Review: Mionix Naos 5000 Gaming Mouse

Mionix are a fairly new company to enter the world of gaming peripherals and their goal is to create products that are of good quality, come up with original designs and innovate with every product that they release. So far they have 11 products on the market and today we will look at the Swedish company’s newest release, the Naos 5000 Gaming Mouse. This mouse boasts a Truly Ergonomic design, a 5040dpi Laser Sensor, 128kb Built-in Memory and a Balanced Weight Tuning System. See Why this product gets a 4.5/5 from me.

Packaging

The Naos 5000’s Packaging looks just as good as the mouse itself. The front of the packaging is very basic, with an actual size picture of the mouse, the name of the mouse, what the mouse is and the Mionix logo. Nice and clean. The back of the packaging is where all the information is with a Labelled Diagram of the mouse, a Model Overview, which talks about the mouse and a few of it’s features, Technical specifications, which includes an Adjustable Polling Rate, Large Teflon feet and 7 Programmable buttons, and finally Sensor performance, which is basically a specifications list of the sensor. The Labelled Diagram points out things such as the Truly Ergonomic Design, the Customizable LED Light System and the Braided USB Cable.

The box is very easy to open by lifting the magnetic hinge and pulling out the necessary packaging. After that the three box contents are visible: The Get Started Guide, the Box of Eight 5g Weights and the Naos 5000 itself. The Get started guide includes information on the Installation of the mouse, Customization of the mouse, Information on the weight tuning system, the warranty, the Compliance of the mouse and Support if it is needed. One thing noticeable is the Driver is not included with the Mouse. Mionix have done this for two reasons:

1. The mouse doesn’t Need the driver as it is plug and play.

2. Mionix know how frustrating it is to find an included Driver CD that has out of date drivers, so instead they have a download link in the Drivers and Support section of their website.

Mouse and Weights

Now we will talk about the mouse and its features. First we will talk about the Truly Ergonomic design. All I can say is that yes it is Truly Ergonomic. I can literally put my flat hand on top of the mouse and my fingers seem to fall into place, and thanks to the rubber coating, everything stays in position. A true winner for Ergonomics here. Next we will talk about the Mouse Buttons and Lights. There are seven buttons on the Mouse: a left click, a right click, a scroll click, a forwards button, a backwards button, a a Dpi Up button and a Dpi down button. Well that’s what they are by default anyway. All seven buttons are programmable to anything you want, giving you the edge in any game. Well move onto the lights now and In the dark these look spectacular. The Mionix logo really shines through along with the other six lights. these other lights include one LED for each Dpi button, a light for the Scroll Wheel and my favourite lights, the last three that tell you which dpi the mouse is at. All of the lights seem to lit up quite a little portion of the workstation, but I guess that makes them a lot let distracting. Eight weights come with this mouse, enclosed in a box where they sit protected in a rubbery material. Each of the weights are 5g each but lets face it, they’re pretty useless just sitting in the box. At the end of the day its all down to personal preference when your talking about the weight of the mouse, but using all the weights in the mouse made me seem more accurate. Plus the 40g weight gain on the mouse means it will barely move at all.

The Software

The software for the Naos 5000 is a great little configuration utility that lets you change almost anything on the mouse. I’ll explain each picture and what each part of the mouses software does. The first image shows the Mouse Settings. In here you can configure every single button to anything you want on the mouse as well as Double Click speed, Scroll speed, Pointer Acceleration and the Polling rate. The second image shows Sensor Performance. In this part of the software you can change the three DPI slots to any DPI up to 5040. Also configurable is the Pointer speed, Lift Distance and the S.Q.A.T. The Surface Quality Analyzer Tool is a tool that basically Analyzes the surface the mouse is on and adjusts the settings above accordingly. Using the Roccat Sota Gaming Surface I got an 8/10, and the accuracy of the tool gave me some settings that really help the overall accuracy of the mouse. On to colour settings now which allows you to pick from 23 different colours to make your Naos 5000 fit the atmosphere. Not only can you change the colour, but you can select certain LEDs to have on at one time, which is handy if you don’t want a certain light on for one of the five available profiles. Last is the Macro Settings which allows the user to set any kind of macro they want to any button on the mouse. As you can see above my example macro is a simple keystroke of the “V” key. It doesn’t seem like much but when playing Fallout 3 its gives me quick and easy access to the V.A.T.S system on the game.

Tests

I’ve only really decided to do one test on this mouse, which is a gaming test. In the two games you see above, Far Cry 2 and Team Fortress 2, I will be testing the mouse’s precision, the ease of the on the fly dpi switches and the macros. Lets get stuck in then shall we…

1. Far Cry 2

A Brilliant game which I’m sad to say has horrible controls. So to try and overcome this problem I’ve assigned the forward button to “5” giving me quick access to the map and “H” to the back button allowing me to take malaria pills and stabilize my health. This definitely helped my gaming, especially on low health as knowing I could easily stabilize my health with my right hand on the mouse and at the same time keep my four fingers on the w,s,a,d and left shift keys gave me much more of an idea where to go and how to get there safely and quickly. After testing out the macros at one guard post, I quickly drove on to another to test the dpi switches and how they affect game play. I had the first slot on 810DPI, the second on 3240DPI and the third slot on 5040DPI. I found 840DPI was useful for short movements on the Machete, 3240 DPI was useful for the pistol and assault rifle and 5040DPI was useful for causing some destruction with the mounted weapon found at posts or on vehicles. Switching to each DPI was instant and very responsive. Moving on to the last little test now, and that is precision. I haven’t played Far Cry 2 far enough to find out if there is any kind of sniper rifle on the game, but as for precision on the assault rifle, I found switching from target to target was a smooth movement and it almost felt as if the mouse was locking onto each target. Very Impressive.

2. Team Fortress 2

Being fairly new to Team Fortress 2, I needed all the help I could get. This is where the macros come in. Assigning “E” to the Forward button and “4” to the back button in the engineer class, I was able to easily and quickly able to call a medic and set up items for my team. Although “E” is so close to the w,s,a,d keys, I disabled it as I found I kept accidently hitting it. With the same DPI settings as above, I set off as the Sniper class on 810DPI. Everything seemed steady and moving from target to target wasn’t too slow. On 3240DPI I changed to the Scout class hoping to storm the Enemy bases and and the same time have some precision on my side. I was getting more kills than before thanks to aiming at targets a little faster, but I’m still terrible at the game so I kept getting killed anyway. On the last DPI setting, 5040, I went onto my strongest class which is the Pyro and with such a fast DPI I was fairly confident I was ready to cause some destruction. No I didn’t get many kills, but I lit many Red team members on fire in a very quick time and gave alot of kills to other team members all thanks to such a high DPI. Finally Precision, where I went back to the Sniper class, found a good hiding spot and tried to see what I could do. I found that the latency between my click and the bullet was virtually zero and got many kills I probably would have missed if I had another mouse. Another winner here.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Braided USB cable
• Smooth Scroll Wheel
• 3 DPI Slots
• Great Configuration Utility
• LED Lights
• True Ergonomic Feel

Cons:

• Slightly Harsh price tag (I know about paying for quality but It would be a lot more competitive against other mice if it were about £10 cheaper)
• Left Handed users might not like it

Conclusion

For such a new company like Mionix to release such a competitive gaming peripheral so early on in their career is definitely something worth giving credit for. The Naos 5000 is not only a feast for the eyes but it is also a powerful, ergonomic gaming mouse that may be out of some peoples price range, but anyone considering buying a gaming mouse should stretch their budget for this.