Mad Catz R.A.T Pro X3 Supreme Edition Review

Conclusion

Let’s get the big elephant out the room first. When this appeared in the office we had a quick hunt for pricing and the general consensus of opinion amongst various sites was that this extremely limited Supreme Edition was retailing around the £200 mark. With that in mind we expected this to be a mouse than nearly played itself, especially when anything above £100 is near guaranteed to be wireless. Since then the Supreme Edition has fallen off the face of the Earth in any retailer we can think of. So the price is a little bit nebulous.

Even if you treat the price of the vanilla Pro X3 as the value of the mouse – £110 – then it falls short of an awful lot of high end mice. The PixArt PWM3389 sensor is unquestionably one of the best around, and even in 16000 DPI form as it is here you’re getting an optical sensor that tracks beautifully on all manner of surfaces, with no lag, weird angles, or anything other than crisp, highly responsive pointer/crosshair control.  The Pro X3 is replete with the famous Omron switches and these too live up to the high standards we’ve come to expect from the Omron range with a crisp, tactile response and none of the bubble-wrap squidginess lesser buttons can give. But the lighting is pretty poor with only two zones. One, the X3 logo, is so small that colour changes are barely noticeable, whilst the larger one behind the back/forward buttons has serious issues with consistency in both brightness and colour reproduction.

Having first reviewed the £85ish R.A.T 8 Adv we were hugely impressed by the amount it offered to play with, both in customisable part options and buttons/wheels/movement that absolutely smoked this R.A.T Pro X3 Supreme Edition in specifications. It’s tough not to come away from the Pro X3 feeling a little bit disappointed. Compared to the 8 Adv it has fewer lighting options, and much worse ones, it has a lower DPI sensor, it’s not wireless, it hasn’t got adjustable weighting, it hasn’t got adjustable side button angles.. it just doesn’t match up very well. It isn’t bright red though, so that’s definitely a tick in the Pro X3 box.

All of which means that what you’re really paying for here is the ability to change nearly all of the mouse parts out for ones that match your own taste. We’re big fans of that concept here at OC3D. What you have to bear in mind though, is that once you have found a setup that enhances your gaming prowess, what are you going to do with all the other bits and bobs you’ve paid a lot of good money for? It’s not like the world is short of various mice that cater to all needs, heck even Mad Catz themselves have loads if you are a big fan of the skeletal frame aesthetic. The components are high quality and robust. Sometimes when you have a mouse with alternative panels it feels like the options aren’t the same quality that you’d get from a one-piece mouse, but the ones in the box of the Supreme Edition are high quality and once everything is installed you’d never tell that wasn’t how it was meant to be.

All of which makes summing up the R.A.T Pro X3 Supreme Edition a challenge. The software gets unequivocal praise, being lightweight, responsive, clearly laid out and an absolute joy to use. The PixArt PWM3389 sensor is as brilliantly accurate as it has always been and the Omrom switches are crisp and glorious. So as a mouse, it’s a little pricey but worth the money and will give you years of satisfactory service, hence it wins our OC3D Gamers Choice award. However, if you don’t want the special gold and black colour scheme of the Supreme Edition, don’t really want the limitations of a single not very good lighting zone, don’t want to spend money on lots of plastic that will largely sit in a box once you’ve worked out your favourite combo, then we’d definitely go for the R.A.T 8 Adv which, red colouring aside, is a better all-rounder and more affordable to boot.

  

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