

Wordpad

The mouse doesn’t play as large a role as the keyboard in this application, but fiddling around with the font, text size and colour were all simple tasks that the Razer Mamba chewed up and spat out.

 

Team Fortress 2

The game that makes grown men boil with rage and little boys cry. A fast paced first person shooter that requires great skill and tactics. Playing as one class wouldn’t provide and accurate view of how the mouse performed so a few popular classes were used to determine the overall performance of the mouse.

Scout – The speedy gonzales of the game. Wielding a baseball bat and armed with a scattergun the scout uses his speed and agility to bombard the enemy with shotgun pellets in quick succession, however he cannot sustain a lot of damage. During the game as scout it was apparent the Mambas sensor was doing its work. Keeping the crosshair on the opposing player posed a challenge at first, but after a few minutes the sheer speed of the mouse swiftly changed from a nuisance to a powerful weapon that could be used to outplay the opponent.

Soldier – The spammer. If you want a good spamfest this is the class to use. Armed with a Rocket launcher you can propel up to four rockets simultaneously at the enemy. A durable but slow character. Using the Soldier is great when you aren’t in a competitive mood. Jump on and shoot a few rockets about here and there. One noticeable area in which the Soldier excelled using the Mamba was taking out Scouts. They like to use their speed to get behind you, but the Mamba allowed me to follow the enemy like a hawk ready to strike on it’s prey.

Spy – The master of disguise. Armed with a knife, the ability to disguise as the opposing team and an invisibility cloak the spy uses these traits to outwit and backstab his opponent. Getting close enough to the opponent to stab him in the back is half the battle. Once a desirable position has been reached uncloaking and stabbing your opponent can be difficult, especially if you don’t judge the angle quite right. Quickly readjusting to get a backstab, disguising and cloaking were synchronised together with the agile response of the Mamba.