Creative Sound BlasterX Siege M04 Gaming Mouse Review

Conclusion

The peripheral market is the most hotly contested one around and so to enter it afresh you have to have a lot of confidence in your product and get it nailed straight away. 

In a lot of respects Creative have got the Siege M04 right, but there are a couple of niggles.

First the good points. If you’re a person with medium to large sized hands then the Siege M04 will suit you down to the ground. It’s one of the largest mice we’ve seen. We’re not talking comically large, just in a sea of compact mice to suit both palm and claw players, this is probably best suited for the palm style players. I can easily press F1 and F12 at the same time with a single hand, yet the sniper button is at my thumb tip when holding the Siege comfortably. You will hold it comfortably though as the combination of a smooth, soft feel, top side and the heavily textured and grippy side pieces allied to a low palm hump mean that the Siege M04 is extremely comfortable to use for long periods.

The PWM3360 sensor has quickly found a home in all the high end mice on the market and it is easy to see why. It has fantastic accuracy and responsiveness, and when you combine that with the ability to go all the way up to 12000 DPI without involving any guesswork nor software interpolation you end up with a mouse that rewards your skill level. Any inaccurate clicks or missed headshots will be entirely your own fault.

Lighting is a little hit and miss, and indeed is the first of the two disappointments that we have with the Siege. The RGB strip that runs around the entire underside of the mouse is glorious, capable of replicating any colour scheme you desire whilst also supporting the rainbow and cycling effects that remain as cool as when we first saw them. It seems odd then that the scroll wheel remains resolutely white no matter what you do, and the X of the Sound BlasterX is red, red and nothing but red. In a perfect world all of the lighting areas would be RGB, but at the very least we’d prefer to see the scroll wheel change with the base lighting. Firstly because the X is probably red for corporate branding reasons, but secondly it’s hidden under your palm. The scroll wheel has no such hiding place and is like a lighthouse between your fingertips.

The second problem is one of under-developed software. It’s an issue we’ll cross again in our review of the Vanguard, but with the Siege you have perfect lighting and sensitivity controls, but nowhere to record macros, or reassign any of the buttons, or control the DPI of the sniper button. Lastly the sensitivity stage button isn’t very well blended into the mouse and is quite large, so holding it in certain positions it ends up scratching the gap between your index and middle fingers. It needs to be a tiny bit smaller, or less angular.

As a first attempt at a gaming mouse the Siege M04 gets many many things right, and the couple of things we’re not too happy about are only some improved software and a minor design tweak away, so for that reason we award it our OC3D Gamers Choice.

  

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