If you’re anything like me then you probably have a fairly decent general purpose desktop mouse. Used for average PC and office style tasks and a bit of gaming. However, when the gaming gets serious there are times when an 800 dpi wireless desktop mouse doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Well here we have a cheap, high performance mouse from Razer, the Salmosa.

Introduction

If you’ve already spent plenty of money on a decent CPU and graphics card and you have a desktop mouse that works then you probably don’t want to be spending a whole barrow load of cash on a high end gaming mouse like the new Logitech G500 or the Microsoft Sidewinder X8 and these are actually really cheap compared to the Razer Mamba. All you really want is a cheap but high performance wired mouse without all the extra bells and whistles. This is just where the Razer Salmosa enters the scene.

The Salmosa is a simple three button mouse but with a high performance sensor and a high USB polling rate. As such it should perform like a much more expensive mouse in terms of it’s tracking and being wired there shouldn’t be any mid-game concerns about dead batteries or interference.

This is how I come to be in the possession of a Razer Salmosa. I use a Logitech MX610 wireless mouse for general use including gaming and it is OK, mostly. Unfortunately whenever I have friends over for a big LAN session my MX610 struggles badly and submits to the interference from all the other PC’s, mice and probably the biggest culprit – mobile phones. So with a gaming session coming up later in the month I really wanted to put this right and decided that I’d buy a cheap, wired gaming mouse. My choice after considering all other options ended up being the Razer Salmosa which I bought from Amazon for just over £15, I would have bought it from play.com for just under £15 but they didn’t have it in stock and I didn’t want to take a risk on the ‘usually dispatched in 10 days’ that was stated.

Specifications

So into the meat of the review. I’ll start off with a little overview of the specifications and what exactly these mean to you when your gaming. Lets start off with a nice spec list then:

• Sensor Type – Infrared
• Sensor Sensitivity – 1800 dpi
• Connection Type – Wired USB, Seven-foot, lightweight, non-tangle cord
• Connection Performance – 1000Hz Polling, 16-bit data path
• Always On Mode
• Buttons – 3 independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
• Mouse Format – Ambidextrous design
• Size – Approximate size: 115mm (length) x 63mm (width) x 37mm (height)
• Weight – 104g

These are the basic specifications taken straight from the Razer website. My MX610 is a laser mouse rather than infrared so on the face of it my MX610 should be better, shouldn’t it? Well no, the reason for using a laser sensor is to gain sensitivity and the MX610 at 800 dpi is a long way behind the Razer at 1800 dpi, this shows that a good well designed infrared sensor can be as good if not better than many standard laser sensors. The connection performance is enhanced over a standard mouse and this in conjunction with the increased sensitivity should mean that the mouse responds sooner to a movement and gets that response over to the PC sooner too. So the delay between hand movement and game movement should be less, the game movement should also theoretically better map the actual hand movement being made.

Having an ‘always on’ mode is a great feature for a gaming mouse. Other mice will go into a standby mode when stood still for a set time and if this happens mid-game while lying as a sniper it can be a right pain as the mouse needs a good shake to wake it up leading to erratic game character movement and a delay before you can actually do what you suddenly decided to do. The Hyperesponse part of the buttons spec is a Razer trademark and whether this is better than other buttons I’ll try to show by the end of the review.

Shape and size is something that can be a personal thing and this mouse is ambidextrous so both right and left hand gamers can buy it. It’s also much lighter than wireless mice like my MX610 which weighs in at around 150g, this is in part due to not needing it’s own power supply which should allow it to move around the mouse mat more easily.

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