Review: Ghost Gaming Series performs great
Mice. These mundane devices might be considered to be the least important components in your rig, but if you've ever owned a lousy mouse, then you know the frustration it brings. So today, we've decided to test one of Gigabyte's ace rodents - the GM-M8000.
Gigabyte is not the first company to pop in your mind when it comes to peripherals, as the company has a plethora of other quality hardware products and mice are hardly the thing they do best. However, we quite liked the fact that the company has decided to have a go at the gaming market, as healthy competition means many a great thing for us, the end-users. So let's see whether Gigabyte can challenge top gaming peripherals manufacturers in their own game.
The GM-M8000 comes in a cardboard-plastic packaging, designed in a way so that you can look at but can't touch the mouse. The packaging is nice as it has a couple of layers to it, and although the box features plenty of info as it is, you can find even more after flipping the Velcro-attached rear leaf. The color scheme is nice as well, supporting the Ghost series theme colors - yellow, red, green and black. As you can see from the photo above, Gigabyte also sent its GP-MP8000 Ghost gaming pad, made of high density neoprene backing and microfiber top to ensure no glitches in pattern detection.
In the box you'll find the mouse, a set of weights (3x6g, 1x20g), a nice little box for your weights which is a nice touch, the manual and the CD containing the drivers and Gigabyte's proprietary Ghost Engine suite as well as replacement Ultra-Durable Teflon feet.
We've seen this mouse at this year's Cebit, and we remembered thinking how this must be one of the most uncomfortable mice ever, as it looks futuristic with no real regard for comfort, but we were soon turned into believers. In fact, this is one of the most comfortable mice we've used, and although looks would suggest many a sharp edge, we assure you it's not the case.
The mouse is well made and it feels good, but the design is somewhat lacking. In an attempt to make it look futuristic, Gigabyte's designers made it too cheapish looking, and it does little justice to the actual quality of the entire product. On the other hand, we'll chose functionality over "eye-candy" any day, and we're at least glad Gigabyte didn't do things the other way around.
GM-M8000 comes with 5 programmable keys and a DPI adjustment button allowing you to switch from 400-4000DPI on the fly, as well as 8kb of onboard memory for storing your profiles. The five programmable keys can be assigned to just about anything, from double click to a combination of clicks and/or keys, and you can imagine that it comes in handy in quite a couple of scenarios.
A button on the right side of the mouse is the profile-switch button, allowing you to change profiles on the fly, and if you're in doubt as to which profile you're using right now - just look at the mouse and the color of the Gigabyte sign on the mouse will tell you, as it neatly changes colors with the change of profiles. It's positioned in a way that you'll have to stretch one of your fingers to change profiles, so there'll be no accidental profile changes while gaming away.
The mouse has a gold plated USB jack and comes with "gaming grade" mouse cable, which is quite tough and will take a lot of abuse before you manage to damage it.