Das Keyboard, makers of the famous (or should that be infamous?) “keyboard without letters,” has over the years limited its efforts to productivity-focused keyboards for mechanical-keyboard aficionados, and coder/hacker types. 2016, however, has seen the company jump into the “hard-core gaming” market with an all-new keyboard and mouse designed for pro gamers—or those who just want equipment with a top-notch feel.
Review Division Zero M50 Pro Gaming Mouse
The keyboard effort was the Division Zero X40 Pro Gaming Mechanical Keyboard, which we reviewed a couple of weeks back. (“Division Zero” is the new gaming brand that Das Keyboard is using to front for this new gear.) The hook with these peripherals is they both use ample quantities of real metal alloys instead of the usual plastic, hoping to convey to gamers that its gear is well-built and will withstand intense gaming sessions.
This time around, we’ll be examining its gaming mouse, which is dubbed the M50 Pro Gaming Mouse. It features an ambidextrous design, with a metal scroll wheel and aluminum base plate that includes feet made of Teflon. It lights up like a true gaming mouse should, softly “breathing” a red glow when the mouse is idle. In an interesting wrinkle, the light steadies to a constant glow when you’re using the mouse, which looks great. The inner lighting emits from the base of the mouse, the Division Zero logo, and the scroll wheel, which has an illuminated ring around it.
Review Division Zero M50 Pro Gaming Mouse
You can also turn the lights off completely, aside from two tiny lights above the DPI selection buttons, which remain on at all times but are dim enough that they won’t trigger sleep deprivation. One thing that’s a bummer, though, is that you can’t change the color of the lights from red, though we anticipate an RGB version of the mouse in the future in order to keep up with the competition—everyone in this market is rushing toward RGB stuff like the Klondike.
Despite the M50’s rather pedestrian appearance when unlit, it features nine programmable buttons, and the ability to save up to six game profiles with unique settings. The laser sensor beneath the mouse tracks at 6,400dpi, and it also features on-the-fly DPI settings, so you can tailor your mouse movement to your needs in a jiffy. You can’t change the DPI/resolution increments, however, as they are pre-selected. (You get to choose from 800dpi, 1,600dpi, 3,200dpi, and 6,400dpi waypoints.)
The metal scroll wheel is dual-purpose, in that it not only “clicks” as it scrolls (as opposed to rolling smoothly), but it can also tilt from left to right, reminiscent of earlier Microsoft mouse efforts. One feature that is simple but much appreciated is that the mouse includes an extra-long braided USB cable. It measures seven feet long, helping ensure it doesn’t get tangled up behind your computer and limit your range of movement…
That’s a decidedly desktop-PC-centric design conceit, though, for situations where your PC is a tower situated under a desk. We can’t see that much cable slack being workable if using this mouse with a laptop.
The M50 comes in at a retail price of $79.99 list, which is no cheap mouse but competitive with other high-end gaming-mouse offerings. Das Keyboard/Division Zero includes a three-year warranty.
The M50 includes software to control all the vital functions of the mouse. It’s intuitive and easy to use, which is a nice surprise given that it’s the company’s fledgling effort. The software features a main window with five tabs for Home, Main Settings, Button Settings, Light Settings, and Support.
The Home tab is not very useful—it’s a bullet-pointy feature showcase for the mouse, redundant seeing as you bought the thing in the first place—but it does show the versions of the software and firmware that are being used, which is helpful. It would be doubly so if you could download a new driver or firmware version directly from this window, but no such luck.
The Main Settings window lets you really drill down into how the mouse behaves for day-to-day mousing, letting you adjust sensitivity individually on both X and Y axes, or set them both to the same level. (You lock them together via the checkbox you see below.) You can also adjust the scroll and double-click speed from here.
The Button Settings tab offers a smorgasbord of options relating to all the buttons on the mouse, letting you customize the role of each of the nine. You simply click any of the menus attached to each button and select what you want from a drop-down menu filled with varying pre-baked “clicks” that include media controls, the ability to change mouse profiles, open programs, or run a macro. As you can see below, the menu is packed with plenty of stock commands…
From here, you can also adjust the polling rate and quickly select a DPI setting at which you want the mouse to perform, though it’s much easier just to tap the DPI-switcher button on the mouse proper (the rocker trailing behind the scroll wheel) to switch settings.
You can also record macros easily with the Macro Manager, then assign them to any of the mouse buttons. It’s all very straightforward if you’ve done this kind of thing before, in that you name your macro and record it, and it’s then stored in the Manager. You then just go to the button manager, select “macro manager” from a drop-down menu for a button, and select the macro you want to use. We’re not the type of gamer that uses this feature extensively, but we were impressed by how easy it was to figure out.
The Lighting options are lightweights here, but hey, it’s a first-generation product and there’s only one color of lighting, so there are logical limits to what you can do. You can toggle the lights on or off, and alter the speed of the “breathing” effect through slow, middle (sic), and fast settings.
The Support/Update tab was unintentionally embarrassing for Division Zero. When we tested the unit, clicking it opened a “404 page not found” in our browser. We also found a 404 page when we went to the URL listed in the Quick Start guide for the software, which is http://gaming.daskeyboard.com/support. Hopefully this will be fixed by the time you read this.
Finally, the software affords the ability to create custom profiles for different games. Oddly, the literature and marketing indicates the ability to create “up to six” profiles, but the software shows save-able slots for only five. You can assign one of the buttons on the mouse to cycle through your saved profiles, but we’re guessing that “no profile” is one of them, or whatever is default. You would use this profile functionality if you wanted one of the buttons to perform an action for one game and a different action in another game.
Source: computershopper.com
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