In today’s market a company cannot maintain a single vertical portfolio and survive. We have seen this more times that we can count. You just cannot do it. If all you make is motherboards, you are eventually going to get left behind. If all you make is power supplies… well you get the point I am making. So it is not surprising to see companies begin to branch out and manufacture different products. Sometimes these products do not even seem to be related, but if they are good they can increase sales and also bring in new customers for the core business. Cooler Master did this not that long ago. The branched off their PC Enclosure business and created a new “gamers” line of cases dubbed CM Storm. Almost right after this line launched they began making peripherals for gamers as well. These products have included Mice, Head Sets, and Keyboards. So far we have spent some quality time with three of their mice and the Sirus headset. Today we are looking at another gaming mouse called the Xornet. This product shares a similar style with their Spawn mouse but not the same level of hardware. Let’s take a look and see if the new Xornet is a worthy addition to the CM Storm line.
Performance - To test the performance of the CM Storm Xronet I stacked it up against my G5 laser gaming mouse, the Sentinel Advanced, the Inferno Mouse, and of course the Spawn. I played through several levels of Medal of Honor, Portal 2, and Homefront. I played each of these for one hour using each mouse to gauge hand and wrist fatigue and also accuracy and ease of use. I then sat down for some detailed Photoshop CS5 editing. These tests would be using the eraser tool and the cloning tool to edit and clean up small details in images. Unfortunately as these tests are all subjective I can only offer you my experience with it at this time.The Test System -For testing the Xornet I used my main desktop which has the following specs;Intel Core i7 96518GB Kingston Hyper X DDR3 1333 (@1600MHz)Asus Rampage III Black EditionXonar Xense Audio CardSeagate 500GB Boot Drive Seagate Constellation ES 2TB SATA Data DriveKingston 40GB SSD Now (Cache drive for Photoshop)ATi FirePro V8800Thermaltake Toughpower 750 Windows 7 x64 Ultimate With SP1After using the higher DPI Spawn and Inferno the Xornet felt a little like moving in slow motion. It was a little more precise, but I had to really increase the response time to get it to feel like it was moving as fast as I wanted it to. In Portal 2 this was no hindrance and turned out to be a benefit. In both Medal of Honor and HomeFront it had an effect. On one hand I was much more accurate and aiming even while moving felt more stable. It was when shifting between targets that things got a little bogged down. Still it was not that bad and by the time my hour was ending with each of these games I was getting used to the way it moved. During our Photoshop testing I found the Xornet to be a great choice. Although the motion felt slower it was much more stable and steady. One of the tests that I do is to erase the background around an image. This is very exacting work and if your mouse it too jittery you end up with very uneven and ugly lines that have to be blurred. The Xornet was accurate enough that I did not need to do any of that. As with the Spawn the Xornet was comfortable. Even after just over three hours of gaming my hand did not feel fatigued and there was no ache in my shoulder like I get with other mice I have used. It is a very well put together product, even if it does feel a little slow compared to the 3500 DPI + mice like the Spawn.
