Reviewer : Erick Nelson
Date : December 12, 1999
MSRP : $99
Rating: 8/10
This mouse is named after a wickedly venomous South African snake (the design looks quite predatory too)
There's a new rodent in town: the kärna Razer Boomslang 2000. This aggressively styled new mouse is incredibly sensitive to increase your precision in any fragfest. kärna design the Boomslang based on the concept that "greater control and accuracy will lead to better performance in games." Does the end result live up to what they were aiming for? Time to find out...
The first sound you hear when you get this mouse that of your jaw dropping. The packaging for this mouse is so cool looking! The silver box has the sweet 3 intertwined snake logo on it. Once you open that up, you're greeted with a nice tin that has the razer text embellished on it. Inside of the tin is the mouse hiding between some foam padding, ready to strike at your hand when you go to take it out of its home.
Once you take it out of the tin
and place it on your desk, you realize just how big this mouse is. The picture
at left compares it to the MS Intellimouse and clearly shows just how big the
Boomslang is. The other thing you'll notice is that the Boomslang is not quite
as tall as the Intellimouse. I think of it as looking like some sort of futuristic
race car, and the long, low profile the mouse has goes with that impression.
While not a complete redesign
of the inner workings of the mouse a lá the MS Intellimouse with Intellieye,
the Boomslang makes a big improvement upon the ball design of the mouse that
has been around since the beginning. The key to the improved precision and sensitivity
of the Boomslang is using a focused light beam to count the rotations on the
encoder wheel, which results in increased DPI (dots per inch). The Boomslang
2000 has 2000 DPI, the Boomslang 1000 has 1000 DPI, and your average desktop
critter has around 400 DPI. Without knowing much else, it's obvious that the
Boomslang 2000 should be one smooth mama.
If you used to have a PS/2 mouse like I did, the switch to USB will provide another benefit as the mouse provides updates on its position 125 times a second. If you don't have a USB port, PS/2flex is included in the driver software which allows you to up the polling rate for your mouse to 200 (PS/2 ports normally poll around 35 times a second). So why wouldn't you want to crank it up to 200 and use PS/2 even if you have a USB port? The answer to this is quite simple: jacking up the PS/2 polling rate sucks CPU power. But if you can't use USB, increasing the poll rate to 80 or 100 will increase the smoothness of the mouse without killing your framerate =)
Installion of the Boomslang 2000 is a snip - just plug the mouse into your USB port (it comes with a PS/2 adapter if you don't have USB) and install the drivers and software for it. The manual also tells you about the different features of the Boomslang and how to install it if you need help with that aspect ;) The software for the Boomslang is pretty slick, combining a nice interface with all the power you need. In the picture to the right, I've configured a keystroke macro for the thumb button that will lay a mine, throw a grenade, switch to my disc launcher and fire a disc in tribes, all with one click =) If the game supports it, you can also set it where the thumb button can be assigned in the game. The software also allows you to set sensitivity, double click speed, scrolling speed and some other stuff.
Once you get into Windows with this thing, the first thing you need to do is crank down the sensitivity. I set it to 3 for the first few hours, then increased it to 5. This mouse is so smooth and precise that you'll be cruising all over the screen once you learn how to tame it. It's also a bit easier to do editing in Photoshop that requires precision as you can adjust the sensitivity for whatever tool you're using. It takes a while to get used to the length of the mouse, but once you do using it for extended periods of time isn't uncomfortable. The Boomslang also has rubberized buttons and a nice plastic part for your palm, which made me like it better than the cold glossyness of the Intellimouse. The ball of this mouse is also situated farther back than on normal mice, but that didn't seem to mess up anything for me.
I know what you're thinking about now: "Why the heck does this mouse use a ball?! I don't want to have to clean it every few weeks!" Well folks, I have some good news for you: this sucker features a little membrane thingy that keeps whatever junk that gets onto your mousepad (or desk) from getting into the mouse. To make sure this wasn't some marketing ploy, I crumpled up some Doritos on my desk and used the mouse on it for a few hours. After I was done I just had some powdered doritos - the ball didn't get any flavoring or crumbs on it at all!
The best thing about this mouse for gaming (besides its smoothness and precision) is the ability to adjust the sensitivity of it on the fly. Let's take tribes for example. I normally play with the mouse set to 6 sensitivity, but if I take heavy armor and a mortar having the mouse so sensitive is just plain funky. All I have to do to correct this bad vibe is press in the thumb button and rotate the scroll wheel and crank the sensitivity down to 3 or 4.
In pretty much any game, having the sensitivity set to 5 will let you do a 180 with about a 1.5" movement of the mouse. If you're crazy enough to crank the sensitivity to 10, you'll be doing a 360 with that short of movement. This mouse really struts it stuff playing games. The only downside to playing games with this mouse is the scroll wheel. Instead of the usual 15 clicks per rotation, the Boomslang has 45. This makes using the scroll wheel to switch weapons in Half Life a lot harder than with using a normal mouse. I also think the scroll wheel is about a half-inch too far forward, but then again I have relatively small hands. Some people have complained about accidentally clicking the thumb buttons in the heat of battle, but I didn't encounter that problem. Overall, this mouse is great for playing games (especially FPS ones)!
While this mouse has some great features like on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment, rubberized buttons, and increased precision, it also has some aspects that make you think twice about buying it.
The first is its high price ($69.99 for the Boomslang 1000, $99.99 for the 2000).
The second thing is having the scroll wheel a bit too far forward (this really isn't *that* big of a hassle, but the tripled rotation amount is). However, having the wheel where it is probably won't be a problem for most of you, and it's really not too big of one for people with small hands like myself.
There shouldn't even be a third downside, but currently there is. This relates to the fact that you can't use the pinky button as a 5th button. Also, the scroll wheel is inverted, meaning that moving it forward will scroll down. This would be better off being an option in the driver software, much like how most games have an option to invert the Y axis of the mouse. I'm pretty sure both of those problems can be corrected by updating the driver software, and if they did this I'd bump the rating up to a 9.
Overall, this is a great mouse with just a few (mostly correctable) problems. If you play a lot of Q3 or UT then this mouse is for you. As always, this is just my opinion, so if you're seriously thinking of shelling out the dough for this sweet mouse, go here to find links to the other reviews of it!