I’ve always been a fan all Razer products, despite the fact that it’s damn expensive. My first gaming mouse was a Razer Copperhead, but its sensor started to fail about one year after I bought it. To replace it, the first mouse I thought to was the Lachesis. But at the store, they only had Mamba’s, and for a price way lower than the official price displayed on the razer website ($120 + shipping costs)… and you know how it feels… You want a new mouse, you can have a Mamba, you don’t think about it too much. You just take one in the department and just go to the checkout.

A revolution in the little gaming mice world ?

So, the Mamba is one of the newest mice brought by Razer. There were few new mice released after the Mamba (the Imperator, the Naga, the Abyssus or the Orochi) but the Mamba is still today the most powerful mouse (in terms of DPI, sensor quality…).
The most notable point of this mouse is that it’s wireless. In fact, it’s the first wireless mouse designed only for gamers. Razer was aware of reluctance of the gamers community about a mouse without a wire, because of the fact that the wireless transmission can be less reliable than the wired one, the fact that a wireless mouse needs a battery, etc.
Let’s be straight : the Mamba completely fits these objectives and there is no need to worry about this lack of wire. Indeed, if most of the time you’ll use the Mamba in wireless mode, you can still plug it with the wire and… you get a wired mouse.  You just need to unplug the wire from the docking station and plug it directly on the mouse. About the wireless tranmission, it’s a 2.4GHz transmission rate, so again, nothing to worry about. Furthermore, the mouse uses its own channels system, the Mamba automatically checks for a free channel with its dock, so you can have several Mamba’s in the same room without any problem (in a LAN instance for exemple).
In an esthetic point of view, the less we can say is that the Mamba is just beautiful. The blue lighting on the wheel is eye-catchy, there is also the same lighting all around the corner of the charging dock that slowly pulses like a heart beating when the battery is charging. It’s amazing. Notice that the famous snaky Razer logo on the top of the mouse is just an engraving, there is no lighting here (personnally I think it’s better this way).
The docking station is the transmitter, and it’s also where you have to put your Mamba down to recharge the battery (on it, the mouse looks like a queen on her throne).

And aside this wireless thing ?

In a technical point of view, the Razer Mamba has no reason to be jealous of other gaming mice. You have a 5600 DPI sensor, a 1ms polling rate, combined with the 2.4Ghz wireless technology, making the Razer Mamba the current fastest mouse on the market. Like any other recent razer mouse, there is a firmware inside the mouse (the famous Synapse system), so you can set it up according to you wishes, and the mouse will still have these settings even if you use it on another computer.
Of course, you can modify the DPI or the polling rate frequency through the driver software. One can think than 5600 DPI is too much and way useless, but I’d answer to this that you can still use all these 5600 DPI and proportionnaly decresase your in-game sensivity, you’ll have a very, very precise mouse.
About the general aspect of the mouse, it’s almost perfect. The mouse is palmed-designed, which means that you’ll need all your hand and your palm to move it. If you like mice like the Copperhead that are meant to be used only with fingertips, maybe you should forget the Mamba. There are of course 3 principal buttons (left, right and the scroll wheel), plus 2 other big buttons on the left side of the mouse, and 2 other little buttons in the left corner of the left button (basically meant to adjust DPI, you can bind it with others commands thanks to the driver). Yes, this means that the Mamba can only be used by right-handers (and the ergonomy is only for the right hand as well). The two lateral buttons are perfect, at least in my point of view, because I was really disappointed about the lateral buttons of the Copperhead that I really found too tiny. The scroll wheel has been improved too, with the Mamba it responds perfectly to the finger without being too sensitive either.
You can also notice a LED on the left side of the mouse that displays the battery status and the DPI stage when you switch it.
Last but not least, the mouse is possessed of 4 teflon feet, for a perfect slithering, on all surfaces (even if a proper gaming mousepad is highly recommanded).

About the driver

Of course, like any other gaming mice, you have a driver software that allows you to set almost everything up.
You can change the assignation of the buttons, define new DPI stages (especially on X and Y axis), create up to 5 profiles, create macros… The software can be a little bit too complicated at the beginning, but no worry, you’ll get over it easily.

Conclusion

In all respects, the Razer Mamba is a high-end gaming mouse, maybe for hard gamers only (more than few hours a week if you want to secure a return on your purchase). Below, some positive and negative points about the Razer Mamba.

Positive points :
- Huge specs
- The scroll wheel
- The amazing ergonomy
- The woven wire (no memory)
- The wired/wireless thing
- The insane packaging (even if you gonna have a hard time when you’ll unpack your Mamba the first time ah ah)

Negative points :
- The price (maybe the most expensive mouse on the market, except if you find a golden one)
- The driver software maybe still a bit temperamental
- Right-handed mouse

I hope you’ll think to the Mamba for your next mouse, if you don’t mind about the price it costs. But… anyway… gaming love is priceless, isn’t it ?

Check it out !

Then I found a mouse that seemed just right: the Cyber Snipa Stinger.
I was a bit scared actually. Cyber Snipa is a relatively new company to this business and also Mac OS X wasn’t officially supported. So I wrote to the support team and they told me that the mouse will work except for the software that comes with it (since is only for Windows).
So I decided to take a little leap of faith and bought it. Also the relatively low price helped the choice.

The Mouse

The Stinger is a laser gaming mouse with an engine up to 3200DPI operating at over 7000 frames per second. It has up to 1000Hz USB adjustable report rate (also thanks to a gold plated USB plug) and a tracking speed of 45 inches per second.

Cyber Snipa Stinger

It has 6 buttons. Left click, Right Click, Wheel Click, Wheel Left, Wheel Right and two side buttons on the left side of the device. Judging from the button allocation and the shape of the mouse, it is clearly designed for a right handed person.

The other two buttons under the scroll wheel are used to switch between different DPI settings (from 400 up to 3200) and to switch between different button configurations and macros settings.

You can setup macros thanks to the software that comes with the mouse. It doesn’t work under Mac OS X however the Stinger has a built in memory that stores the configurations and the macros within it.
So, for example, you can setup your macros under a Windows machine and then move to a Linux computer and still have all your macros stored.
It’s kinda cool altrough I’ve never been a fan of macros.

It has a very nice grip which prevents the hand to slip away. I can’t tell wich material is exactly. It feels rubberized but it’s not sticky. On the side it has two rubberized side grips which grants a comfortable grip on it. The two side buttons are easy to reach and are very usefull too.
The Side clicks of the wheel are kinda good but I wouldn’t reccomend any important bind on them since in tough situations you can easily get wrong and just clicking the wheel.

Under the mouse there are 4 teflon feets that makes the mouse literaly fly on almost any surface.

Under the mouse there’s also a very nice weight system.

Weight System

The mouse comes with 7 weights of 20g each (for a total of 140g… that’s a lot!). You can store the weight that you don’t use in a nice tiny box that comes with the mouse.

I really like the placing of the weights and the way you can actually choose their position and therefore the balance of the mouse. Also this blows away the weight system of similar mice like the Logitech G500 (you can only add up to 27g).

Impressions and Settings

When the package arrived in my mail I opened it and plugged in the mouse right away. I didn’t really liked the packaging and the way the things where stuffed inside. Also I didn’t liked the fact that there is a Mini-CD for the software which might be a problem if you have a slot load drive. I decided to use it at 3200 dpi from the start so once plugged in I configured it with USB Overdrive (remember that I’m on a Mac) to set the accelleration to 0 and to bind the side buttons to drop kevlar and drop weapon. I immediatly felt that I was in front of a great mouse and a great sensor. I used two or three days to find the perfect sensitivity and from there I saw my frags growing dramatically.

I don’t change the DPI on the fly (unless I have to do some precision stuff on Photoshop) and the button doesn’t allow you to go backwards (you can only go forward like: 1800 2600 3200 400 etc…). It’s not a big deal for me and shouldn’t be a big deal also for the majority of the players.

I mounted it with 5 weights (it took me some days to find the ideal weight). I mounted them all on the back of the mouse to have the tip lighter and therefore more sensitive to slightly movements.

I like a lot the design of the mouse. It might seem a bit weird at first due to the led logo or the colour of the scroll wheel that changes based on the current DPI but in the end is really nice and pleasing to the eye.

The hand also is very comfortable on it and it’s shaped to give a good resting position to your hand.

I haven’t fully tested the software but It offers a fair amount of stuff to set up and configure on your mouse.

Conclusion

The Stinger is surprisingly good and for its price it’s a no-brainer. It has a very nice weight system and an outstanding laser sensor. I was happy to find that works on my Mac with no issues at all and with its built in memory I can set up any macro that I want and carry it with me on any other machine. It’s comfortable and it helped me a lot on increasing my frags on Urban Terror. It has some minor flaws like the lack of a backward button for the DPI but overall is just a great mouse. It’s nice to have a new competitor on the market that can pull out some very good products without killing your wallet. If you are planning on changing your old mouse this might be the right choice.

Check it out: Click Here