#SAITEK MAD CATZ RAT 7 SKIN#
#SAITEK MAD CATZ RAT 7 FREE#

This means you're always relying on wireless connectivity (more on that in a sec) but also that you've always got a battery ready to go, and it's admittedly pretty neat to rip out that battery (like a clip from a gun) and slide a fresh one in. Instead, you socket one of two hot-swappable lithium-ion battery cartridges into the back of the mouse, and put the second in a charging station that doubles as the 2.4GHz wireless transmitter and holds additional weights for the Rat as well. It doesn't use a USB dongle and standard batteries, nor a removable play-and-charge cord. We alluded to it somewhat at the beginning of this review, but the Rat 9's not like any other wireless mouse we've seen.

#SAITEK MAD CATZ RAT 7 SKIN#

We tend to grip mice between the base of our thumb and pinky, but the Rat 9 isn't well designed for that - we ended up pinching our skin in one of the mouse's seams where no amount of soft-touch plastic could save us from chafing on those delightfully rakish edges, something that could perhaps have been avoided with a little rubber instead. All of this makes for some fairly comfortable mousing options, but as with most one-size-fit-all products (also see: baseball caps) you may not find an exact match. There's also a taller soft-touch palm grip for claw-style gamers to better align their wrists. We never really found ourselves using the thumb wheel in our first-person shooters, but you can think of it as a two-way rotating programmable button if you will, and it spins in small enough increments to find use as a weapon or ability switcher.ДЄs far as comfort is concerned, chew on this - out of the box, the Rat 9's completely coated in soft-touch plastic, and if you don't like that, you can swap for a pair of textured rubber palm and pinky grips instead.

#SAITEK MAD CATZ RAT 7 FREE#

The thumb grip's pair of programmable rockers similarly won our favor because of their ridges up top - like the thumb keys on Logitech's G700, we could press these just by slightly shifting the base of our thumb, leaving our thumbtip free to hold the red sniper button - a feature we'll talk about later. The main control surface is wide enough, in fact, that we could comfortably put three fingers on the top of the mouse, using the middle to control the mouse wheel and DPI sensitivity adjustment rocker (a nice touch in and of itself) without ever moving our index and ring finger from the all-important trigger buttons. While both the left and right mouse buttons do require a solid press, they're large and responsive all the way up to the apex of the mouse, and there's actually only a single spot (on the extreme upper-right-hand corner of the right mouse button) where it won't actuate if pressed down. Mice live and die by the placement of their buttons and the comfort of their grip, and adjusted properly the Rat 9 is fairly superb on both fronts. Though the Rat 9's metal frame and newly-added lithium-ion battery packs make the mouse fairly hefty to begin with, there's also an weight cartridge on the underside of the mouse, and while it's not as accessible as some of its contemporaries (you have to unscrew the hex key and a retaining nut) you can easily add 42 grams to the device in 6-gram increments. Since the thumb and palm grips do interlock to some degree, not all combinations work as you might expect, but we quickly found a style we liked and only our curiosity and some rough edges (more on that later) kept us fiddling with the settings. Out of the box, it's a modest, narrow peripheral suited for small hands or a fingertip grip style, but you can transform it into a wide, elongated device in under a minute flat - just unscrew the integrated hex key at the back of the unit and you can adjust the thumb rest's angle and length replace the pinky rest or palm rest with two alternatives (each) and / or extend the palm wrist with the push of a button to support larger hands. Dressed completely in deathly black with sharp angles and rakish curves throughout, it evokes a Skunk Works stealth plane but with metallic components jutting out - he better to show you precisely where you can tinker with the mouse. In case we hadn't already established that it's a looker, let's say it once and for all right now: the Rat 9 is one sexy mouse.

Saitek mad catz rat 7