Our thougts:
This is another attempt to make a product sell by courting the PC gamer market – normally, this is used by the clueless to sell the useless. The difference here is that NZXT has been working on other enthusiast class hardware for years, making nice cases for LAN rigs. Their experience shows in a polished presentation, and a keen sense of ergonomics. While they may not be overtly targeting the niche markets of lefties and people with small hands, they identified an underserved market and are catering to it. (Business 101!) For this target market, this may actually be the mouse to have.
The news isn’t all glowing, however. Like I said before, if you have a Mac, this is not the mouse for you, but rather a cool-looking paperweight. Also, the drivers are nothing to write home about, though they are adequate – button mapping, profiles, and macro recording are all provided. The software is on a 3” mini-CD in the manual, which probably won’t work on a slot-loading disk drive. This is inconvenient, but you’ll want the latest version from the NZXT forums – there are apparently multiple versions, but you’ll have to grab the latest from the support forum. Once installed you’ll see 1.0 when you check the version (they forgot to increment the version counter to 1.0.3?) but there are bug fixes in the latest release, so check the numeric date string in the file name.
Even here, there’s a silver lining. Profiles are not switched via the mouse, fortunately – this removes the temptation to bind a profile-cycle button. My issue with these is that they give no indication if you found the right mode, and generally introduce a hitch when profiles are switched on the fly. In this way, they make sure that you never accidentally drop your polling rate if you’re relying on the 1000/sec, and keeps you focused on what matters – sensitivity. And even when the stops are set by the drivers, they’re set at logical levels and spaced evenly. Net result, easy to set up.
Conclusion:
If I sound a little hard on the Avatar, it’s intended as constructive criticism for NZXT’s next product – there’s a lot here to like and I want the next one to be even better. The Avatar is simple to set up, simple to use, comfortable for hours at a time, and above all ambidextrous. If you’re looking for something long and narrow, this is where it’s at. While not cheap, ranking in at about $70, the Avatar is reasonable, but you could probably find a better mouse for the money. But did I mention it looks really sharp? This may not be the end-all-be-all of gaming mice, but NZXT knows what they’re attempting, doesn’t promise more than they should, and delivers on what they attempt.
