Cooler Master MM830 24000 DPI Mouse Review

Conclusion

It’s always struck us as slightly odd that if you ask most people for their current hardware wishlist it will be full of beefy CPUs and blazing graphics cards, maybe a bigger case, larger faster storage drives and all that type of thing. Rarely will anyone desperately desire a new monitor or mouse. Given that those two items are, along with a keyboard, our connection between the two disparate worlds of biological and the silicon we think they should be much higher on people’s collection of desires. If you ever have to go and use someone else’s PC – usually in the role of ‘mate who can fix these things’ – it’s obvious how used you are to your own setup and how a lower quality product can greatly impact your productivity. Our mice are nearly glued to our hands. So perhaps you should spend less time dreaming of RGB LED strips that you’ll barely notice and more time dreaming about something which feels like an extension of your being. The better the rodent, the more natural your game play, and better you will perform.

Whenever we review mice it tends to be that the sensor is the part the manufacturer wants to shout from the rooftops about, and the comfort and usability is the part we focus on. The days when there were obviously bad sensors and obviously good ones are lessened in recent years, as even mediocre sensors are excellent and the highest quality ones, such as we have here on the Cooler Master MM830, are so brilliant as to be dazzling. Naturally the big headline about the MM830 is 24000 DPI. A number that seemed impossible when we first were impressed by 6400 DPI sensors. Certainly in normal use that is so sensitive that it’s almost unusably fast, but that isn’t the point of high DPI. What you do is increase the sensitivity of your mouse, and then detune the sensitivity in your game of choice. That way the pointer remains in control but the accuracy is greatly improved. If you doubt the need for such huge numbers remember that – for example – a 27 inch 1440 monitor has 13600 odd pixels per inch. Suddenly the improved accuracy of having a sensor that can move at a pixel level makes sense. It isn’t just about the manufacturer putting higher DPI sensors into their mice to win the arms race, but as a result of the rapid inflation of our desktop resolutions. 1080P might still be the king, but 4K is coming fast, especially on the desktops of people likely to want a high end mouse such as this. It’s not just in the raw DPI that the MM830 does well though. The ability to adjust the angle snapping level is nice, the ability to turn it off entirely is a godsend.

The other main feature of the MM830 takes a little more getting used to. Normally if more buttons get added to the side of your mouse they are in addition to the regular back/forward ones we’re all used to. Cooler Master have eschewed this reliable placement and instead moved them down the mouse into the middle of the D-Pad. It takes a fair bit of retraining to get your thumb to not move to the top edge of the side to find the back/forward options but instead remain lodged in place. Once you do get used to it though the benefits become obvious. In titles where you regularly use those buttons you’re always having to compromise between control over the mouse if you keep your thumb poised over the buttons, or a slight delay whilst you move it there to click them. Here there are none of those worries. That in an of itself would be enough to put the MM830 into the highly recommended category if you’re chasing leaderboards, but the addition of two extra buttons and the ability to combine the side buttons with other buttons to greatly increase the number of functions at your fingertips without necessitating a keypad sized array is a boon.

Lastly the OLED display is something we’ve seen before on the Steelseries Rival 710 and it’s as handy here as it was on that product. In fact it’s even more useful here thanks to the prebuilt options within the software. It’s worth mentioning how good the Cooler Master Portal software is. To say something is powerful but user friendly is almost a cliche, but it’s true here. Everything is where you expect it to be, clearly indicated, responsive, with plenty of preset options for those who don’t want to spend an afternoon tinkering, but lots of power for those who require things to be ‘just so’.

All in all the Cooler Master MM830 justifies its place as the flagship model of the Cooler Master Mastermouse range, combining a comfortable shape with a lot of cool features and an absolute beast of a sensor. Fast, light, powerful, everything we want the interface between us and our silicon friend to be.

  

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