Logitech brought us here to Switzerland to check out the G900 Chaos Spectrum. An
interesting looking mouse, but with some really bold claims, especially when
comparing it to a wired mouse, which traditionally would have been a lot
better in like almost every possible metric. They claim, however, that it has
now reversed. They're claiming that the G900 is better than a wired mouse. Let's
do some science and figure it out.
So, we're starting off in the RF Labs. This is probably one of the most important things about this mouse is its
wireless performance. That's what they've been trumping really, really hard this whole time. So, we need to
benchmark it. We're going to test it with huge amounts of interference,
without interference, all this different kind of stuff, and see how it compares
to other mice. We're going to do that by coming inside of an anooic chamber, but
this time it's not an anooic chamber in terms of sound. It's an anooic chamber
in terms of signals. So RF, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, all that kind of stuff isn't
going to be able to leave the room once the door is closed and isn't going to be
able to come on into the inside. But to
cause that interference, we have this antenna right here, which is going to be
shooting out massive amounts of amplified RF, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth
signals. What they did was they went to a LAN of about 300 people, measured the
signal noise, and then amplified that by a little bit more to make a crazy worst
case scenario. Over on the other side of the room, there's all this foam kind of
stuff everywhere. That's so that signals aren't bouncing around throughout the
room, and you just get a solid trajectory, so it's better and more
consistent for measurement. Here we have the mouse rig. So, this is a jogger that
keeps a pad moving under the mouse so that the uh actual sensor is constantly
firing and sending information, which is important because you need the mouse to be actually working. And then the mouse
is held in place above that. Across the
room a little bit right here is the receiver. So, this guy is actually
talking to the mouse. That wire goes through a tube to the outside and then
we're measuring actually the tracking of the mouse out there where the actual
interesting stuff is. So, let's check that out. So, as you can see back here
on the spectrum analyzer, they have a crazy amount of noise being fired in
that room right now. But over here, you
can see a tracking tester where it's just tracing the cursor movement of the
mouse as that jogger is going around. And it is in a very I'm going to reset
this. You can see it drawing. It isn't a very consistent kind of pattern, which
is good. There's going to be some drift from the sensor, but that's actually fine. All sensors have some amount of
drift. Um, but the good thing about it is that it's consistent. It's not going
all over the place. And if you're not making robotic exact circular movements,
it's going to be extremely predictable where everything's going to be anyway. So, this is a good sign. And this is for
the G900. So, now we're testing the Razer Mamba. Exact same scenario. This
time we're going to try it with the signal noise on and with the signal
noise off so you can see what it is in a more perfect scenario. The Mamba is
currently set up and good to go. Powered on. Jogger is running. Antenna is over
here. Let's go check the results. All right, so the Mamba 2015 is hooked up
inside. That's what's running right now on the tracking tester. As you can see
on the spectrum analyzer in the back, there's nothing really going on. That's
because we have the antenna off. So, what I'm going to do is come back here,
crank the antenna on. So, I'm going to turn this dial a little bit there.
That's all good to go. The spectrum is now crazy. You'll see it actually moves
where it's where it's kind of firing huge amounts of spectrum. So, it's not
going to be a consistent problem. You can already see on here. I'm going to
reset it so that we have some more room to actually see it get messed up. But,
it's jumped all over the place. These lines that you see is where it stopped
tracking completely for a second and then engaged back in somewhere else. You
can see that instead of just simple sensor drift, it's actually jumping all
over the place. I'm going to reset it here. It's going okay at the start, but
then you see one big jump there. I'll wait for it to do a few more.
There's one jump right there. So, there's going to be bad spots. Sometimes
it'll be okay because maybe it's away from where the antenna is firing huge
amounts of information. But then other times, as you saw before, it might
actually start jumping all over the place because it's kind of getting overpowered, which is not very good. So,
there's a line there. There's another line there. It's getting a little bit worse now. Yeah. So, that's the Mamba
2015. Let's move on. All right. Next up on the chopping block is the Oraoros. A
little bit of an older mouse. It's currently running on the jogger. Its
sensor is currently over here. We're good to go. One other little bit of
information that I want to give you guys is this is the antenna that's receiving
the signal. So when we show you guys the spectrum analyzer, this is the thing
that's outputting that information just in case you're interested. So next up,
Razer Orbus. That's on the inside right now. You see it going with nothing
really happening on the spectrum analyzer. Seems fine. A little bit of
sensor drift, which is completely normal. Now let's hurt it a little bit.
So going to turn things up.
There we go. Spectrum analyzer is going like crazy. Stuff sweeping across like
we saw before. Moving back. Now that
happy little bit of sensor drift is no longer really very happy. As you can
see, there's already two major jumps and it's completely changed direction. Three
major jumps now. Yeah. So, not the clean nice patterned
thing that we saw with the G900. It's a little bit more of a mess. Now looking
back, there's 1 2 3 4 5 six major jumps,
I think. And instead of just drifting nicely upwards like it was before,
you're going up and then cranking way over to the right. And it's probably
going to screw up again later on. Not the end of the world, but not perfect.
Last, but potentially not least, is the Sensei. So, we have the Sensei rigged up
on the jogger, and we have its receiver on the other side. Something to notice
about the configuration of things as well. The receivers are always placed in
line with the very front of the mouse. And the way that the jogger works,
there's little arms going all the way around so that it can hold it in place
perfectly despite the movement of the actual jogger. And it doesn't have to
press any buttons. So, it's not pressing left or right buttons. It's not pressing the back button. So, it's not doing any
of that kind of stuff. And it's holding it in place, which is pretty cool. So,
the Sensei isn't doing so great. You can
see on the spectrum analyzer there's nothing really going on. We basically
have it off. Um, and that's not just
simple normal nice unified sensor drift.
That's quite messy. Let's start over again somewhere clean. Give it a nice
clean slate and then hit it with the antenna as hard as we can go
just to see what happen. Wow. Okay. So, this one
that is just that is horrible. So, one of the interesting things that this one
does that none of the other ones actually had a problem with is you can
see the lines get kind of squiggly and they start doing weird spirals and
actually making things that aren't at all the shape of what it's doing, which
is a huge unusable problem. Again,
something to remember, this is an insane worst case scenario. It's beyond like a
normal kind of worst case scenario because they went from a like 300 person
computer LAN, which is an insane scenario for any wireless device, then
made it a little bit harder. But this thing is completely failing. The other
ones were failing pretty hard, and the G900 had zero issues whatsoever. So, I
think that's pretty cool. So, to create the device, the G900 that beats all of
the other devices in this crazy worst case scenario test, it takes a lot of
things. skills, science, testing, all that kind of stuff. It's not just buy
the better thing, put the better thing in, and then you have a better object.
It's not that simple. So, what they do is they use simulators in order to test
what the actual end result is going to be. That's not always perfect, and just
putting something in there and running a simulator won't magically solve all of your problems. That's where the skill
component comes in. They're able to get their RF simulator results to be
extremely similar to their actual measurement through skill. That's
extremely important because it helps with your iteration process. That way,
you don't have to build a new full device every single time you want to
test it, which is going to help a lot because they have to release a product
sometime. Then they also have to pay attention to where different components
within the mouse go, like the battery. battery is a huge deal. With some older
mice that even Logitech had, the positioning of the battery could cause
weak spots in your signal as it went around. But the sizing and the
positioning of this battery is a little bit better. They they have it on a different Z-axis within the mouse so
that the emitter should be able to have a strong signal going all the way
around. Super cool. Next up, we've got the sensor lab. So, what we're going to
be doing here is testing motion latency. So, how long it takes for you a movement
of the mouse to actually go to the computer. We're not worried about the less rest of the latency in the system.
This is just what Logitech would have control over. So, we're going to do that
by coming in here and using this turntable. The service on here is just
like a Steel Series QCK type surface. So, probably something that's pretty
common in someone's home. We're going to start with the Logitech G900, which is
already on here. It's not torqued down. It's not too light. It's just kind of
exactly how much someone would be pushing down on the surface cuz you
don't want to grind against the mouse pad. You don't want to do anything like that. That would mess up with the
results. Next up, we'll have a Razer Chroma, which is actually a wired mouse.
So, we'll compare it against that. And then we have a Mamba 2015, which is
another competitor wireless mouse. There's a little bit of plus minus here.
that it could be plus 0 to 1 millisecond
or anywhere in between due to polling rate. But spoiler alert, it's going to
win by more than that. So, it doesn't really matter. Another thing I forgot to
mention is that the mouse is placed very specifically on the turntable mouse pad.
It's placed at a 45° angle so that X and Y axis are contributing the exact same
amount. They have to be very precise about these things cuz extra variables
like that could screw with something in a way that would mess up your results.
So they have the right amount of tension down, they have the right angle, and
they have a huge amount of samples, all of which are good. All right. So we're
going to run our first test here. You can go right now. And what you'll see on
the screen in a moment is it's going to accumulate data over time. So what's
actually going to be displayed graphically is rounded a little bit just
more for presentation so that you can kind of see whereabout things are. But
below that is more of the hardcore math. No rounding and you can see the mean.
So, we have to wait a little bit for it to gather some data and then we'll give
you a more accurate mean. So, after taking 33 samples of movement, the mean
latency was 4.79
milliseconds. So, that might not sound impressive yet, but just wait till we
try the other mice. So, we're about to run test two. This is against the Razer
Chroma, which is actually a wired mouse. You can see here in the device info, it
is in fact the Razer Chroma. We're going to be comparing it against our previous
file, which was running the G900. So, we're going to have blue data showing up
on the chart. That's for the previous mouse. And the green data you, as you
can see in here, color green, will be actually for the Chroma. So, let's run
the test. So, we have our first result, the G900 versus the Razer Chroma. As you
can see here, the green is much higher than the blue, which means that the
green lost. This is motion latency. So, you want a low number. As you can see,
the median for the G900 was 4.8, as we
already discussed. The blue is the same numbers that we had running on our
previous test, but the mean for the chroma is about 6.88,
which is 2 milliseconds more, which is a lot because you have to pay attention to
each segment of your latency throughout the entire entire uh equation. So, your
graphics card, your monitor, your mouse, all that kind of stuff. And reducing
each one by relatively small amounts is
a huge deal. So, you can get the total number lower. So having Logitech's
number of the input from their mouse due to motion lower is good. And that means
that it's lower than a wired mouse, which is pretty damn impressive. Another
kind of cool thing to look at is that the lowest, so the fastest rate at which
the motion was able to go from the mouse to the computer for the Razer mouse was
about 5.5, which tied the highest or
worst result from the G900. Just kind of a fun little tidbit. So this time the
mouse we are testing is the Razer Mamba. As you can see in the top, we're
comparing it yet again against the G900. So the compare with file is the original
G900 test that we ran again. We're doing 33 33 trials, the exact same that we're
doing every time. This time it's going to show up as pink. So yeah, let's get
started. Okay, so we're done testing the Mamba 2015. And this is kind of why I
haven't liked wireless mice in the past and probably why a lot of people haven't
either. Look at the data. It's a mess. You've got results from 0.5, which are
junk data. We'll explain why that's junk data in a moment, all the way up to
18.5, which is probably caused due to
lag in the transmission of data over the wireless signal. If it if it misses a
report and then has to do it later, it's going to be massively delayed. your mean
is at about 9.3 which is much higher than the 4.79
of the G900 but probably more within the
actual capabilities of the sensor. The problems with the junk data and the
really really high late reported data is
more due to the implementation of the sensor instead of the standard
capabilities. Last but not least, we have click latency. So realistically,
what all of these different stations have been explaining is that we don't
necessarily need to be afraid of wireless anymore. I was afraid of
wireless before, but I think that was justified before this mouse came out
because, as we've seen, there were some problems with wireless mice. Now, click
latency would be a huge one if it was worse than say a wired mouse. So, what
we're going to do here is actually measure that. So, I'll explain how we'll do that. Now, they have a wire going
into here, but you can see that it's not the actual normal one. This is wired
directly into the switch instead of actually um the mouse itself so that you
have your wireless adapter still running. That has been done on the G900,
a Rival 300, and a Razer Chroma. So, you
can see there's two wires going into each one of these cuz these are more naturally wired mice. Now, I'm going to
move these guys out of the way. This uh
wire from the switch is going into a signal adapter. This then sends it to a
latency measurer. So what this one is recording off the bat is exactly when
the uh switch is pressed. Um and then it
starts a timer from that point in time to when this adapter is able to send the
signal to the USB analyzer. So that's when it actually receives the signal
that the switch was pressed because that one isn't wired in. That's a wireless
signal. So you get to see the total latency of the mouse within your system.
Similar to how we were testing total latency of the mouse in previous
sections. This isn't the total latency until something would appear on your
screen because there's other things within that equation like your graphics card and your monitor and whatnot, but
this is what Logitech can control. So in order to actually run the test, they set
up this kind of game thing where you go click on the lit up circle. This is just
causing you to click a number of times at different intervals so it can be
recorded over here. Much like the motion testing, motion latency testing that we
did earlier. It'll show up a graph which will have some slightly rounded numbers,
but we'll give a good visual representation of the results. So, we're going to run this about 30 clicks and
then get a result after that.
So, as you can see graphically, our average is at about 4.5. It kind of all
huddles in a nice bell curve right around that area. And our mathematical
not really rounded as much average is at about 4.3. Surprisingly similar to the
latency in our motion input latency test. So yeah, let's move on and try the
other mice. The first contender is the Steeler Rival 300, which has its
firmware updated to the most recent one since last Friday. It's a wired mouse,
so theoretically up until now, it should be faster. So we'll see if it reigns and
holds that title. Let's begin the results and then compare it against the
G900. Okay, so looking up here, we can see the
blue data is from the Logitech G900. The
green data is from the Steel Series Rival 300. Um, you can see again the
mean or general average from the Logitech G900 was about 4.5 and now with
the Rival 300, it's kind of less of a
more perfect bell curve. The mean looks somewhere around 7.5, though. Moving
over to the actual math of things, it looks like the average is, yeah, about
7.6, which is a pretty significant increase, which is not good. You want a
lower number again. It's more like golf. So, it's not over yet. Let's try one
more. So, the program can only store two sets of data at a time. So, for round
three, I'm actually going to have to redo the G900. So, here we go. G900 test
two, and then the G900 test two will be
compared against the Razer Chroma.
Okay, so that's not really very good for
the other team. Uh, looking at the graphical average now, it's probably at
like a little bit below 11. And uh,
yeah, that's about right. 10.9 milliseconds compared to 4.29.
Sounds like wireless wins. Okay, that was actually kind of awesome. Uh, I'm
pretty convinced. Let me know what you guys think in the comments down below or on Twitter at Luke Lafr. Thank you to
Logitech for sending us here. If you guys want to see more stuff, click up
here. We've got videos that we show. Usually, this goes at the end of the
outro. This I'm switching the game up. It's going to the beginning this time.
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