The Box and Goodies -
The box the Spawn ships in is a little different than what we are used to. The front shows a nice image of the product with what we can only guess it energy circling around it. The view of the Spawn is a little misleading. It makes the product look larger than it is in real life (but we will talk more about that later). Cooler Master does give you some important information on the Spawn (the max DPI etc) so that you have a good idea what you are getting into just from a glance.

Opening up the front cover gives you a glance at the actual Spawn mouse itself along with even more details on what you get when you buy this gaming mouse from Cooler Master.

Flipping around to the back of the Spawn’s box we find an actual specification listing. One item that jumped out at us right off the bat was the “Right Hand Ergonomic Claw” listing. It made us wonder if there is a left had version that you can buy. We have looked around but so far have not found a left hand specific version of this on any e-tailer’s site. Once you are through looking over the box and pull the Spawn out you find it enclosed in a plastic shell. Underneath this is a small manual. Oddly enough our box did not have any sort of driver or utility cd (even the mini ones that are popular now). But we were able to find the driver easily enough online.

The CM Storm Spawn -
The CM Storm Spawn was much smaller than I expected. I have a large palm (with stubby fingers) which makes many mice uncomfortable to use. When the mouse is small this is even more of a discomfort the spawn’s smaller size does have me concerned, but we will reserve judgment until we get it into action. Getting back to our description, the Spawn is small and squat this differs from most mice that are much longer than they are wide. It honestly looks like someone just removed the back half of the mouse leaving the large buttons, wheel etc. in place.

The outer shell is made of colored plastic that is resistant to most scratches (incidental ones but not anything major). There are openings where Cooler Master has placed buttons or grip surfaces. These are all made of a rubberized material that offers excellent grip even with wet fingers. The mouse buttons feel like they have the same surface which makes them appear more responsive (and they are). Along the right side of the Spawn is what we can only describe as a finger rest. When you have this mouse in your hand your ring finger naturally rests right along this ledge. It makes the Spawn more comfortable to grip in many ways as your ring and pinky finger are not both being dragged across your mousing surface.

Along the left side of the Spawn (where your thumb rests) are two buttons by default these are for back and forward when in Internet Explorer but they can be configured to work differently using the Spawn software (which we will cover later). On the top of the mouse we find the scroll wheel/middle mouse button and two additional buttons. The Scroll wheel is a stepped type meaning that you can feel a click each time it moved up or down. It is very responsive and accurate. The two additional buttons are setup to change the DPI level of the mouse up or down. Moving it up can increase mouse accuracy but also increases the speed it moves across your desktop (it is also much more sensitive to motion), decreasing has the opposite affect (of course).

The cable used is something of a departure though. The last few serious gaming mice I have played around with had cloth covered cords. These actually reminded me of the old electrical wiring that had wax coated cloth for a shielding instead of PVC. Still those have a disadvantage as well; after time they become frayed and collect dust and dirt very easily. The Spawn uses a very supple PVC coating on its 2 meter cord. The end of this cord is a gold plated USB plug. The gold plating is supposed to be for better conductivity, however most electrical experts will tell you that gold plating is not going to give you any advantage in connectivity. It will help protect this from corrosion and dirt. Unless Cooler Master made the whole thing from gold and the port on your motherboard was gold (solid) as well there is no true “performance” benefit from using gold. It is all about longevity and preventing corrosion and dust from affecting this product.



Flipping the Spawn over, we see that Cooler Master has learned something. The Teflon pads on the bottom are pretty large and they also conform to the entire front area of the mouse. Why is this important? Well, have you ever been playing a game and your mouse slid over the edge of your mousing surface? With most mice the small point Teflon pads will catch on their way back over the edge. With the Spawn this is not likely to happen unless you really push it off the mouse pad. We also find the 3500 DPI optical sensor mounted perpendicular to the centerline of the Spawn.

Internally Cooler Master has thrown some excellent components into the mix. The buttons on the Spawn are all rated at 5 million clicks, the wheel is a Japanese Ultra-Step encoder, the polling rate on the Spawn is up to 1000Hz, and of course there is the Sentinel-X 32KB of memory to store your settings. This allows you to take the Spawn with you and keep all of your customizations.

In all it is a well put together mouse, even if it does look a little weird. The wide squat body makes up for the lack of weight that you would get from a more traditional mouse. We can’t wait to see how it performs with some of our favorite games.

Software and Extras -

We mentioned earlier that there was not installation CD or DVD included with our Spawn. That is ok as you can grab the software from Cooler Master’s website. It is a very small installer and once done you get some decent options for configuring your mouse.
The first page gives you all of the options for controlling what the buttons actually do. This is while in Windows, most modern games will let you configure commands after you are in the game so this is sort of useless for gaming. Still you can setup the speed of the scroll, the speed of the double click, mouse acceleration, and also the way the mouse responds to sudden angle changes.

Page two lets you create macros (like ghost mouse does). You can record a series of mouse movements and clicks into a single function and then execute them with a single command. It is hand for some, personally I have never used mouse macros, and most other people I know do not see their value.

The Third page is the custom page; here you can adjust the DPI level settings, the pointer speed and also the polling rate between 125Hz and 1000Hz. The faster the polling rate the more responsive the mouse. It is important to note that not all USB ports can maintain a 1000Hz polling rate. They may allow you to set it this high, but you will not see any performance gain from it.

The last page is just the support and update page, here is where you go to try and find answers to issues or to just make sure your software is up to date.

Performance -
To test the performance of the CM Storm Spawn I stacked it up against my G5 laser gaming mouse, the Sentinel Advanced, and the Inferno Mouse. 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.

Test System -
For testing we used what is my current desktop system the specs are as follows;

Normally I do not overclock my peripheral test systems or my game testing systems, but on my desktop I did just for fun. This was the system that I chose to test the mouse with because it is new I used it with all four mice in the group. Understandably this made the test take much longer than normal but the results are much more accurate.

Gaming with the Spawn was a joy. I had my doubts at first because I was afraid the smaller length would be uncomfortable after an extended amount of gaming. This was not the case at all. The width of the Spawn and the finger rest made it very comfortable. It just seemed to glide under my hand. Neither my pinky nor the heel of my hand dragged across the mousing surface that I use. The accuracy was spot on; in Medal of Honor I found it easier to point, shoot and react than with the Spawn. The large non-slip mouse buttons made single shots simpler to perform while the wheel was very easy to use as a middle mouse button and to swap weapons with. Overall for gaming I would have to say that the Spawn out performed even the Inferno Mouse which was my previous favorite.

In Photoshop the Spawn again showed off that it has accuracy and control. It felt very stable even during some fine editing (like removing the back ground from the new Bacon Icon). This was over all of the other mice in the test group. Here again the shorter length was more than compensated by the width of the Spawn. My hand felt more relaxed when moving the Spawn around.

The Spawn (as I have mentioned) was just plain comfortable. It although my hand completely covered the spawn while I was using it did not feel small or awkward, I felt like I had complete control even after extended use.

Value -
Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item.

Remember how we mentioned that we could not find a left handed version of the Spawn? Well truth be told we could not find the Spawn anywhere online. Even Cooler Master’s site did not show where we could buy this. As there is no asking price, there is almost no way to rate this for value in the traditional sense. The only way we can relate this is by what we would be willing to pay for this mouse based on our experiences with other products of a like type and performance. With this in mind and the market that the Spawn is aimed at we feel that the MSRP should be in the range of $40-50 ($39.99 to 49.99). If Cooler Master can drop this onto the market at that price they will have people clambering to get this. If not, well they might be pricing themselves a little too high.

Conclusion -
When it all comes down to it the Spawn is a mouse. A USB Human Interface Device for navigating around your computer regardless of the OS type (unless it is command line only). However, on top of this basic fact are some nice extra features that make gaming and precision image or object manipulation much easier to manage. The market for this type of product is pretty large and with the performance of the Spawn we would expect there to be no shortage of interested consumers. We cannot tell you if this product will be a success though as we do not know the market price for this yet.

Still what we can tell you is that the Spawn now has a permanent place on my desk as the primary mouse for gaming, photo and video editing as well as general usage. If Cooler Master came out with a wireless version of this (BlueTooth hint, hint,…) I would buy that too.