In a world where touchscreens are being put on every possible device in our homes, it’s easy to forget about the humble mouse. Saviour of clicking, menu opening, and dragging, there’s a reason that this stalwart remains at the centre of our PC experience. In terms of gaming, it’s incredibly straightforward – if you want the ultimate in accuracy, you need a quality gaming mouse. You probably also need its alphabet-toting brethren, the keyboard, but that’s a different review.
ASUS and its gaming-oriented subsidiary ROG are makers of serious peripherals for serious gamers. Amongst its latest batch of tech is the ROG Keris, a 62g lightweight wired optical gaming mouse, with a hint of RGB about it. As you’d expect from ROG, what you’re getting is a comfortable, swift, and impressively accurate mouse that’s perfect for pretty much whatever you throw at it.
While a wireless mouse is great for reducing the number of wires trailing around the back of your PC, they require technical wizardry to be able to match the low latency of a wired connection. ROG have made their cable – with its bog standard USB-A connection – as easy to live with as possible. It has an exceptionally lightweight fabric that makes it feel more like the mouse is untethered than many of the other wired numbers out there.
The body of the ROG Keris is sculpted out of sleek black plastic, feeling comfortable underhand with each of the controls sitting naturally within reach. Beyond the faithful left and right buttons, there’s two further L/R PBT polymer inputs beneath your thumb, a DPI toggle on the underside, and an RGB-equipped scroll wheel.
I always think the scroll wheel can make or break a mouse, and the one fitted to the Keris is a great rendition. It’s wide enough to provide plenty of traction, while the increments are definite enough to give feedback and let you be sure of each step, but light enough that they won’t hamper you in the heat of the moment. The fact that it glows in whatever lovely shade you fancy is just an added bonus.
The key thing is that the Keris feels responsive and accurate. Equipped with a 16,000 DPI sensor with a polling rate of 1000hz, it’s going to talk to your PC thousands of times in the space of time it takes you to line up that perfect headshot. When you’re ready to take your shot, the ROG Keris is right there with you. Having moved over from a ROG wireless mouse, I appreciated the unerring sense that absolutely every motion was being captured.
The micro switches on the ROG Keris are rated for 70,000,000 clicks, and despite my best efforts over the last few weeks I’m still an incredibly long way short of wearing them out. I have no doubt that they’re more than capable of achieving that limit and beyond, but if you somehow do furiously click your way to breaking them, push-fit sockets make swapping them out a doddle.
The Aura Sync lighting is all controlled via the Armoury Crate software. There’s an unbelievable number of incremental shades available to you, and you can match them up with all of your other glowing tech in no time at all. Armoury Crate also allows you to dig into the finer tuning of the ROG Keris as well, letting you alter your DPI increments and polling rate to match your needs.
