In the last 10 years, if you were looking for top-end gaming peripherals,
you might not have first thought of the name ASUS, but that might be changing.
ASUS sponsored this video uh and sent us over five of their Harp mice. One of
them is actually a Caris, including the Harp 2 Ace Demon 1 Edition. This is not
the box you will get at your house, unfortunately. This is like an
influencer box, but it includes this brand new mouse that is designed by
Champions. uh and is kind of their competitor in the high end for like top
tier gaming mice. And if the specs and our initial Labs report or anything to
go by, this might be a contender, a real
contender from Asus. This is actually a really cool box. I want to spend more
time in here. If you want to see more ASUS mouse products, let us know in the
comments down below. They even have kind of a sizing chart and sort of grip style
thing, uh which would make me think that I want the Harp Ace Mini, but that's not
what we're talking about today. Screw that. Get out of here. We're talking
purple baby. Demon one. You thought I was an angel. Turns out I'm a devil in
love with a demon. This is called the Demon One edition because it was designed in conjunction with Demon One,
who's a Valerant Pro, as well as other esports pros to kind of design the
shape. What makes this one special is obviously the color and the styling, but
also the biiobased nylon shell uh that differentiates it from like the Aim Labs
edition uh that we could talk out about at a different time. That means that
this is supposed to be repellent to kind of hand grease, which is nice because
this is a beautiful color, but I think that if they don't uh put the work and
the design in, it could be pretty nasty looking. It's got a pretty nice premium
feel. It's sort of got that velvety uh luxurious feel without being too
rubbery. So, I don't think it will degrade. I think it'll hold up quite well. You can feel the print of the
Demon One, which I don't think is a big deal. Your finger will rest and be
there, but I worry about where kind of especially where your finger will land
depending on how you do it. Um, and the way my hand lands on it, I'm right on
the one. So, mine's just going to be demon. It'll no longer be a demon one,
if you know what I mean. Asus designed this to be both a fingertip and claw
type grip mouse, which I can see that
working for me. It's definitely lands more in the claw, uh, which puts my
fingers right on the edge, but the buttons do feel good even right at the
back. Uh, I think I could definitely use the mouse like this. They're using the
ROG exclusive optical buttons that are rated for a 100 million clicks. They
feel pretty good. They're quite clicky.
Fairly consistent. Although at the front it's a little more travel, which is
pretty fine cuz it's still very clicky and responsive right at the back. Scroll
wheel very reminiscent of a Gro style.
It's clicky. It's not designed for scrolling through a million data items.
It's designed for scrolling through your inventory. Although I'm a big fan of
using numbers on the keyboard to do that. It's also the only RGB on this
mouse, which uh is either a positive or a negative depending on your opinion.
I'm the RGB hater. If there's one RGB hater left on this world, it is me. And
if there's none left, I am dead. But you know what? That's pretty cool. I don't
hate it, especially cuz it's it feels pretty good. I am not a hater of that
amount of RGB. I also not a hater of side buttons. The way I claw grip it,
these buttons are a little far forward for me. If I had slightly bigger hands
and I was more palming it, I think they would land in a better spot. So, these
is very personal preference kind of thing for me. Slightly forward, but not
dealbreaker, nothing like that. On the front, we have our type-C port. It is
not recessed, which I'm a big fan of. On this side, we just have the Ace
branding, not HARP 2 ACE, which is interesting. Uh, also, that's three
lines. That's not two. Get with the program. You know what I'm saying? On
the bottom, we have our glide skates. uh with their proprietary 2.5D edges to
make them smoother. It's a decent amount of glide space. Glide experience is very
good. Uh we also have glide pads around the sensor which is pretty standard
these days. I dig it. The glide
experience is also extra smooth because it is a 48 g mouse which is on the
lighter side. It is not the lightest mouse of all time, but it is definitely lighter than most gaming mice. And
that's an especially impressive weight count because it's not a perforated
body. It's solid. Um, I know a lot of people don't care about that, but I like
the solid body mice, and so the fact that it is this light is a pretty
impressive feat of engineering. Back to the bottom, we have our try mode switch,
Bluetooth, wired, and uh the dongle
mode. We have our DPI switch and our pairing button. I feel like if you're going to have your DPI button on the
bottom, it's almost not even worth having, but to each their own. We also
have a little slot for our dongle, which I'm a big fan of. The last thing on the
bottom is the ROG Aimoint Pro sensor. It's a pretty impressive sensor
specs-wise with 42,000 DPI, 750 IPS, and
50gs of acceleration force. Those last two are kind of the more important ones.
Uh, but it also has track on glass technology. I think lots of gamers have
deskpads. Um, but you might not. And that sensor pairs nicely with the 8K
polling rate on this mouse. Your mileage may vary. I think that a 1000 Hz polling
rate is adequate for most people. Uh, but if you're someone that's really
chasing the cutting edge of gaming performance, 8K is a great feature to
have. And if you want to get extra battery life, you can take it down to
1,000 anyway and get like a 100 hours with this thing. That's pretty good for
a freaking mouse this light. Man, I'm really excited to try this thing. Let's
plug it in and see how it does. Oh, what a treat. There's no software to
download. You just go right to the gearlink.asus.com website. Automatically
detect my mouse. Even using the wireless dongle, cuz there's a lot of mice you
have to plug in to configure. Big fan of this, especially after the nightmare
that has been several of the mice we've unboxed recently. I've downloaded the
software. I've connected the mouse. No, continue pairing. I want a pair. Why do
I need advertisements for more products inside of my We can set our five
profiles, which is interesting because I don't see a profile switch button, but
maybe there's a combination. The first option is our button assignment. We can
assign buttons to do different things, which I do not want to do. But we also
have our hotkey instructions which we have all our different uh [music]
functions that we might want to do. It's kind of neat to have it all very clear.
Profile switch hotkey. Press the DPI button and scroll wheel simultaneously.
So you can switch profiles just using the mouse. So you make your profile save
to the mouse. That's great. Next we have our speed shift settings which seem to
basically assign a button to get your mouse in top performance mode. Get
everything cranked all the way. Uh, I don't really want to do that. I want to
leave everything manual. Next, we have our performance settings where we can
change our DPI. We can also remove the ones we're not going to use. So, if you
know you only want to switch between 400 and 800, you could just have those two.
It looks like you have to have two to switch between, although presumably you
could set them to be the same. Yeah. So, you can kind of trick it that way. If
you only want to have one DPI, I know I want 800 when I'm testing. That's good.
I can turn on and off ankle snapping. Bye-bye. I can change my polling rate
and I can turn on and off motion sync, although in this pre-release version it
looks like I cannot. The next thing that's really cool is uh this angle
feature. Uh so it'll adjust presumably
the way it's measuring your hand movements based on the angle. I think
the way I hold my mouse best matches the minus 10 uh on the top down somewhere
between 20, I think, and 10. We'll do 10. Uh, this is very interesting, but
this is not the kind of video where we're going to do a deep dive on this to see how it impacts gaming. Instead,
we're going to move on to lighting. Ooh, yeah. And my favorite RGB setting, off.
This one's actually pretty useful because you can show how much battery
life is left um using the color, but um
no, I I just want off. I want as much battery life as possible. Next, we can
calibrate. Oh, so you can do a mal manual calibration depending on your
surface or choose from several preone
ones. We're going to go hone ace. Seems
exactly like an LTT Store deskpad. You know what I'm saying? Come on, ASUS. You
should have a LT deskpad preset. You know, you know, you know what I'm
saying. Next, we have our liftoff distance, which will change how much it's compensating for the adjustments
when you lift the mouse to move. Um, usually this is a slider, so it's
interesting that it's just [music] low or high. power. We have 96% battery.
That's great. Uh we can set the light to flash when we're low on battery. And we
have our our power saving mode where we can turn off the mouse faster. Uh next
we have zone mode which is sort of like a separate thing from your profile. It
sort of overrides it so you can set it exactly what you want so that no matter
what in game you can [music] hit the button combo and get there real quick.
And then we have our companion which we need to download and is not [music]
really part of this. Oh, it has quick access to co-pilot. No, this mouse was
doing so good. There was no AI features. To be fair, they didn't advertise this.
Uh, it's just going to deepen a menu. I'll give that a pass. The last thing
that I realized I didn't talk about is what will be in your retail box, uh,
which we will have listed here. And it includes some grip tape, which is pretty
cool. I like the fit and finish of this mouse texture, but uh, it's nice that
they include that option. Know what I'm saying? Let's play some games.
This feels very responsive, very snappy. That makes sense. We actually tested the
mouse latency at our Labs and in wired mode, this is the second lowest latency
we've ever measured. And in the wireless mode, uh it is among the top tier uh
that we have tested. In its Bluetooth mode, it's uh normal Bluetooth. So,
don't use Bluetooth if you're planning on going gaming. But both wired and with
the dongle, this is a really, really good, snappy, responsive mouse. And I
can feel that. I can feel that pretty good. I did switch the liftoff distance
to high because I was having some weird tracking issues when I was moving the
mouse and I'm having a better result. It's hard to comment on the performance of mice because so many of them are so
good. Um, and it's nice that this is a
really solid option for you to explore.
Um, I'm just impressed that ASUS is kind of
clawing their way into the top tier gaming peripheral market and I feel like
this is a really solid option for you to explore uh and look more into. go to a
local store and see if you can try it because so much of what makes a good
mouse is just your comfort and your preference. Um, but this one has the
juice. This one has what it takes uh to be very very good. The one important
detail uh whenever you're making a purchase decision is price. It's $170,
which is not out of the realm of other top tier gaming mice. And this has the
juice, it has the good stuff, all the bells and whistles you could want, but
it is not in the category of bang for your buck. And so if that's what you're
looking for, this is the mouse for you. But if you're someone who's after the
best stuff they got and you like purple like me, this is a really good option to
explore. So check out the ROG Harp 2 Ace at the link in the video description.
The Demon 1 version is coming out in 2026, but you can get the regular black
one right now. And if you want to check out some of their other mice, they have
a cool little campaign going on called the Find My Ace, which will help you
find the ROG mouse that might best suit you. So check that out at the link in
the video description.
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