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Cooler Master is not in an enviable position, going up against some of gaming's biggest names. In professional gaming an excellent mouse can make all the difference. Luckily for Cooler Master they have created a great product in the CM Storm Havoc. However, there are areas where we feel it is imperative they need to improve on for future iterations of their line-up.
While some would argue that being able to switch between different DPI levels on the fly is a gimmick, it is an incredibly useful feature when handled properly. If you are playing the Recon class in Battlefield 3 on a map such as Wake Island the ability to switch from fast aiming to slow, determined aiming can mean the difference between a kill and giving away your position. We would have liked to see Cooler Master follow in Logitech's steps with their excellent placement of the PDI settings buttons on the G500.
The overall construction of the mouse is excellent. Cooler Master has obviously spent plenty of time designing the product, but we cannot escape the fact that a glossy finish on the right side is a poor choice for both ventilation and grip. Extending the pleasant rubber coating to the right side of the mouse would have resulted in a slightly higher score for the Havoc.
On the software side of things we feel that Cooler Master provides users with plenty of customization options, but it does feel a little cluttered. The configuration screen size cannot be adjusted which makes everything look cramped. We hope Cooler Master will space out the available options more in future releases to provide a cleaner look that matches the mouse.
We used the CM Storm Control-RX Gaming Mouse Pad for our tests and found it to be an excellent mouse pad. The Lycra cloth surface is soft and smooth and is near impossible to move without lifting up a corner. If you are in the market to replace a mouse pad that is sliding all over your desk we have no hesitations recommending the CM Storm Control-RX Gaming Mouse Pad. It is currently available in the US for $29.99, or roughly £20 inc vat when it hits the UK.
The CM Storm Havoc is set to be available in Europe from this month. At the time of writing it is available for $62.10 from Amazon in the US. Unless the price is converted 1:1, we can expect the CM Storm Havoc to retail around £45-£50 inc vat.
Pros:
- Excellent build quality.
- Customizable lighting.
- The rubber coating provides excellent grip.
- Excellent tracking capabilities.
- Does not break the bank for high-end features.
Cons:
- Placement of DPI settings buttons could have been better.
- DPI LEDs are difficult to see in bright conditions.
- Choice of glossy finish on the right-hand side does not benefit grip.
Kitguru says: a great mouse, but there is some room for improvement. Within the price range it is definitely worth consideration.
You should measure and write more technical information about the mice you review. Stuff like: acceleration, perfect control speed (at different dpi), angle snapping/prediction. You should check the esrelity and overclockers forums.
I really like your articles I just want to see this information included.
I think figures only tell a part of the story, its like these 8,200 dpi ratings, I can’t use anything over 5,000 dpi or its like a jerk fest. and not the nice kind.
Im still happy with my old logitech mouse.
I do like cooler master, but I think they suffer a little from the thermaltake syndrome. build quality issues. My last cooler master case fell apart slowly over a year. I tend to only get corsair/silverstone cases now. Not so sure on these mice either. I think they are made in a chinese factory for multiple companies with slightly different enclosure designs. id rather get a mouse from one of the compoanies like steelseries, razer etc, who dedicate a lot of R&D to the designs.
Hey,
While he has built himself an impressive setup, his benchmark seems to be based upon the assumption that the acceleration of a mouse remains constant (in his example a player with low sensitivity would accelerate at a constant 2m/s, resulting in a total of 900 meters travelled in a minute, or 54km/h). When measured over a period of 10 seconds that results in 20 meters travelled at speeds between 2m/s and 20m/s.
Note that the above is based on testing with a constant acceleration over a fixed period of time.
However, whilst gaming there is always a certain amount of momentum between swings where a mouse would either move at a far lower or higher speed. A mouse like the Havoc is rated up to 150 IPS, or 1371.6km/h (150 inches – 381 cm * 60 * 60 / 1000 according to my calculations).
A more accurate way of measuring the acceleration would be through a form of stop-start testing where the mouse is ‘catapulted’ and rapidly brought to a stop in multiple directions until it stops tracking. This would also be a good way to test for input delay and wake-up times. At this moment in time I don’t think it would be in anyone’s best interest to start flinging mice at the walls, so we’ll need to look into a safe and reliable mechanical method to make that work.
Perfect control speed, defining proportional movement in-game, is something that would also be tricky to do. Even with just raw input, games like Battlefield 3, CoD, CS, etc. all handle differently because the engines partially determine the maximum turn speed. As an example, I noticed that I could crank up the sensitivity higher in Battlefield 3 than I could in CS. Rather than test it for every individual game, we would like to find a way to test this across the board.
We will also need to find a way to eliminate the problem of compensation by the user. If a mouse performs poorly a user will be automatically inclined to ‘correct’ the mouse.
Angle snapping and correction I can test by drawing in Photoshop so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Stay tuned while we work on getting this worked into our reviews!