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pabreview: Razer mice

July 21, 2010, 09:44:17 pm by pablo d

I’ve been on mouse overload for the last few weeks. Playtech lent me a couple of their Razer mice to play with (a Mamba and an Abyssus), then our Battlefield team received a boxful of Razer Diamondbacks because we’re awesome and stuff, and then I found myself tinkering with the Razer Deathadder on the stage PCs at xLAN. Make that a Razer overload as well.

Anyhoo, now that I’ve familiarised myself with them all, I will introduce you to them one by one, and give you my personal opinion on them all...

Diamondback 3G.

The cheapest of the bunch with an NZ RRP of $65, the Diamondback 3G is an updated version of the hugely popular original Diamondback mouse released a few years ago. Sadly, I don’t think it has been enjoying the same success as its predecessor, most likely because the gaming mouse market has since been saturated.

On paper it is almost identical to the ubiquitous Logitech MX518, with its 1800DPI infrared sensor, programmable side buttons, 5.8 megapixel tracking, maximum acceleration of 15g and 125Hz USB polling rate all exactly the same. The only real point of difference in the specs is that the Diamondback is ambidextrous whilst the MX518 is soley right-handed. Oh, and the Razer mouse has a sexy blue glow around it.

I really really wanted to like this mouse as I had heard people rave about it for a long time, however it just wasn’t a good match for me. Perhaps I have oddly shaped or sized hands, but it was too small to control with my palm, and too big to claw-grip. Having a long and narrow footprint also caused it to capsize slightly during fast movement.

Lastly, being ambidextrous, there are two extra buttons on each side of the mouse in exactly the same place. This is a good thing for the thumb buttons (to throw grenades and suchlike in-game), but my pinky finger kept accidentally hitting the buttons on the other side. I ended up disabling those buttons so no huge drama, but it was still annoying.

Performance-wise it was fine: the buttons are nice and snappy with good tactile response, it has good glide, and the rubberised grips don’t get slippery or sticky after long gaming sessions. It’s a very light mouse which I actually prefer, but it also has a cheap plasticky feel to it.

Overall, I wouldn’t choose it over the likes of the Logitech MX518, but some of that decision is based on personal preference so don’t let me discourage you from at least checking it out if you’re looking for a gaming mouse in this price range.

Abyssus.

Next on the list, weighing in at $85 (which is odd, considering that it’s listed at a cheaper price than the Diamondback on Razer’s Australian website) you’ve got the Abyssus.

This mouse has ups and downs when compared to the Diamondback. On the plus side it has got an upgraded 3.5G infrared sensor with almost twice the precision at 3500DPI, 1000Hz USB ‘Ultrapolling’, and a sweet illuminated blue Razer logo where your palm sits (the rest of the technical specs are the same as the Diamondback).

The downside, however, is that it doesn’t have any side buttons, the “On-The-Fly” sensitivity adjustment is on the bottom of the mouse, and it is tiny by comparison. To be fair though, the size might not be an issue for some gamers – in fact it was fine for me because I prefer a claw-grip, but there is no way that the average sized hand would be able to comfortably palm-control the Abyssus.

So I gave this mouse a fair crack at some Bad Company 2 online, and the positives it does offer where definitely appreciated – namely the higher precision and the ability to claw-grip it. Also, of course, the basic Razer awesomeness is still there like the Hyperesponse buttons and rubberised grip. I’m sure the 1000Hz USB polling helped with the response of the mouse as well, although that’s a hard thing to quantify.

I just couldn’t get past the shortcomings though, specifically the lack of side buttons and the bottom-mounted sensitivity adjustment switches. I can’t remember the last FPS game I played where I didn’t have ‘throw grenade’ assigned to the side button on my mouse so it was almost like missing a finger.

Also, switching sensitivity “on the fly” is supposed to be seamless, i.e. something that can be done in the heat of battle, but with bottom-mounted switches you need to stop what you’re doing, turn the mouse upside down, change the setting (hard set to 450, 1800 and 3500 DPI) then resume gaming.

All up, I have trouble recognising the Abyssus as a true gaming mouse. I’m confused as to why Razer would put an upgraded sensor in it but then remove other, more crucial elements. Moving on…

DeathAdder.

Ah, yes, now to the good stuff. Basically, if you have $115 to spend on a mouse, just shut your face and go buy one of these. Now.

I suppose I should at least qualify that statement I suppose. Firstly, the form factor is, I feel, a serious improvement over the two mice above. It is asymmetrical (available in both right and left-hand editions) with a lean perfectly tailored to the natural resting angle of your hand.

It’s also a decently big mouse with good weight behind it, and I found I could both claw-grip and palm-control it quite comfortably. Inside the mouse is basically the Abyssus – 3500DPI, 1000Hz Ultrapolling and all the rest. It also has a braided fibre cable, which tangles a lot less and looks a lot cooler than the cheap plastic covering of the other two mice.

One minor gripe I would have to make however would be the sensitivity adjustment. There is no dedicated button for changing the DPI settings – you have to assign one of the 5 main buttons to this, the best choice being one of the side buttons. In games like Modern Warfare, I like to use one side button for ‘change grenade type’ and the other for ‘throw grenade’, so you would have to sacrifice one of these to get the on-the-fly functionality, but it is not a problem in other games like Bad Company 2 with only one type of grenade available.

So to me, the DeathAdder just ‘felt’ right. When a mouse is so well-designed that you don’t have to consciously focus on operating it in-game, you know that is worth some serious brownie points. I’d ~~steal one of these from the xLAN stage PCs~~ buy one of these without hesitation if that was the price range I was looking at.

If I had slightly more dosh, however, I would go for the…

Mamba.

This mouse is like the DeathAdder, except wireless. And on steroids.

Gone is the 3500DPI infrared sensor, and in comes the 5600DPI Laser sensor. At this point I should probably mention that having a DPI this high is absolutely stupid. You would perform about a dozen 360 degree spins in game after moving the mouse just a few inches unless you’ve cranked the in-game sensitivity right down to compensate, but even then you will start to experience the dreaded negative-acceleration curse.

Having to resort to 1800-3500DPI doesn’t detract from the Mamba experience though – with the main attraction of course being the fact that it is wireless. I don’t know about you, but I hate the cord on my mouse, it always gets in the friggin’ way. People have been put off wireless gaming mice in past due to wireless lag, which is totally understandable given that most wireless mice are crap. I spent almost a full hour switching back and forth between the wired DeathAdder, the Mamba in wired mode, and the Mamba in wireless mode, just to see whether I could perceive any lag.

The result? Well, I *think* there is a slight perceivable difference, but that could be a placebo effect from my brain telling me to expect some wireless lag. Still, the fact that I can’t conclusively tell a difference should say something about its wireless performance. And yes, you can operate it in wired mode – just yank the USB cable from out of the back of the receiver and plug it straight into the mouse, simple as that. Razer claim up to 14 hours of continuous gaming out of one charge, and in my experience that is fairly accurate.

One thing which may be hit and miss about the Mamba is its weight, which is added to by the battery and the inner wireless technical bits. I personally didn’t find it too heavy, but neither would I have complained had it been any lighter. There also seems to be many reports about bugs and glitches with older versions of firmware. The first thing I did when I got the mouse was install the latest drivers and firmware, so I can’t give you my experiences with any of these sadly, but I can report that I didn’t experience any in the first place.

At the end of the day, does it justify the $229 price tag? Every cent. Especially considering that it launched not too long ago for $349.

Well there you have it: four Razer mice, four verdicts. Thanks for reading, and my thanks to PlayTech for giving me more toys to play with.

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on3 Review: The OCZ Vertex 2 Solid State Drive – Now with Sand!

July 20, 2010, 03:16:56 pm by philo-sofa

This puts me in an awkward position: the other day I had a discussion with the editor of Atomic magazine, not that I know him (things don’t work that way here at on3 – I was arguably just trolling their forums). The point of discussion was a whether a banal factual review was better than a Gonzo or ‘hippie reporting feelings about stuff on acid’ review. I adopted the ‘analytical > all’ position.... and yet this 2.5” sliver of silicon is making me think I got it all wrong. What makes a good SSD worth the entry fee is, as it turns out, feeling. Now you can’t communicate feeling electronically, no matter how many emoticons your forum offers, so in lieu I’ve settled on the next best thing: producing a set of videos. The first is from a very fast traditional drive (the WD Black 640GB), the second from the Vertex 2 – each loading an identical set of 10 programs simultaneously:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT75O20uXf8" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT75O20uXf8</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pjXRaCvyF4" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pjXRaCvyF4</a>

What stands out here is just how much faster the Vertex 2 moves: Windows starts in half the time, whilst programs take 25%-50% as long to load as with a traditional hard drive - it’s also all done in complete silence (SSDs are composed of memory chips, with no moving parts). It’s a genuinely bizarre experience, a bit like driving a Mercedes-McLaren. I’ll come back to just how fast OCZ’s new supercar offering is compared to the competition shortly, but first a look at the ‘why’ of Solid State Drives as a whole.

Turntables 101

Waaay back in the day the PC was many things – most notably at that point, they were slow and beige. However in a strange way, the dinosaur of old was also lightning fast – loading a program often took under a second and the OS but a few seconds. This stemmed not so much from the hardware itself as that the average program was perhaps 4 Megabytes. If we fast forward 20 years CPU speeds move from 100 MHz to 4 GHz and memory from 64 MB to 4 GB, but programs increase from 4 Megabytes to 4 Gigabytes in size. That’s the kicker, whilst everything else in your PC is exponentially quicker the hard disk is maybe only four times as fast as it was in the 90’s, yet it now loads a thousand times as much data. The mechanical drive is designed like a turntable, and thus has to access a specific place to get to data - this vinyl-age hardware thus spends half its time locating information, not actually loading it. As a bonus kick in the teeth, a hard drive will generally move data around no faster than 90 MB a second and for a 4GB program that’s slow. The upshot is that however fast the processor and however your OS tries to hide it, the HDD is the bottleneck on every computer built today.

Enter the SSD

This was an obvious problem and thankfully there was an obvious solution - putting data onto memory chips. Silicon didn’t need to rotate and so didn’t take forever to find a file; in theory it could also read and write data much faster than a hard drive ever could. As is often the case though, initial models were disappointing from a variety of perspectives, amongst them the ruinous expense. The price was a direct result of expensive memory, whilst the often low and inconsistent performance came from untested hardware controlling that memory - early drives generally ‘stuttered’ - causing programs to lockup for a few seconds.

It wasn’t until Intel released their X-25M drives that the situation changed significantly. Half the puzzle was solved and Intel finally brought us an SSD that could free the masses from mechanical drives, assuming the masses all had $NZ 1000 to spend on an 80 GB drive - monopoly is such a beautiful thing, no? As a result of Intel being, quite frankly dicks about their pricing, the great masses still weren’t able to get their (largely unwashed admittedly) paws on an SSD. The water finally broke on the SSD revolution in early 2009 - it falling to a memory company to bring the first non-Intel performance offering to market and with it, real competition. Equipped with the Indilix ‘Barefoot’ controller, OCZ’s original Vertex galloped heroically into action like Mel Gibson in Braveheart (only with less racism and likely a lot more respect for historical accuracy), and within a few months OCZ had everything tweaked right. The original Vertex was at this point close to an Intel SSD in terms of speed, it also never stuttered - running just as flawlessly as Intel’s offerings. As a result prices fell (you can now buy an advanced 80GB Intel drive for a third the price you could in 2008) and a trickle of identical SSD’s using the Barefoot controller burrowed their way out of clean-rooms and into performance PC’s everywhere.

The Vertex 2 – OCZ Contends the Performance Crown

The drive we have on review today is the successor to the original Vertex – the imaginatively named Vertex 2. Slight ribbing aside I can see why OCZ reused the name – within the SSD world the ‘Vertex’ carries a lot of cultural cache – this drive has a lot to live up to. It’s 50GB capacity is designed to take Windows and a few important programs , with a traditional hard drive for storage and the rest. Hardware wise the $NZ 330 Vertex 2 and its slightly slower $NZ 300 Agility 2 cousin pack the shinily new Sandforce SF-1200 controller chip. I could go on (and on and on) about the technical trickery in this controller but at the end of the day the proof of the pudding is not in the details, but in the speed of consumption – and this is a lot faster than the original Vertex. It’s faster even than the newest Intel X25M, hell it’s faster in most cases than the $NZ800-for-32GB, SRS-business server-grade Intel X25E. Now don your nerd hats folks, I’m about to specify exactly how fast that is!

Test System & Methodology

Intel Core i7 860 @ 4.0 GHz
2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 CL8-8-8-24 1T
MSI P55-GD65
Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 @ 9000/5200
Corsair HX-620

All drives were connected via the onboard Intel ICH10R controller, in AHCI mode for the Vertex 2 and IDE mode for the WD Black. A fresh build of Windows 7 Professional was made onto the Vertex 2, drivers and programs were installed and TRIM confirmed as being enabled using Intels SSD Toolbox. This installation was then ‘imaged’ onto the WD Black using Seagate Seatools, and a defrag performed on the WD Black. All timed tests were run ten times each, with the average (mean) value being reported. HD TACH, IOMeter and YouTube demonstrations were each run five times, with the most representative test shown. As a side note, a look through other reviews shows that HDTACH ‘Sequential Read Speeds’ for the Vertex 2 are divided into two categories: ~190 MB/s and ~220 MB/s, of which this review fits into the former. Testing on another ICH10R as well as an ICH9 controller showed no change in speeds – however the consistency in IOMeter and other tests between reviews suggests that this may is an issue with HDTach, not the drive.

HDTach 3.0.4.0 - 32mb (long zones) Sequential Test:

IOMeter (2006-07-27 Build) Test:

These are synthetic benchmarks, but unlike graphics card synthetics they’re pretty much on the mark. Both IOMeter and HDTach drive down into something called ‘Kernel Mode’, essentially an attempt to bypass the operating system and connect directly with the drive itself to determine its true performance. The results show the Vertex 2 to not only be much faster than the WD Black, but the fastest consumer SSD there is today bar none. One of these will grow your epenis exponentially – this is a scientifically verified fact. In keeping however with our new age desire to also talk about feelings over a cup of fair-trade ‘chai’ and an ethnic quiche, it’s just as important to boil this down to what happens when you use the drive in real life:

General System Performance Test:

Again, these numbers are as good as they come, at an average of 20% faster than the Intel X25M G2 – this is indeed the new performance king - as such the Vertex 2 represents a watershed for the market. The blazing speed is primarily a result of the Vertex 2’s low latency (how long it takes to find data) – that being less than a hundredth that of the WD Black, this combined with moving data at two or more times the speed truly results in a gulf in capabilities between the two. To put all this into relief, if you were to compare a RAID 0 array of six Western Digital Velociraptors using the “Real Life Program Load Times” table above, not one of the benchmarks would come out in favour of the Velociraptors – in fact most would show times pretty close to the WD Black. This reiterates that latency, the ‘time taken to find the data in the first place’ is what SSD’s are all about.

Further Testing – Idle Garbage Collection (no seriously) and an Achillies Toe

One of the less well known factors affecting the Solid State Drive is that performance on an SSD will degrade hugely. There are two methods employed to prevent this, the first being Windows 7’s TRIM capability, which engages automatically on all compatible SSDs (the Vertex 2 being one). However for those using RAID or any other OS, TRIM is unavailable - you’ll then need to rely on the drives own ‘Idle Garbage Collection’. The latter option is of variable quality, depending on the Controller and Firmware. Performance testing with an install of Windows XP and ‘junk data’ showed the Vertex 2 to be possibly the most resilient SSD there is to performance degradation over time – if you’re planning on using RAID or an older OS, this is the drive you want.

In fact the Vertex 2 has only one quite minor caveat attached to it – the Sandforce controller compresses data during transfer to speed things up. As a result, if you’re one of the 0.01% of people whose workload consists primarily of compressed data (for SQL bunnies it might) this drive will be slower than an Intel. For everyone else the Vertex 2 remains the faster option.

The Lay of the SSD Landscape in Mid 2010

The only true competitor to this drive is the Crucial C300, at least until the October–December releases of the new Indilix controller and G3 Intel drives. A current Intel drive will give performance not all that far from OCZs and they aren’t a bad choice, however as the Vertex 2s cost essentially the same per GB of storage, it’s clear choice you should chose. In contrast, the Crucial C300 is a SATA III drive, and can stand toe-to-toe on performance with the Vertex 2 if you have SATA III. Should the C300 ever reach NZ in volume and with good pricing it would become a true alternative in price/performance, however at present mark-ups are just too big for it to be competitive. Similarly, whilst there are other drives shipping in NZ with the Sandforce controller (A-Data & Corsair) the OCZ drive is both the fastest, the mostly widely available and... the cheapest. Not really such a bad combo that....

On price then, the Vertex 2 stands up to the competition. All models also come with a three year warranty, a 2.5” to 3.5” converter (SSDs are generally laptop drive sized) and OCZ’s best in class firmware updates. Also note that a 50GB Vertex 2 or Agility 2 drive can similarly be upgraded to 60GB by updating their firmware to v1.10 - 100GB (~$NZ630) and ($1,100) 200GB models can be upgraded to 120GB and 240GB respectively. This still leaves us with an expensive component, but building a good PC is all about balance; ensuring there are no weak links or bottlenecks and as mentioned above, every pc is bottlenecked by its storage system. I truly don’t believe any PC above $NZ 2000 is being built correctly without an SSD.

Conclusion

200+ GB SSDs are still luxury items, able to genuinely replace system drives and intended for those looking to build extreme rigs, but ‘boot drive’ models are priced within the means of most, allowing us to ‘buy into’ the performance an SSD offers without spending an arm and a leg. In fact, in real life these allow you to spend the majority of your time solely using the SSD – and for both high cost, large capacity drives and the more affordable ‘boot’ drives, we have a new performance king.

My feeling then, is that this something of a strange and difficult first review to write; the Vertex 2 is a genuinely unique product; you should have an SSD, it should be a drive with a Sandforce controller and (in NZ at least) that drive should be an OCZ Vertex 2. In the end it all comes down to the experience – once you’ve used a good SSD it really is difficult to go back. Now if work would just pay me my damn bonus....

Many thanks to Playtech for providing the review sample.

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pabreview: Razer Arctosa gaming keyboard

July 19, 2010, 07:57:03 pm by pablo d

Razer and Playtech recently supplied a boatload of gear to be used by New Zealand's top gamers in the stage PCs at the annual xLAN event held from July 9th to 11th at the TelstraClear Pacific Events Centre in Manukau City. As an avid gamer I had the pleasure of using this kit a few times, and now I have the honour of presenting it to you, piece by piece for your reading leisure.

Today we will start with the Arctosa Keyboard. Some gamers might remember the popular Tarantula keyboard from Razer - well this got phased out and replaced with the Lycosa and Arctosa, with the Arctosa being the cheaper of the two boards at $79.99.

While it may be the cheaper board, it still kicks a fair amount of butt and is definitely a big step up from your average workstation keyboard.

The first thing you're likely to notice about it is the slim keycaps. A lot of gamers prefer this type of key because of the shorter travel before actuation, plus the Arctosa uses Razer's patented Hyperesponse technology to reduce key latency and maximise response, along with 1000Hz 'Ultrapolling' which sends a signal from the keyboard to the PC every millisecond, where a lot of boards will only send a signal every 2ms to 8ms.

Next on the list of cool things about the Arctosa is anti-ghosting around the WASD key cluster. Ghosting is what happens when you push too many buttons at once and the keyboard won't register the keystroke. It is quite expensive to get around this so it's good to see this feature included in a "budget" gaming board, even if it is only just around the WASD keys.

The board layout is fully standard, with 7 basic media control keys in the top-right corner. There are no USB ports for external devices, no audio jacks, and no backlighting on the Arctosa. It does have a removable wrist-rest though ^_^

Lastly, for you MMO and CS nerds, there are fully programmable keys with macro capabilities and customisable software profiles with on-the-fly switching.

Fancy patented names and features aside, I think the Arctosa is quite good for the price. The keys feel slightly flimsy compared to certain other, more expensive boards, however I spent a good couple of hours pounding them during some Battlefield: Bad Company 2 matches and didn't really have any complaints by the end of it, other than wishing it had backlighting.

The only competition in the Arctosa's price range seems to be the Microsoft X6, which for $20 more does have a whole heap more features like backlit keys and a removable number pad, however if that's $20 you don't have then in my opinion the Razer Arctosa is fully worthy of your consideration.

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WarCraft finalists discuss their last match

July 11, 2010, 12:32:54 pm by MordenNZ

WarCraft final discussion on how the last matches went and the final outcome!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRYH-gwoFS8" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRYH-gwoFS8</a>

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StarCraft winners discuss the final match

July 11, 2010, 12:20:36 pm by MordenNZ

TerrorBlade and Expe discuss the StarCraft final and their PvP matchup.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIW6f6Upfhk" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIW6f6Upfhk</a>

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The nights entertainment

July 11, 2010, 11:28:51 am by MordenNZ

Last night some epic battles raged across the landscape behind the Telstraclear event center with some late night laser tag for XLAN attendees to enjoy while taking a break from the onscreen action, some awesome fun, check out the gallery for more images of the nights activities.