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NZXT Avatar Gaming Mouse Review December 10, 2008 Tom Colarusso |
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Summary: With four adjustable DPI settings, 7 programmable buttons, LEDs, and rubber grips, NZXT's Avatar is one of the latest offerings in the gaming mouse market. Tom takes the mouse out for a test drive in our latest review!
 NZXT Avatar Gaming Mouse Review | Page:: ( 1 / 4 ) |
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The Avatar is a 7-button optical mouse featuring an on-the-fly adjustable resolution between 650 and 2600 DPI. Ambidextrous in design, the Avatar sports subtle blue lighting and sleek lines that give it a nice finish and feel. To the left of the Avatar is the LED readout which denotes what DPI setting is currently active. The skin of the Avatar has a nice rubbery texture to it that helps keep your hand from slipping, even over long gaming sessions. The bottom sports 3 Teflon pads to ensure smooth motion across any mousing surface. The Avatar is a pretty light mouse, but has a good weight to it which helps you from overshooting your targets. As it was designed for use by both right and left-handed persons, two buttons are split among the right and left sides. Mouse buttons themselves are easy to push and the mouse wheel provides a satisfying click with each turn.
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The Avatar features a low profile middle button/wheel, so pressing the button takes little effort. However, the wheel itself is set to a fairly high tension, preventing accidental scrolling while pressing down. This is especially important if you use the mouse wheel button frequently in games, like for movement or to zoom in. This high tension makes it difficult to accidently scroll the wheel, which generally will switch weapons at the wrong time. The drawback to a high tensioned wheel is that scrolling takes a hit, as it’s not as easy to flick through long web pages or documents. Situated behind the mouse wheel are the two extra buttons that are set by default to change the DPI on-the-fly. Overall, the Avatar has a good feel to it, but as we used it more, we realized that it must’ve been designed for gamers with hands of a tad bit smaller dimension. The ambidextrous design had us accidently pushing the right-side button with our ring finger, which forced us to be more aware of our hand placement than we normally would have been.
| Software | Page:: ( 2 / 4 ) |
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The software included with the NZXT Avatar is straightforward, easy to use, and includes support for up to five different profiles, each one with its own settings like polling rate, button macros, sensitivity and more. These profiles can be easily changed on the fly by the push of a mouse button. The problem, however, is that the Avatar only supports five active profiles at a time, which is of no help to those gamers who might be knee deep in more than five games. The software does allow you to save profile configurations for use later, which solves this problem for the most part. However, it does not auto detect which game you are playing, so you have to remember to open the proper configuration if it is not already loaded into one of your five active profiles.
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The Avatar software also supports an easy to use macro programmer. By clicking on the button of your choice and selecting “Advanced”, you will bring up the Macro Configuration. This screen allows you to program any mouse and keyboard button combination you choose directly to a single button on the Avatar. This can be extremely handy for games that require a combination of button presses to achieve certain actions. The software worked as it said it would for us, although we did have a hard time figuring out when we would need this feature. Despite this, it is still a pretty neat feature to have and would certainly come in handy for some fast paced games or MMOs.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 3 / 4 ) |
Pros
Software: The software package is fairly simple and easy to use, while the programmable buttons and profiles make it easy to configure the Avatar to any specific preference under any game out there.
Price: Currently retailing for around $70, the Avatar is cheaper than the Razer Boomslang, as well as the steelseries Ikari, while still sporting many of the same features of its more expensive rivals.
Ambidextrous: The Avatar is well designed for both dextral and sinistral-handed people, while still sporting 7 programmable buttons
Cons
Not Comfortable for the Big-Handed: The Avatar’s size makes it a bit smaller than we would’ve like to have seen, which made the mouse somewhat uncomfortable for those of us with giant monkey paws. We also had a hard time not hitting the right button with our ring finger due to its ambidextrous design.
Profiles Not Game-Specific: It would’ve been nice to see the profiles change automatically based on whatever game you load up; instead you are limited to five active configurations which have to be changed prior to running the game or bind a button to swap them on the fly.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 4 / 4 ) |