We review a lot of gaming mice, and one of the points we periodically complain about in reviews is a lack of configurable buttons on seven-button mice. Seven sounds like a lot—until you really take stock of them. If you ignore the obvious buttons that you’ll never want to tweak from their defaults and thus do without—the left and right mouse buttons, the DPI-switcher button or buttons, and the mouse wheel—you’re down to a total of two or three that can realistically be reassigned. For some game genres, though, you really don’t need more than that, as long as the mouse’s other characteristics aim it squarely at a niche market where other factors count a lot more.

This is the market soft spot that Razer was aiming at with the design of its $69.99-MSRP Deathadder Elite. To be sure, this mouse is not cheap, and it has relatively few buttons to reassign. But the package as a whole is a good, solid fit for MOBA and first-person-shooter (FPS) gamers.

Design and Features

Here’s a first look at our Deathadder Elite…

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There’s just a hint of a “claw” design in the front, but the talons are well-manicured. That matte-black appearance, combined with its slim lines, means that if the internal lights are turned off, the Deathadder Elite could pass for a sleekly expensive business mouse.

Its contours are those of a popular mouse style these days, the modified hourglass, with the right side bulging out to provide a better ergonomic fit around the curved right edge and pinky of the right hand. It’s ergonomic in another way, too. Seen from its back looking forward, it arches up to a peak under the index finger. You can catch a hint of that hump effect here…

All of this makes the Deathadder Elite a good palm-grip mouse for relaxing gameplay, though the splayed front sections of the left and right mouse buttons provide a first-rate platform, too, if you’d prefer a claw grip for more frenetic MOBA/FPS action…

Wait, let’s not leave that image yet. Let’s zoom in a bit…

Stop right there. Looks like someone miniaturized a tire on an 18-wheeler and turned it into a mouse wheel, doesn’t it? In case you thought we were just playing around, this is another ergonomic point. The really bumpy physical tread lessens the tension on the tendons associated with the index finger, wrist, forearm, and shoulder. Less tension translates into a healthier life for that incredible but highly breakable thing known as the human body, with less chance of repetitive motion injury. The Deathadder Elite’s mouse wheel is one of the easiest to use to date that we’ve laid finger on.

While we’re on the top of the mouse, we’ll drop back a bit…

As a rule, we prefer to have a DPI toggle, so that you can easily jump up or down a user-defined DPI level from the same location, rather than some of the counter-intuitive mouse designs we’ve seen, which supply you with only a one-way DPI button. But this two-button solution works nearly as well if you drop back your index finger. It’s perhaps just a bit too far back for the button which is closest to your palm.

The Deathadder Elite is about 5 inches long by 2.8 inches wide by roughly 1.7 inches high, making it suited to a large hand. However, it weighs only about 3.7 ounces. This puts it roughly in the same weight class as the Mad Catz R.A.T.4, at a featherlight 3.2 ounces, and the Corsair Raptor M45, which, without screws and weights, drops to 3.5 ounces. Just some cursory use of the Deathadder Elite reveals how easily it glides with very slight pressure.

There’s nothing to see on the right side of the mouse body, but here’s what you get on the left…

The two elongated buttons are well-placed for easy access by the tip and pad of your thumb. The stippled “grip” part under the buttons, where you rest your thumb while you mouse around, looks better than it feels, however. It is really too thin and poorly differentiated from its surrounding texture to be very effective.

Finally, if you return to our first glance at the Deathadder Elite, you’ll see the thinly braided cord that attaches to your computer. At just under 7 feet long, it emerges from the center front of the mouse. The cord isn’t stiff, and it doesn’t exert any undue push or pull that we could discern. That’s not always the case with braided cords like these.

There’s nothing really to see on this mouse’s underside, save a pair of pads and the optical sensor. We’ll get into that under Features, so let’s head there next.

Setup and Features

The installation process was a sore spot with us when we checked out another Razer mouse recently, the Naga Hex V2 ($181.80 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) . So it proved here, too.

Where most mice we’ve reviewed ask nothing more of you than a software download to get up and running with your new purchase, Razer requires registration, activation through an e-mail account, and agreement to a lengthy legal contract for the use of its Synapse software. (It mentions “binding” and “possession.” While we don’t think the supernatural is meant here, we can’t be completely sure, given the effort Razer has made to defend Synapse from purchasers of Razer products.) Allocate five minutes (or a bit more) for the registration process, depending on the turnaround time getting your e-mail activation squared away, and another five for installation.

This is the first screen you’ll see when you launch Synapse…

No, the murkiness above is not a vestige of our screen capture. The small gray-on-black font is problematic, as is the fact that the screen doesn’t scale for higher resolutions. It is reasonably well-designed, however, within a minimalist framework that neither requires nor supplies any help system. You have separate, selectable screens running along the top edge, for Mouse, Macros, Chroma Apps, and Stats. Click on Mouse, and you get a new series of tabs under the first set for Customize, Performance, Lighting, and Calibration, as you can see above.

From Mouse > Customize, you can reassign eight of the mouse’s nine button effects. (Reassigning the left-click button isn’t possible.) Most of them, however, are things you won’t want to touch—scroll up and scroll down on the mouse wheel, for example—so that you end up, as we stated earlier, with effectively the two assignable buttons on the mouse’s left side. Clicking a button here brings up a reasonable list of options: dpi change, keyboard function, mouse function, launch program, multimedia, and Windows shortcuts.

Here’s the Mouse > Performance screen…

You’ve got a slider for acceleration, 0 to 10, and one that reconfigures the Deathadder Elite’s five DPI settings. (Those range from 100dpi to 16,000dpi, but the stratospheric end is a sales gimmick, part of the usual gaming-mouse-resolution marketing arms race.) Clicking on the vaguely labeled “Enable X-Y Sensitivity” lets you split the resolution settings for the X and Y axes and designate them separately. That’s very useful for tracking more coarsely across wide displays, and for games that have far more action on the horizontal plane than the vertical.

Our choices on the Mouse > Lighting screen are fairly simple. You get four effects to choose among: Static, Breathing, Reactive, and Spectrum Cycling, not counting Disabled. You get a selection of 40 colors that you can allocate to the two LED-lit zones on the mouse body: under the scroll wheel, and in Razer’s Celtic-influenced snakes symbol on the palm. You can link the zones, and change the brightness level along a linear slider….

Some potential buyers might find this a meager selection of effects, but bear in mind that your hand will be covering both of these zones most of the time during play, so you’ll only be looking at them when the mouse is not in use. Keyboard lighting can be employed to excellent effect as a visual gaming cue, but most mouse lighting is, from that perspective, as superfluous as a cravat on an aardvark.

As much can be said for the Deathadder Elite’s Chroma Apps and Stats screens. The former lists out the apps that third-party developers have created using the Chroma SDK—none for this mouse series—while the latter displays how many clicks, wheel rotations, and the like, you’ve used with the mouse in every game on your computer. This information is certainly an interesting curiosity, but in the big picture, it probably adds little or nothing to the sum of human knowledge.

On the other hand, Mouse > Calibration is one of the most useful toolsets Synapse has to offer. You can either use a linear slider to manually set the most effective lift distance between the Deathadder Elite and whatever surface it’s on (that is, the distance at which the mouse stops tracking), or click Others, then Add a Mat, and go to a lift-distance wizard screen that makes the best choice for you, deploying algorithms based on your habits in moving the mouse around. That’s pretty sophisticated stuff, for what it does.

On the other hand, macro creation in the Deathadder Elite’s software is pretty basic…

You can record macros, edit the sequence, remove lines, and change delays between the macro steps, but beyond that, you bump up against the ceiling of the software’s capabilities. Compare that with the robust macro creation in Corsair’s Utility Engine (CUE) software, which lets you chain macros, or launch a new profile for a sub-game, or place two actions on a macro—one on a button press, the other on its release—and you can see what’s missing here. We wish Razer did.

One major feature of the Deathadder Elite that we haven’t discussed isn’t part of the Synapse package. That’s the new Razer 5G Optical Sensor, modestly described as “the world’s most advanced.” It claims to track up to 450 inches per second (ips), and supplies a resolution accuracy of 99.4 percent. That is beyond claims made by any other peripherals developer, at least up to the present time. How that translates into actual game play is a subject for our performance eval, so let’s move on to our next section and do just that.

Performance Impressions

Contrary to a rumor that we started, it’s not quite true that if you look at the Deathadder Elite from the left, it will move a few inches to the right. But it is very light on its pads—roughly 3.7 ounces, as we mentioned earlier on. That being the case, we decided to test it primarily in MOBA and FPS titles, in games that challenge a player’s precision, speed, and real-time strategic analysis. DOTA 2 was our main choice for the former, and Far Cry 4 for the latter.

True to form, this mouse provided very little resistance to movement. (We had to keep the braided cord on a horizontal surface behind it, however. Otherwise, there was a slight but definite pull that introduced extra pressure.) It proved equal to the lighter, speedier models of Mad Catz’s MOBA line. We also appreciated the quick response of the top-side buttons to a very light touch, though the side buttons felt distinctly heavier. We left the acceleration feature turned off—a chancy control to use in high-speed fights—but we could have wished for a linear slider to supply graduated angle snapping.

The most wished-for feature we found lacking was, without question, a more muscular macro editor. We like the fact that Synapse offers a reasonably diverse range of button-reassignment options, and lets you tie individual profiles to specific games (saved, unfortunately, on the cloud, instead of on the mouse itself or in local files). But if you find yourself wanting to customize its pair of buttons to serve some moderately advanced macro needs, you’re out of luck.

We mentioned earlier in this review that setting up a macro in Corsair’s CUE gave you more flexibility. A more complex macro possible on CUE might perform one task when a button was pressed, and another when it was released. This would have been perfect in a two-gun FPS title, or even The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim when using a sword and a shield. Or casting an RBAAS (Really Big Ass Attack Spell) then quaffing down a large mana potion; rinse, repeat. You can’t do that, or many other similarly useful tasks, with Synapse.

Razer’s new optical sensor is likely to have a limited appeal—one that’s based on what we might call the Gripe Factor: “I try to launch my attack or move my hero just out of attack range, and the mouse keeps messing up on me…you know, man?” If you find yourself speaking this way about your MOBA losses, then Razer’s 5G Optical Sensor sounds like something you’ll want to consider. We certainly experienced no handicap playing any game built around either fast-paced reflexes or carefully placed sniper action using it, but we could say the same of some other optical sensors we’ve used regularly in recent years. Our conclusion is that good MOBA and FPS players won’t need it, but tournament-level types just might want it for the extra edge.

Conclusion

Regardless, the Deathadder Elite remains a fine performer. Its speedy, precise movement and aim place it among the better mice we’ve tried in recent years in fast-paced games that rely heavily on coordination and reflexes. Synapse needs some better macro chops, and we’d add some “attaboys” were it to include angle-snapping and deceleration features, as well. But if you’re in the market for an attractive MOBA mouse, the Deathadder Elite is one of the better ones out there.