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Testing a mouse like the Cooler Master Xornet II involves using it for just over a week as our main day-to-day mouse, including office tasks such as photo editing and web browsing. However as a gaming focused peripheral, it is also put through its paces in a number of titles from different genres. All the while we take into consideration its accuracy, speed and comfort over long periods.
Since gaming is what this mouse is designed with in mind, we spent a lot of time trying out the Xornet II in first person shooters, fast paced strategy titles and slower puzzlers and card games. As it is a claw grip mouse, it was no surprise that it performed very well in shooters and RTS titles the most, though was a pretty solid performer throughout all of the different titles we tried. It is fast and accurate thanks to the smooth Teflon feet and high quality optical sensor that feels most at home on a cloth pad.
The sensitivity of this mouse is not huge, maxing out at 3,500 DPI, but in our experience that is often more than enough for most people. Our boss Allan ‘Zardon' Campbell has twin 4K displays and even then he barely makes it past 8,000 without feeling like he has lost control of his rodent.
Remapping keys and changing the sensitivity of operating system mousing parameters is all possible
The click threshold for the Xornet 2's left/right mouse buttons with their Omron switches is surprisingly light. This should mean faster clicks as you need to press less hard to actuate. It is something that is difficult to notice while using the Xornet 2, but when you switch back to something with more resistance on the switches, you certainly notice it. Perhaps Razer was on to something with the Mamba's customisable click strength switches.
However it must be said that this is a mouse that is only really of use to claw and finger grip gamers. Due to the short length of the mouse and its lack of palm support, it does not work with that grip style – unless you like pressing the left/right-click buttons with the underside of your second knuckle.
For those using claw and finger grips however, this is a mouse that is very comfortable to use. It has a good support for ring and little fingers on the right hand side and the thumb and finger grips are soft to the touch but provide enough of a textured surface to keep a hold without problems. They even continue to work during stressful gaming situations where perspiration is more common.
The same cannot necessarily be said for the palm rest portion of the mouse, which with its matt plastic can see some sweat build up at times. However due to contact with this portion of the peripheral being irregular at best, this is not too much of an issue.
Lighting options are limited, but the spectrum of colour options is near infinite
As much as this is a mouse that is great during gaming though, I found it not quite so wonderful during general usage. There are no problems with control, accuracy or any of the really important stuff, but a couple of niggling problems spoiled the experience somewhat.
For starters, the very light nature of the switches meant that miss-clicks were not impossible and though it was far from a common occurrence, I did close the odd window accidentally while using this mouse. This seems like something that gets better as you get more used to the click strength required, but just bear in mind that there is a learning curve if you have come from something that is more heavy-duty.
I also found that both left and right mouse buttons squeak quite commonly when pressed. This seems most pronounced when pressing them at the front edge of the switch, though was present regardless of where you pressed after a few clicks.
This was something I was able to fix with a liberal spray of WD40, so I wonder if Cooler Master could do with using some form of lubricant on their mice before shipping?
Lift off distance can also be adjusted, but sensitivity can only be tweaked in 250 DPI steps
Of a similar annoyance, the middle mouse button occasionally did not seem to register a click, which meant sometimes clicking several times to close or open a new tab in a web browser. It is not something that would happen often, but when it did, would require 2-3 extra clicks to get it to register, which was frustrating.
The back-end software for the Cooler Master Xornet 2 is nicely thought out and easy to understand. It has options for key remapping, lighting changes (based on DPI selected) and a few extra features like polling rate and lift off distance. For some reason Cooler Master chose light-grey text to go on the grey background though. It makes it almost unreadable in some cases.
