Home : Hardware : Reviews : Razer Diamondback Mouse
A smooth-moving gaming mouse with some nice features, yet it can't quite stack up to the Logitech line.
If you’re a first person shooter type of gamer, you know you need as many edges as you can get when it comes to hardware: faster processors, faster video cards, powerful RAM…and a higher DPI mouse. How else are you going to get precise enough movements to line up that long distance shot with your sniper rifle? Today we’re reviewing a mouse that claims to do just that: the Razer Diamondback.
Features
The Diamondback has a few things going for it over the standard optical mouse:
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A 1600 DPI sensor
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A frame rate of 6400 frames per second from that sensor, equaling out to 5.8 megapixels per second
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16 bit data path for processing all of that optical information
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Always-on sensor that doesn’t shut down when you’re not moving the mouse (good for when you need to make a quick getaway)
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7 programmable buttons
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Teflon feet for a smoother glide
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Internal red, green or blue LED
The Diamondback also comes with a CD that installs the Razer control panel, a funky-colored applet that allows you to adjust the sensor sensitivity, double-click speed, scroll wheel speed and program those seven buttons.
The applet is pretty useful, especially if you find yourself wanting to run a lot of different things from your mouse. The sensitivity settings are pretty in-depth; you can adjust the sensitivity, the speed of the Windows pointer and the acceleration control and change the resolution of the sensor from 1600 DPI to 400 DPI. You can also adjust the sensitivity of the mouse within a program by holding down the fourth mouse button and selecting the new sensitivity, good for when you find yourself over adjusting.
When it comes to the button programming, there are a good number of options. You can assign buttons 4 and 5 to “Windows Buttons” (which turns out to be the forward and back buttons you’d use in a web browser or Windows Explorer), along with things like double clicking, macros of your choosing, keyboard keys, multiple function assignment or the on-the-fly sensitivity option mentioned above. You can also change the orientation of the mouse to make it either left or right handed. There were three things that bothered me, however:
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The applet only lets you assign the Windows Buttons to buttons 4 and 5.
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Adding a few extra options, like the ability to launch a program, would have been a nice touch.
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The applet has this odd habit of launching a dead page on Razer’s website when you apply the settings.
