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Razer Revamps DeathAdder with 3.5G Infrared Laser

Paul Lilly — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:20:20 -0500

We were already impressed with Razer's DeathAdder gaming mouse when we reviewed it awhile back, which earned a 9 verdict and Kick Ass! award, so what does Razer do for a follow-up? Tweak it, of course!

The revamped DeathAdder now sports a "state-of-the-art" 3.5G 3500dpi infrared sensor, compared to the original's 3G 1800dpi optical sensor. Not a bad upgrade for super-sensitive gamers who might be able to notice the difference. And for those that can't, the redesigned DeathAdder also boasts a tangle-free braided cable.

"The DeathAdder is undoubtedly one of Razer's best selling gaming mice," says Robert Krakoff, President of Razer. "To date, the Razer DeathAdder has served the gaming community for a good 3 years and with all the advances in sensor technology, we put our sensor scientists and engineers to task to imbue it with the most precise infrared sensor in the world -- but at the same time maintain the specialty designed form factor that gamers have come to know and love."

The second-gen DeathAdder is available now direct from Razer for $60.

Image Credit: Razer

Razer Mamba

Will Smith — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:00:52 -0500

An amazing mouse with an awful battery

There’s really nothing worse than an otherwise wonderful product with one fatal flaw that brings its whole score down. The Razer Mamba is a wonderful wireless gaming mouse, with an absolutely devastating power problem.

For the Mamba, Razer tweaked the kick-ass shape of the now-classic DeathAdder design—perfect for palm-grip mousers—to sneak in a pair of sensitivity adjustment buttons. The changes paid off: The Mamba is eminently comfortable for long-term gaming sessions, and the sensitivity buttons fix our only complaint with the DeathAdder, which offered imprecise on-the-fly sensitivity adjustments using the mouse wheel.

The Mamba would make one helluva wired mouse, but battery-life problems make us wary of its $130 price tag.

The Mamba’s 1,000MHz laser sensor is wonderful as well. After side-by-side testing, we couldn’t differentiate between the Mamba’s 5,600dpi sensor and the 5,000dpi sensor on the Logitech G9x, but that’s a good thing. With five different sensitivity levels, which are tweakable using the mouse’s software, there’s absolutely nothing about this mouse’s sensor that will prevent you from fragging with wild abandon.

What will prevent you from reaching your maximum gaming potential is the Mamba’s quick-death battery. Because the battery only lasted through about 12 hours of gaming before behaving sporadically, it’s a damn good thing that the Mamba also offers the option of plugging directly into the provided USB cable so you can continue playing after your battery inevitably dies. The bad news is that the USB cable is pretty chunky, and making the mouse/cord connection is fiddly at best. Worse, it’s hard to unplug. It required two hands and took us several minutes of fighting to remove every time we wanted to return to untethered fragging. On top of those problems, we absolutely detest that the only sure-fire way to get a full charge on the mouse is to turn off the physical power switch on its underbelly every single time you charge it. That’s just lame.

At the end of the day, we simply stopped using the Mamba as a wireless mouse, instead preferring to leave the cord permanently plugged in. We’d much rather have an awesome wired mouse (at a wired mouse price) than have the battery conk out during a heated TF2 match, when there’s nary a moment to connect the cord. As it is, the Mamba is a great wired mouse at a price that’s high, even for a wireless mouse.

Razer Launches In-Ear Earphones for Gamers on the Go

Paul Lilly — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:40:37 -0500

Razer, maker of gaming peripherals, added to its audio lineup this week with a revised pair of in-ear earphones the company is again calling the Razer Moray.

"After the release of the original Razer Moray, we received feedback from gamers who needed something more," says Robert Krakoff, President of Razer. "They wanted a compact headset that provides not only great audio quality, but the ability to talk to their friends."

The noise-isolating earphones come with an inline omnidirectional microphone that Razer claims "captures sound input from any direction with exceptional voice clarity." The company also touts a "powerful" bass response.

The revised Razor Moray is available now in either black or white with an MSRP set at $60.

Image Credit: Razer

Destroy Your Mouse for Shot at a Free Razer Mamba

Paul Lilly — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:30:24 -0600

We wouldn't advise strapping a brick of Black Cat fireworks to a perfectly good computer mouse, but if you have an old rodent laying around just taking up space in your PC parts bin, you now have an excuse to put it to sleep in the most inhumane manner you can think of. That's because gaming peripheral maker Razer is asking users to submit a YouTube video of "how you trashed your old mouse to stand a chance to win the Razer Mamba," which is Razer's new hybrid gaming mouse.

Razer showed off the Mamba at this year's CES, which features a hybrid wired/wireless design in a shell that looks very similar to the company's DeathAdder. The new mouse is set to go on sale in February with an MSRP of $130. The deadline to enter the contest is January 30, with winners to be announced on February 17, 2009.

Razer hasn't said how many winners it will select or what the criteria will be, but this isn't the first time the gaming peripheral company has tasked users with destroying hardware for a chance at trading up. Razer ran a similar contest with its Tarantula keyboard, in which 5 winners were selected.

Don't plan on entering but still have a cool idea on how to destroy a mouse? Hit the jump and share!

Razer Releases the Mamba Hybrid Gaming Mouse

Paul Lilly — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:49:24 -0600

One could argue that Razer has pioneered the competitive gaming peripheral market (Logitech might object) starting with the original Boomslang mouse, and the company has been churning out serpent-inspired mice ever since. The latest reptilian namesake to find a place in Razer's lineup is the new Mamba gaming mouse, announced today at CES.

Similar in design to the DeathAdder, Razer's Mamba eschews the ambidextrous ergonomics inherent in the company's earlier products and targets right handed gamers. But the most interesting evolutionary aspect of this new rodent is its hybrid DNA, which has given birth to both wired and wireless functionality in a single unit.

"With dual mode wired/wireless functionality, the Razer Mamba lets users immediately and seamlessly switch from wired to wireless play," Razer says. "With first in class polling rates at 1ms as compared to traditional wireless mice that poll at 8ms, players will have virtually lag free game play."

Razer claims lag free operation when operating in the 2.4GHz wireless mode, saying the Mamba offers "the fastest mouse both on and off the cord." Helping the company make that claim is a 1ms polling rate combined with a 5600DPI 3.5G laser sensor. The company says you can expect 72 hours of battery life under normal gaming usage, or 14 hours of continuous play.

Look for the Mamba to be available in February 2009 with an MSRP set at $130.

Image Credit: Razer

Razer in Search of Next Fatal1ty, Will Recruit Pro-Gamers at WCG 2008

Paul Lilly — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:25:33 -0600

Tired of carrying your clan on your back while you clown the competition with moves that would have Fatal1ty thinking about retirement? Or maybe chasing that law degree is turning out to be more work than you anticipated and it's time for a change. Either way, gifted gamers looking for a change will have a chance to go pro and join Team Razer through a recruitment drive at the World Cyber Games (WCG).

"Team Razer is looking to recruit more professional gamers at the WCG Grand Finals, held in Cologne, Germany from November 5 to 9," Razer wrote in a press release. "To be eligible for consideration into the 'Go Pro with Razer' program, Razer will be in search of true hardware evangelists."

Sell-outs need not apply, as Razer says it isn't looking to simply pay talented gamers to user its products, and instead is only interested in those "already using Razer peripherals competitively." Interested applicants not planning on attending WCG are also welcome to apply for sponsorship at gopro.razerzone.com.

Image Credit: Razer

High-End Gaming Headset Roundup -- Check Out These Sweet Cans!

Reed Porter — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:55:42 -0500

You’d never credit your headset after winning a Team Fortress 2 match, nor would you ever brag about your soundcard after just acing a round in Call of Duty 4, but any gaming veteran knows that having a sweet set of cans is a must for even the casual gamer’s setup. This is especially true today with the vast majority of professional gamers using headsets instead speaker systems.

Unfortunately, deciding which audio hardware is right for you can become aggravating very quickly with USB headsets, 5.1 headphones, onboard mixing, analog inputs, and incompatible interfaces confusing the market. With this roundup, we’re going to scrutinize six gaming headset options, and examine the largely unspoken differences between analog and USB audio technology.

If you like your existing soundcard, you won’t need a USB headset. This is because the only way for audio to be produced through the USB headset is by bypassing the soundcard entirely. A USB headset is recognized by your operating system as a completely separate audio device. While this is convenient for laptops and desktops with cheap onboard soundcards, it creates a headache for anyone looking to play music or film audio through their speakers; you'll have to change the default Windows audio device, swapping between the headset and whatever sound card your speakers are plugged into. A USB headset will usually require software installation to function with your OS and to allow customization and mixing control. This brings us to the very reason companies are making USB headsets in the first place, to allow for inline hardware acceleration which remixes the audio before sending it to the speakers. Essentially you have a mini soundcard embedded in the headset.

This is both a good and a bad thing. For gamers without soundcards (or have soundcard driver problems in Vista), USB headsets are an unbeatable value. You get hardware acceleration and a physical headset in one package. If you already have an expensive and fully-functioning soundcard, however, buying a USB headset can be pointless – the audio quality won’t necessarily be better with USB. The only option for you is using analog jacks, or if you have a newer soundcard, optical cables (although it would be amazing, we have yet to see a high end optical headset).

That said, deciding upon a testing method was difficult. We eventually settled on testing the analog headsets with a PCI-Express X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty soundcard and the USB headsets on their own.

With that important difference explained, we take a look a few of the latest headsets to see which pair is truly king of the cans.

Creative HS-1200

We’re typically wary of wireless gaming products due to their spotty battery life and ironically more inconvenient set up process. We were pleasantly surprised, then, when Creative proved us wrong with this wireless offering. The HS-1200 mixes audio onboard like other USB headsets, but unlike its competitors it makes use of Creative's X-FI Crystalizer and CMSS-3D technologies. This portable X-Fi implementation comes pretty close to the surround directional accuracy and audio quality of an actual X-Fi soundcard. Despite this, games would only allow us to enable older version of EAX. OpenAL does not work with this headset and Battlefield 2 wouldn't let us set the audio quality to "Ultra." Another drawback is the lack of underwhelming bass; although punchy, there was no real boom.

The wireless functionality impressed us as it worked within 40 feet of the transmitter, through walls and electronics, before fading out. Also, the headset comes with volume control buttons on the earpads themselves, which is a necessity when going wireless. The earpads felt comfortable enough, but they sit on top of your ears, making you sweat a little. And although the microphone performed well in Skype and games, we would have liked to see it retract or detach.

All in all, the audio fidelity of the HS-1200 is excellent and the wireless functionality is near-perfect, but the poor EAX support and small earpads force our smiles to wane.

Verdict: 7

Creative Fatal1ty HS-1000

While this headset carries the official seal of approval from the Championship Gaming Series (CGS) and uber-gamer Fatal1ty, these endorsements are obviously more of a marketing gimmick than a certification of quality, since we don’t think any professional gamer would ever use a budget headset like this one. The HS-1000 contains the same inline acceleration as the HS-1200, and the CMSS-3D and Crystalizer are a welcome inclusion. Despite this, the EAX support remains just as spotty as it was on the HS-1200 and OpenAL support is nowhere to be found. Even with the far more comfortable earpads, this headset’s speakers aren't as accurate as the HS-1200's, producing little if any bass.

Fortunately the mids and highs were a bit more up to par. One thing this headset is good at is maintaining audio clarity at extremely high volumes; there was little distortion when pushing levels to the limit. The Fatal1ty's had the worst microphone among the sets we tested; it would pick up background noise with every bit of fidelity as it did our voice. In addition the recording quality was only mediocre.

For its relatively low price, the Fatal1ty HS-1000 is good, but it simply can't compare to what real professional gamers use in competitive gaming leagues such as the CGS.

Note: In a smart move, Creative is producing analog and USB versions of this headset. Both are identical except for the inclusion of an inline mixer with the USB version and the analog set will cost you much less.

Verdict: 6

Sennheiser PC350

As a company renowned for producing some of the best headphones on the market, Sennheiser recently released their first high-end headset designed specifically for gamers. With this in mind, we were incredibly eager to get our hands on the new PC350's. Out of the box, we noticed the earpads on the headset can fold inwards for portable storage as well as twist 90 degrees to the side allowing you to comfortably lay them flush against your shoulders.

During testing, the PC350's produced the best sound out of the roundup so far; we were able to discern sounds previously unheard when testing other sets. The highs were very crisp while the bass reproduction was accurate down to very low frequencies. We were actually able to make the headphones vibrate with no distortion. The microphone performance was great, although we would have liked to see it tuck away into the headset as it did on the Plantronics GameComm. The set was comfortable to wear for prolonged periods, more or less due to the headset resting on your head rather than your earlobes.

Our only gripe about this headset is that it's a closed-ear design. The unit’s earcups rarely sat identically over each ear; occasionally one earcup would leak in sound while the other wouldn't. We could blame it on our tester’s misshapen head, but it took a good deal of shifting around before the unit completely engulfed our ears letting no sound in from either side. Overall, we think the closed ear design is more annoying than it’s worth.

Even so, the PC350's were the best sounding headset we tested, producing exceptional sound.

Verdict: 9

Medusa 5.1 ProGamer Edition V2

While we had high hopes for these luxurious-looking pair of cans, we were slightly crestfallen after running the Medusa through testing. This is the only headset we tested with 4 speakers per earpad, producing true 5.1 surround sound with simulation. In this regard, it succeeds: the aural positioning was the best we've heard, beating out any other set in the roundup.

Unfortunately this is the only merit the ProGamer's can claim. The 5.1 audio comes at the price of severely reduced audio fidelity. Bass reproduction was almost non-existent and only audible at ear piercing levels while the highs and mids sounded rather drained. The unit’s physical design is misleading as well: soft cushy earpads and headstraps at first looked very inviting, but during actual testing they felt much more rigid and cheap.

If Medusa didn't sacrifice fidelity in place of directional sound and the unit was as comfortable as it looked, this headset would easily have been our favorite in the roundup. Unfortunately, superior directional sound results in downgraded audio quality and the headset is only faux luxury.

Verdict: 5

Razer Piranha

In searching for the ‘king of the cans’, we were bound to find a lemon scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Razer Piranha unfortunately fills that role. Unlike all of the other headsets we tested, the audio sounded completely flat and static.

After wearing them for hours our ears began to hurt as they sat right on top of our ears. Many sounds that we could hear clearly in other headsets were indiscernible on the Piranhas, while the highs and mids were very drained.

Oddly enough however, the headset had punchy bass that held clear even at high volumes. In addition, the microphone quality was respectable. The Piranhas perform great in those areas, but in every other respect they were sub-par.

Verdict: 4

Plantronics GameCom 777

These GameComs shocked us in nearly every area of testing. The 777's come with a detachable "5.1 Dolby Headphone USB soundcard" that allow for either analog or USB input, making it perfect for the LAN party gamer. In addition, the inline mixer is a plug-and-play device, so it requires no software installation.

When testing the USB card we found its directional mixing was surprisingly accurate and close that of an X-Fi soundcard. The headset was also very comfortable to wear with velour padding on both the earcups and the headband. The microphone also folds up into the headset itself, flush with headband – something we’ve never seen before. We wonder why it took so long for companies to implement this seemingly obvious idea, and hopefully we'll see more headsets following suit in the future.

Thankfully, Plantronics decided to build the headset with an open-ear design which results in increased fidelity as well as a more natural listening experience. The highs and mids were crisp and clear while the bass was wholesome and thunderous. Only at VERY high volumes would the bass cut out.

The GameCom’s sexy and comfortable aesthetics, mixed with superb audio make it our favorite headset in the roundup.

Verdict: 9

Razer DeathAdder

Will Smith — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:24:38 -0500

We love the shape of this mouse—it’s comfortable for even the longest session—and the DeathAdder just gets better from there. The sensor delivers pixel-perfect accuracy, and we love that the driver lets us adjust everything from X and Y sensitivity to the lights on the mouse. We’re still not sold on the idea of constantly updating firmware for a mere mouse, but Razer’s built a highly compelling rodent with the DeathAdder.

The DeathAdder’s matte finish and uber-comfortable design let even the sweatiest gamers maintain pixel-perfect control during heated deathmatches.

Razer eschewed the standard laser sensor for an old-school 1800dpi 3G optical sensor. Our testing showed that this third-gen optical sensor offers virtually indistinguishable performance compared to laser sensors. Now, even mouse sensors have their own fanboys—some hardcore gamers swear by old-style optical sensors; others prefer their mice with lasers.

But regardless of your personal preference, we think you’ll find that the DeathAdder’s sensor kicks ass. The mouse itself is extremely comfortable, even for extended gaming sessions, and the buttons are perfectly placed for palm-grip gamers. Gamers who use a claw grip may find this particular mouse a touch narrow. Combined with the uber-comfortable matte finish, the DeathAdder rivals the Logitech G5 for comfort.

Our only complaint is that the DeathAdder offers too much granular control for quick in-game sensitivity adjustment. Instead of dedicated sensitivity switching buttons that toggle between two or three settings, you must bind one of the mouse’s five buttons to on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment in the Razer control panel, and then use the scroll wheel to hone in on the desired sensitivity. If you don’t adjust sensitivity on-the-fly, this shouldn’t pose a problem for you. But if you do, it could be a deal-breaker.