Razer Mamba

Specification and Software

The Mamba's software configurator is generally a good looking bit of software, and its look fit neatly with Razer's fondness for sleek black with green colour schemes. It's also well thought out and clearly labelled with five tabs allowing you to adjust sensitivity, check for driver updates and change the Mamba's firmware.

You can also assign tasks such as 'click' or 'scroll down' to any of the Mamba's nine buttons, in addition to creating fully custom macros. That said, stating the Mamba has nine buttons is a bit like saying a male cat has six legs: two of Mamba's nine 'buttons' are actually the scroll wheel's up and down movements, so they're not really buttons. The configurator's drop down menus make adjusting what each button does an intuitive task and a cool rotating 3D animation adjacent clearly shows which buttons are which on your blinging peripheral. All your chnages can be saved directly to the Mamba's on-board memory.


The Mamba can be configured with a maximum of five sensitivity stages, which should be ample even for gamers with a broad range of game genre interests. If however, five is too many, you can remove some of the stages to save confusion about which one you're on. A tick box allows you to adjust the sensitivity of the X and Y axis individually or together for each of the five profiles. The Mamba is the new king in the dots-per-inch-distance-boasting championships and boasts an unnecessarily massive 5,600dpi sensor.

Needless to say the Mamba is ludicrously sensitive at 5,600dpi and we can't imagine there's a great deal of people out there using 4,000dpi gaming mouse and sitting there thinking 'man, this just isn't sensitive enough!' We asked Razor if the 5,600dpi capability has seen a good response from the gaming community. 'Absolutely. It’s clear that 5600dpi is not intended to be used by the average user, but some of the very high sensitivity players, especially in FPS liked it a lot,' they told us. However, Razer wouldn't comment on how it achieved the uber-high dpi count.

Wireless

The key aspect of Razer's high end creation is that it's a wireless mouse intended for gaming. Apparently, Razer has teamed up with other companies to create the 'gaming grade' wireless technology. We asked Razer who it had teamed up with but were told 'we chose to work with some of the technology leaders in their respective fields. Obviously we do not disclose these partners as these are highly confidential.'

Whether you opt for wired or wireless mode, the polling rate is 1ms/1000Hz . If the claim is true, clearly it's an impressive feat and we were keen to learn a bit about how Razer had managed but unfortunately our question was curbed. 'That’s company secret'.


Although technically the responsiveness won't be affected by the fact that you're using the mouse wirelessly there is a possibility that the signal interference will affect what your cursor is doing.

In compensation for this, Razer has developed an 'interference management system' they call Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS). Given the negative connotations overclockers will have with the words 'spread spectrum' this is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words for the technology. Eager to learn more nonetheless we asked Razor how it worked only be told 'Yet again, we can’t disclose more than the information at hand'.