I can shoot a rainbow, shoot a rainbow, shoot a rainbow toooo
What is the computer mouse missing? It already has buttons, wheels, lasers, optics, weights, pulleys, secret chambers for hiding priests and fluffy patches you can stroke to reduce blood pressure. The bespectacled, white-coated boffins at Corsair, however, think they’ve struck upon the answer. What the computer mouse needs now, more than anything, is colour!
That’s right, the thing hidden beneath your hand needs to be more colourful, to be a resplendent peacock advertising its virility in the hope other mice from across the district will come and mate with it. The M65 RGB claims to be able to display 16.8 million colours, which is presumably a rounded-up figure representing the 16,777,216 colours of the 24-bit RGB colour spectrum. The human eye, in comparison, can distinguish around 10 million colours.
You can literally make sunshine blaze out of the mouse’s backside, as the illumination for the rear Corsair logo spills out of the back of the unit – where the casing has been pared away – and on to your desk. A beam also issues from the front of the mouse, as the wheel illumination leaks out, although at an infuriating angle.
Once you’ve finished customising, what are you left with? You get an 8,200dpi infrared laser diode on the bottom of an aluminium unibody that apparently lowers weight and increases rigidity. Although, frankly, if it’s your mouse that’s lacking rigidity in your hand, then you’re doing something very wrong. It is much lighter than it looks, however. Weight distribution, the issue of which keeps some gamers up at night, is said to be ‘optimal’ – but that hasn’t stopped Corsair from including three tuning zones on the bottom of the unit for you to adjust the weighting further with a screwdriver.
In the hand, the body of the mouse feels broad and low, with a satisfyingly large contact patch below Mrs Palm. Her five lovely daughters get slightly uneven treatment, however, with the two fingers that rest on the main buttons kept happy but the little finger occasionally left to fidget in space as the body of the mouse vanishes at the wrong point. The edges of the body panels aren’t too protrusive, and it’s generally a comfortable mouse to use once you’ve got used to how low it sits.
The M65 has a smooth black coating on its upper surfaces that feels rather luxurious. The lower surfaces have a similar coating that’s missed a few turns of the polishing machine, and which are halfway into fine sandpaper territory. It won’t be taking any layers of skin off, but it’s some of the roughest material we’ve ever felt on a mouse. This does have its uses – the M65 won’t be slipping out of your fingers no matter how much sweat pours down your wrist.
The main buttons, rated for 20 million clicks, feel responsive, while the sniper key that reduces sensitivity so you can pull off smooth headshots falls perfectly under the thumb (if you’re a right-hander, no ambidextrousness here). The two buttons above it are less perfectly placed, however, being just a little too indistinct from one another for our tastes. The mouse’s greatest component must be its absolute beauty of a wheel: broad and grippy, with absolutely no chance of spinning it too far, it gives just the right amount of feedback as you turn it.
There’s a good mouse here under the absurd customisation claims. You could easily use it all day without getting handfatigue, and the excellent wheel will still be providing manual satisfaction weeks after you start using it. – Ian Evenden