Last year when I bought the iMac, I made the decision that it wasn’t a gaming platform, and I would use the consoles for my gaming needs. Since then Steam has come to the Mac, and with the Mac App Store providing the likes of COD4, Bioshock and Borderlands, it looks like I may have to rethink.
Although I am a major Apple fan boy, the Apple Magic Mouse is good, but no good for gaming. Don’t get me wrong the precision is good, but the touch sensitive top…not so good. I recently started playing Minecraft, and found it extremely annoying that every time I rested my middle finger on the right side of the mouse (as we all do) it would randomly scroll through my inventory. I found this to be the same with any game that uses the scroll wheel, and to be honest became a pain in the butt.
So, I needed a reasonably cheap, but mac compatible gaming mouse. Now I know that you can just plug in any mouse and it will work, however I’ve used the Razer mice in the past and I’ve really liked them. The DeathAdder comes with compatible Mac drivers allowing you to configure every last feature to get the perfect setup.
The full spec is below
3500DPI Razer Precision™ 3.5G infrared sensor
Five independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
Ultra-large non-slip buttons
Ergonomic right-handed design
PC/Mac compatible
I have to say, it feels good to have a decent mouse in my hand again, and looks like I’m back to “PC” gaming.
Screenshots below, as well of a video of the cool light on the back.
I’ve decided to give Windows 7 another go, as there have been a few driver updates. This time in changed my SATA2 drive to Native mode instead of AHCI, and the install went flawless.
Once up, Windows downloaded 5 updates, and had 4 additional drivers for my Bluetooth dongle, Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN, ATI 2900 Graphics card, Razer Copperhead gaming mouse.
The spec of my machine is as follows
ASUS M2R32-MVP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4Gb OCZ 6400 Memory
ATI 1Gb HD2900 XT PCI-e
1 x 500Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drive
2 x 250Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drives
1 x Pioneer 112 DVD-RW (Again wiped out the Pioneer 212 SATA drive as this again caused issues)
Onboard ADI 1988A Soundcard (Wiped out the SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer sound card, don’t ask !)
Acer AL2216 Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard
Creative 5.1 Surround speakers.
Windows 7 now works fine, with the new driver updates, and the download of the Logitech G15 driver and utility, everything seems smooth. I did however have a problem where every 5 minutes or so, Windows would give me a BSOD with a tdx.sys error message, however after a little bit of googling, it seems Windows 7 has a problem with AVG Free anti-virus.
Granted I was only up and running for a few hours last night, but I did a little bit of testing.
Steam, worked fine, all games apart from World of Goo seemed to work ok, apart from all games being at a status of “Download Started…”
Warcraft worked fine, infact better than fine, I saw an increase of over 20 frames per second.
Itunes, worked flawlessly
Left 4 Dead work, and worked very well, without a glitch
Gadgets I’ve tried, and worked.
WhetherBug
Multi Meter (D)
Network Meter v2.1
GMail Checker
Utorrent Gadget
Now this is running fine on my main machine, I will create further blogs as I decide if I love/hate Microsoft’s latest operating system. So far I think it’s quicker, uses resources better, is stable, however it’s still early days.
I would like to point out that I have a lot of 720p content on my NAS drive, and without installing any video or audio codec, it played the videos straight out of the box, very impressive
The Mighty mouse is a very elagant design, no visable buttons on the top and the “squeeze” buttons on the size.
The scroll wheel is a 360 degrees rollerball.
In the box
Unboxed
The underneath
and that’s all there is to show really !
I’m still getting used to the mouse, I don’t think it’s as responsive as my PC mouse (however that is a Razor 2000DPI Gaming mouse), but the 360 degree scroll wheel does make up for it.
