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Cooler Master's configuration utility isn't quite as feature packed as some we've seen in the past but it does allow us a reasonable level of adjustment to the Spawn's settings. On opening the software, we are greeted by a diagram of the mouse and a variety of drop-down menus which can be used to assign different functions to all the mouse buttons.
You can configure macros by clicking the ‘Macro' tab which lets you record keyboard macros which will appear in the dropdown menu for each button. Although there are a number of predefined mouse functions available in the drop-down menus, you can't combine mouse clicks into macros. We had a little trouble getting our test macros to record properly as the software seemed to register each keypress twice. We thought it might be an issue with our keyboard but we switched to a different one and the problem was still present. Hopefully this is an issue that Cooler Master can sort out before the product is available to buy.
The third tab is entitled ‘Custom' and gives us access to the performance configuration options of the mouse. This is the area in which the Spawn falls behind other competing mice as you can only customise the DPI level between three discrete levels: 800, 1600 and 3500 DPI. We would have liked to see a greater number of levels as we couldn't quite find a DPI level that we perfect for our style of gaming. There are also four polling rate options a slider to adjust pointer speed on this page. The fourth and final tab provides a link to online support and an easy firmware upgrade button.
On the whole, the Spawn's gaming performance is on a par with it's competitiors. During our tests we didn't notice any lag or lapses in tracking and glide was reasonably smooth on both hard plastic and cloth surfaces. Even though some gaming mice on the market boast sensors with up to 5600DPI, we found the Spawn's 3500 DPI to be more than enough for our needs and only a handful of gamers are likely to use those extra DPI.
