Cougar 700M Gaming Mouse Review
Conclusion
The worlds of power supplies and mice are chalk and cheese. Indeed we’ve seen many companies struggle to produce such disparate products successfully. Cougar have turned up and, to use an idiom, hit it out of the park. We struggle to think of any company whose first attempt has been so flawless. Perhaps Roccat were the last. Either way the Cougar 700M is jaw-droppingly good. So good in fact that we’re struggling to find anything about it that we’re dissatisfied with.
The most obvious thing that might split the audience are the looks. The 700M is visually arresting. However, it isn’t without precedent. As we said in our introduction it reminds us, and we imagine most people, of the Cyborg R.A.T. More recently the Razer Ouroboros looked very similar. Hold onto the Ouroboros as we’ll be coming back to it later. So this isn’t the only mouse that looks so futuristic, yet it’s clearly the best of the aforementioned. Wherever you look you find something that has been considered and refined until it is perfect.
The backbone of the 700M is the aluminium chassis. It brings rigidity without adding weight and enhances the looks of the 700M too. The palm rest comes in two sizes, but both of them are well judged and comfortable. Swapping between them is simplicity too. It’s this quick change ethos that instils further pleasure in use. The angle of the palm wrest is a no-tool adjustment and at both extremes of the scale it feels very robust. Sometimes a thumb screw alteration can be rigid at one section of travel and not so solid when at the other end. Not here. The scroll wheel is equally solid, being the beautiful combination of smooth, weighty and yet with an obvious tactile bump when you are switching weapons. Even the additional fire button to the left of the LMB is solid and can be pressed without affecting the mouse, such is the solidity of the entire design. Even the placement of the weight adjustment (in 4.5g increments) is as central as possible, and very fast to adjust without having to turn the mouse over.
Sensors and buttons are the heartbeat of any mouse, and the Cougar 700M utilises the top-end Avago 9800 Laser sensor, with support for upto 8200DPI, at 12000FPS. Switches are Omron and give the reassuring click that we’ve all come to love. Because of the excellent quality of the Avago/Omron combination they sometimes outweigh the other qualities of the mice they are placed in, but not with the Cougar 700M. It’s every bit as good as they are, and we can’t think of much praise higher than that.
Having such a brilliant mouse on hand Cougar could be forgiven for providing the bare minimum of software, but even the ‘UIX System’ software is every bit as good as the mouse. It’s easy to use with everything being clearly labelled and not tucked behind some obscure icon and it even supports the very rarely seen mouse pointer macros, both of the relative and absolute coordinate variety.
It’s certainly priced at the higher-end of the gaming mouse spectrum, but like the SteelSeries Sensei before it, it’s so brilliant that you’re left feeling it’s a bargain. We mentioned the Razer Ouroboros before as it had a similar design, except the software wasn’t quite as good and it had fewer features, yet cost over a hundred pounds. The Cougar 700M, at £70, is a comparative steal. There isn’t a single thing we dislike about the 700M. It has amazing build quality, design bordering on genius, the very best parts and amazing software. It even comes in all-black if you dislike the silver and orange looks. Walk, no run, to your favourite hardware emporium and seek one out this very instant. It’s brilliant and utterly worthy of our OC3D Gold Award. Amazing job, Cougar.
   
Thanks to Cougar for supplying the 700M for review. Discuss the Cougar 700M Gaming Mouse Review
