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SilverStone Raven
Testing: Weighed Against the Competition
So now the Silverstone Raven has been pried out of its package with a hacksaw and crowbar, let us open all of our senses to it and see what we can see. First off, the mouse stinks - literally, not that it's a bad mouse, that's for the next section to decide - but it reeks. The rubberized coating, the plastic, the epoxy in which the carbon-fiber grip is embedded... they all share one engineering feature - they all outgas those volatile organic compounds I mentioned earlier. Don't go sniffing this mouse unless you want to kill some brain cells. Waitaminit. Carbon fiber? Why did they do that? I mean, normally high-strength composites are in order when something of both extremely high strength and extremely low weight are required. A quick heft test reveals that despite the composites, this is no featherweight. So what's an enterprising geek to do?
You got it. We do this scientifically.
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The Raven driver CD |
The Raven manual |
A common household object - a 2AA MiniMag |
Logitech's VX Nano |
Razer's DeathAdder |
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Logitech MX510 |
Logitech G5 Mk.2 (light) |
Logitech G5 Mk.2 (heavy) |
Logitech G9 (author's mod) |
Apple BT Mighty Mouse |
SilverStone Raven |
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Everything above was weighed on a self-calibrating postal scale, as close to centered on the sensor as possible What you see is in ounces, and all wireless mice were weighed with factory-supplied battery configurations. This is important. The Energizer L91 batteries, commonly sold as E2 Lithium, supplied with the Apple Mighty Mouse are both rather more expensive than the Duracell alkalines shipped with the VX Nano, but are much lighter - the AAA alkalines weigh in at 11 grams, whereas the much larger AAs used in the Mighty Mouse are only a hair heavier at 14.5 - equivalent alkaline AAs are 24 grams. What this means in practice is that like the fancier gaming mice, you can actually adjust the weight and balance of your Mighty Mouse by using different types of batteries, one or two at a time (Awkward to explain, but surprisingly usable). Also of note, the G9 weighed in at six ounces with an aesymmetric fifteen-gram weight load that was created to move the center of mass of the mouse toward the left mouse button, correcting what I feel was a poor factory balance (but others love...), putting the center of mass over the center of the mouse, like the Raven was designed for from the get-go.
The Raven, however outweighed them all, tying the G9 (with all four seven-gram weights installed) as the porker of the bunch. Some people want a mouse so light that it responds to the pressure of one's will and thoughts - this is not the mouse for you - but many like a rather more substantial product to smooth out the jitter of over-caffinated finger muscles. This one's for that crowd. Now that I've had a chance to poke at the Raven so thoroughly, I can attest that yes, it is in fact real carbon fiber on the palmrest, and not a photo-print imitation. I can also attest that whoever designed the original Xbox controller must have been hired by SilverStone - this thing is huge. I also discovered a feature that immediately warmed the cockles of my black heart - in productivity mode, the Raven has hard keys for PageUp and PageDown. This is a feature I always found in software when using the MX510 with Logitech's discontinued MouseWare, back when Logitech had spare buttons for things like that. The number of programmable buttons was impressive - such things lend themselves to sim games like MechWarrior and Freelancer and with Dark Horizon on the... er, horizon, this seems timely. But "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", so let's quit wasting time and go kill something.
Testing: Hot In Action
In order to get a feel for the Raven, I joined the beta for S4 League, a free to play online-only FPS based out of Korea that will finally be receiving a US launch, and starting with the tutorial, leveled my character up to level 5, while focusing on long-range weapons to best test the accuracy and utility of the SilverStone. The Raven functioned flawlessly, drivers or not, in this simple game; tracking was accurate, button response was excellent, and it was even comfortable. The problems with the Raven really only came to light with more complex games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or Half-Life 2: Episode Two, where you need more than Mouse1 and Mouse2. I found that the Mouse4 and Mouse5 buttons were all but unreachable with the thumb they were intended for; the best way to activate these I found was with the index finger; since that happens to be your trigger finger in games, that's not gonna fly. Also, while the sensitivity control was seriously unique and they get serious credit for having not only driver-agnostic sensitivity control, but driver-agnostic X/Y independent control, they were difficult at best to actually use. In game mode, it requires mashing both little buttons behind the wheel, and twisting the glowing blue thumb-dial. It seems that SilverStone recognized this was a pain, and as a result they gave you five profiles in which to store your sensitivity settings. Also, the thumb button to change profiles is conveniently where the thumb tends to rest naturally. The problem with that is not specific to SilverStone, but Razer and others do it too. There's not a catchy name for it, but I call it the Too Many Profiles Problem. If you've got two settings you need, and you have to go through three blanks to get to them, that is a bad UI paradigm. The simple solution is to add check boxes, in order to enable or disable specific profiles. For the first week or so, the Raven left my hand stinking of VOCs for a couple hours after playing? It's since stopped outgassing after about two weeks, but this is a clear downside of the hermetically sealed packaging.
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