Steelseries WoW Catacylsm Mouse Software Overview & Impressions Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,977 words · ~9 min read
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all right so this is the wow cataclysm Mouse and I've actually got one of my
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co-workers who moved to our Ontario office helping me with this little
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filming session the first thing I noticed about this guy is it's huge so
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there it is next to my incredibly beat up and rugged looking G9 so you can uh
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there's there's some distinct differences between the uh the the
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crafted sort of worn out finish on the
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cataclysm Mouse and the disgusting War
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out finish on my old G9 so the first thing I want to show you guys and the
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reason I have him here holding the camera so that I can actually operate the mouse while uh while he points the
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camera at things the first thing I noticed is it's really really large so
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it's actually not I'd say it's not quite comfortable for me to reach all of the
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buttons like I can't really reach that one I can just barely reach that one and
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if you have slightly larger hands than me that's probably a good thing and
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you'll find this mouse quite comfortable I think the overall shape is kind of
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like the aari laser and one of the other things that I did notice is that not
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everyone cares about this but I have a hard time picking up the mouse to to
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move it if I reach the edge of my mouse pad without mashing the buttons on the
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side so that's something you're going to want to watch out for if you do have larger hands it might not be such a
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problem I downloading the driver package right now it's 26 Megs so I hope there's
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some pretty good functionality in there and I will show you guys that uh in a
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few minutes but this is just the initial Impressions after putting it it on my uh
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SX mouse pad which by the way it Glides on like nothing I have ever seen before
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it probably Glides better on this mouse pad than my aari laser my G9 or any
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other mouse that I have thrown at it tracking is already dramatically better
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than the original wow Mouse which honestly I really didn't like it's hard
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to quantify but I didn't really like the feel of the laser when it tracked
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whereas this one is quite smooth quite responsive it they've definitely
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upgraded it a lot in that regard okay so the first thing that the driver
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installation did is it updated my firmware and then it installed itself so
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I've got lots of functionality here so first thing I want to show you guys is
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some of the basic features so over here
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uh the default CPI value was at about 800 I turned it up a little bit and then
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I turned the sensitivity down in order to get the movement just right for me
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like I said I love the way this mouse tracks though it's very smooth and it
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Glides great on the SX mouse pad all
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right so we've got the pointer speed sensitivity okay so that's all of your
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basic controls you don't have quite the level of granularity that you do with a
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more um twitch FPS gaming oriented Mouse
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from steel series like the Z or the aari laser but you do have that basic stuff
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and it's still better than what you're going to get with a generic Mouse by a
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long shot now where this mouse really gets complicated is all of this stuff so
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let's start with the colors I wish I could show you guys this in the dark but
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I don't actually have a way to turn off the lights in my office so here's one
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thing I'm going to do I'm just going to turn that down so that we can actually focus on this there we go so you can see
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the color intensity and pulsation so color changes the well the color so you
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can see I have it set to red right now intensity changes the brightness and
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pulsation so I'm going to show you guys like a low pulsation compared to what I
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had before so you can see it actually
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turns off and then comes on quite slowly so that's kind of depends what kind of a
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look you're going for colors you have pretty much every option under the Sun
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so I'm going to change it to Blue there it is blue I'll show you guys
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a couple of the different colors uh why don't we do green let's see what like a
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like a bright green looks like there's a
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green looks pretty cool I could kind of do this all day
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this is the kind of feature that I could like play with forever on a mouse
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there's yellow pretty cool okay so here I'm
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going to turn that back to normal all right and then there's a whole bunch of stuff here as well so here are all of
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the different things that we can assign to buttons so first of all you've got
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all of your built-in wow stuff because World of Warcraft has some pretty
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specific rules for how you are allowed to bind actions to keys and what is
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considered cheating and what is not so this allows you to just simply bind
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World of Warcraft actions to the mouse buttons without actually binding like
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keyboard keys to your mouse buttons it is built right into wow you can actually
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configure this Within game as well should you so desire so you can bind
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game commands to a button you can bind change CPI commands to a button this is
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cool check this out CPI up CPI down so you can assign that to whatever you want
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most gaming mice have actually here G9 is a perfect
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example have dedicated buttons for that
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and a lot of them don't actually allow you to change them to different buttons
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or bind those to something else if you don't really care about changing your
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sensitivity so that's a pretty neat feature that they've built right into the driver there's also change profile
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so you can set a button to change your profile up profile down or even assign
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them to specific profiles so your profiles allow you to have up to 10
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different sets of bound actions to your
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buttons on the mouse so if I decided okay well I'm going to use like uh let's
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say these two for like profile one and two that way yeah I sacrific those two
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profiles but but I allow myself to bind
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two entirely different sets of commands to these ones which are really more
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convenient to reach anyway for my hands and you know two things here two things
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here so it really gives you a lot more flexibility depending on how the mouse
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is most comfortably used for you so that's a pretty cool thing too and then
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finally oops I clicked the wrong thing finally custom macros so you can create
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new ones yeah yeah yeah blah blah blah wow you're not allowed to use macros in
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wow thank you don't show me that again so why don't I just create a macu macro
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that's uh copy paste
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or rather copy okay so here we
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go so okay so
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enter okay okay I don't have I don't quite have it figured out how the macro
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recording works so give me two seconds here guys all right I figured it out so
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there's a couple different ways you can create custom macros and really I don't
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play wow so this is the function that would pretty much sell this mouse to me
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okay so I've gone no delay I've created some custom macros all you do is type A
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name just click on the box press the keys you want and then click okay so
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I've created copy paste and cut you use the convenient little chart here to say
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okay which buttons go where and then you can just map them like this so if I
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click here and then click copy and I can change it to whatever I want so I want
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that to be a custom macro copy then I can have that functionality with that
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button so all that's really left now is to just show you guys the functionality
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that this enables for the average office worker yeah you might look weird for
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having one of these on your desk in the office but I mean come on okay I've
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already got you know g15 keyboard I have four monitors at my desk so I couldn't
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look much weirder so I'm not going to worry too much about it so I type something uh
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testing this all right so I've built in
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uh copy cut and paste to my mouse uh
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should be no addition so okay I hit I hit copy right now there we are copy and
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and then you know enter enter you know you could build in like you've got so
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many buttons here you could put enter you could put space bar you could put
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anything that you use frequently just bind it to the mouse so I'm going to
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click this button here and then I'm going to paste he that's so cool so yeah
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here you know what here I'm going to show you guys real time the uh the
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creation process so new uh okay so we're
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going to make it enter I don't want any
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delays okay and and then all I want is enter and then okay so now I'm going to
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find a button that I want so I think button number four should be pretty good for enter then I go over to this
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interface here I click custom macros I go to enter uh apply okay so I have
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applied that to the mouse so now what I can do is I can press enter enter enter
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paste enter enter paste enter enter paste and then if I want to I can go up
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here I can I can actually cut instead of
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uh copy if I'm hitting the right one it'll take a little bit of practice
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getting used to where all the buttons are but then I could uh press enter
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enter paste so hold on let me try that again cut oh I don't know if the I don't
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know if oh I might have bound cut wrong but anyway pretty cool hey guys so that
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is my overall impressions of the steel series MMO gaming mouse the new
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cataclysm Edition basically I think it's
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just so much of an improvement over the old one which I looked at back at launch
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in terms of the software as well as the hardware and I actually really like this
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I may just find myself replacing my uh trusty well-used G9 for this at work
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because the uh the productivity of this just looks phenomenal oh yeah not to
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mention there's memory on board so you can save your profiles and carry them
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around with you pretty sweet don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for
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