Hardcore PC Gamers are serious about the equipment they use. If they weren’t, then there would be no market for “extreme” gaming peripherals like gaming mice and gaming keyboards. Several vendors have introduced better products in the past few years that cater to the “professional gamer”. The computer mouse, once thought to never use much bandwidth, now require USB 2.0’s high polling rate to deliver the fast motion necessary.
Today’s gaming mice now boast speeds of 3200dpi (or more), which allow FPS gamers to whisk around corners with little effort, or RTS gamers to throw their cursors across dual high-resolution displays with a simple flick. One feature most of these rodents have is the ability to adjust the mouse’s DPI rating on the fly. You can run wildly through corridors in one moment and then dial the DPI down when sniping.
Hades is new to the computer peripheral market, and has introduced their H1 Professional Gaming Mouse, which they boast as “the most advanced optical gaming mouse in the world”. They are going to have some serious competition with the more established kids on the block, Razer, Logitech and Microsoft. The feature list of the Hades H1 seems in-line with other gaming mouse products.
Hades-Gaming is going to provide the best professional optical gaming mouse, H1. All the features of H1 are designed for pro-gamer, and the extremely high performance will demonstrate H1 is the king of gaming mouse.
H1 makes the cursors moving in a high accuracy, stable status. It such matches the request of the FPS (First Person Shooting) games such as Counter-Strike Series, Unreal Tournament Series, Call of DutySeries, Quake Series, DOOM Series, Painkiller, Half Life Series etc.. At the same time, the hight resolution feature also satisfied the RPG, RTS games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons Series, Ultima Series, Might & Magic Series, Wizardry Series, Men of Courage, Age of Empire Series, WC, Red Alarm Series.
The optical engine of H1 is the most powerful of the world, of course, it just one of the frature of H1. The 4 levels adjustable rsolution, keyboard commands saving, weight adjustment, full speed USB, PTFE (Teflon) mouse feet. All the features above make the H1 become the most powerful weapon for gamers.
- Best performance optical engine
- Special design for FPS/ SLG/ SIM/ SPT/ RPG/ RTS games
- Tracking speed up to 40 IPS (inches/sec)
- 4.8 mega pixels / second
- Frame rate: 12,000 FPS
- Toggle resolution selector
- 4 levels of adjustable resolution with indicator (up to 8 levels)
- Default resolution: 400/ 800/ 1200/ 1600 DPI, 4 levels
- Resolution: 100 – 3200 DPI
- 2 Modifiable mouse mode profiles
- 8 programmable mouse buttons (saving up to 16 different commands
- Save up to 16 keyboard commands
- Adjustable USB report rate: up to 1,000 reports/sec (USB 2.0 required)
- Modifiable suface optimization
- Adjustable weight via five 5g weights
- Non-slip gaming scrolling wheel
- Non-slip soft rubber coating
- 6-foot USB cable
- Gold-plated USB connections
- Teflon mouse feet
- Dimension 120 x 77 x 41 mm
- Weight: 128g (with cable)
- Colors: red/grey or black/grey
The Hades H1 Gaming mouse comes in a small red box that includes a software CD, an attractive carrying case, eight replacement teflon feet, and the Hades mouse itself. The carying case has two pockets where you can stuff the gold-plated USB cable and teflon feet. If the driver CD used a “mini-CD” form factor, then this might fit in the pocket, too.
Since the Hades mouse is completely driverless, the included CD contains software to manipulate the mouse’s settings and write these settings to the roden’t onboard memory. The mouse can emulate a keyboard, and registers itself as two devices, a “H1 compliant keyboard” and “H1 compliant pointing device”. All of the software only uses 10 megabytes, so you can easily copy them to a flash drive.
The mouse itself has several noteworthy features. For one, its USB cable is gold-plated. While the efficiency gold-plating has on electrical signals is debatable, consumers have come to expect this on professional-grade equipment The mouse also has several LED lights that can be programmable to indicate the mouse’s current settings (or just look cool). The mouse’s PTFE (teflon) feet feel very slippery to the touch and do not scratch easily. The mouse also uses an optical sensor rather than the laser technology that recent mice have adopted.
Mimicking Logitech’s gaming mice, the H1 has a weight compartment with five slots. The mouse includes five 5-gram weights, allowing you to customize the feel of the mouse to your liking. The weights must be pulled out with your fingernail, and only 5g weights are supplied. In contrast, Logitech’s G9 has a pull-out weight cartridge and you can mix-and-match 5g and 7g weights.
The H1 also includes 8 programmable buttons. The default functions are: left click, right click, center click, forward, backward, dpi up, dpi down, and mode select. There is no horizontal scroll functionality to the mouse wheel, and I doubt this is a feature that many gamers want (although any of the buttons can be remapped to this functionality). Beside the forward/back thumb buttons is an array of 6 LEDs to indicate the mouse’s mode and DPI level. Two red LEDs show which one of two modes are currently selected, and four blue LEDs indicate the current DPI settings.
The center mouse wheel also has a red backlit LED. This LED can be adjusted to different illumination levels, and can even be programmed to flash when in macro mode. Below the mouse wheel are what appear to be two buttons, but in fact are actually three. The first button is a rocker switch and by default is used to increase or decrease the mouse’s DPI. You can also put the mouse into “single button DPI mode”, where you can toggle through the entire DPI cycle with one button, leaving the other side of the rocker switch available for other functions.
The mouse can be customized and tweaked to any level of performance, and you can even adjust the optical sensor to track better on your surface of choice. The included software CD includes a configuration utility, an online manual and a mouse test application. The manual is rather diffucult to decipher, and includes many examples of “Engrish” that have been lost in translation.
The mouse test software lets you visually see how smoothly the mouse performs compared to other mice. It can show you the mouse polling rate, your effective DPI settings, and how quickly your “keep shot” (auto-fire) settings are. I used this utility to test the difference between my wireless laser desktop mouse and the H1. It can be easily seen that the H1 has much smoother circles, whereas a traditional 800dpi mouse makes several straight lines when moving the mouse in a circle. These straight lines are the result of the mouse not polling quickly enough. Using an old mouse, a circle is composed of say 20-30 points, and the H1 delivers hundreds of positioning points in the same amount of time, resulting in a much smoother pattern.
I also used this tool to show how the mouse reacts at different DPI settings. You can see several circles that become progressively larger. I moved the mouse in approximately the same motion in all settings, and the resulting circle shows how sensitive the cursor was to each. At the bottom you can see that the cusor is almost uncontrollable in a desktop setting, but believe me that this fast motion translates into a very quick and satisfying experience for the twitch-gamer.
The Gamer Toolkit allows you access the mouses’ onboard memory, much like Spock did with McCoy in Star Trek 2. All configuration settings (including keyboard macros) are stored onto the device’s onboard memory, so the mouse retains all settings even if you plug it into a completely different computer. The tool is seperated into four different tabs:
Buttons Configure
This is where you can configure each of the mouse’s 8 buttons. Most people will keep the default settings, but you may want to remap each button to a completely different function in a different mode (I have a seperate desktop and gamer profile). You can even assign a button to use one of the three programmable scripts that you define in the next tab. Each button has a dropdown list next to it, and the picture of the mouse changes to show you which mouse button you’re actually changing. This tab is straightforward and easy to understand.
Script Programming
This tab will interest gamers, but is a little difficult to understand at first. You can program up to three scripts, which are selected by clicking the A, B, or C icons above the Edit Area. You can then program in commands from the keyboard, either by pressing the keys on the keyboard individually, or by “String Input Method” where you type in a literal macro (such as “I+D+K+F+A”). When using the default method, you must keep focus on the Toolkit window (if you press the Left Window key, [LWIN] shows up in the Input field, but the window loses focus, so you must click on the window to continue the macro).
Once a keyboard or mouse sequence is constructed, it must be added to the Edit Area by clicking the “Add Script” or “Insert Script” buttons. Add Script adds the macro to the very end of the list, while Insert Script inserts the command to the selected area. You can add a combination of keyboard commands, mouse commands, or “timeouts”. Customizing a script can be a long process of trial-and-error. Either the script won’t fire, or too many commands try to execute at once, or the game doesn’t respond in time. This is a very powerful feature, but young Jedi must have patience…
Features Configure
If you’re going to totally Fubar your new mouse, thenthis tab will do it. You can override the Sensor features, which basically adjust the shutter rate and can be customized to be more sensitive to different surfaces. Just by playing with this I killed the mouse and had to reload the profile from file (after calling technical support about how to do this). The sensor is already more sensitive than other optical mice from my experience (very similar tracking to laser mice, if you can believe that). My advice: leave the sensor area alone.
You can adjust the USB report rate for each of the 2 programmable modes from 100 (USB mouse’s default) to 1,000. One-thousand USB polls per second is pretty much overkill and requires USB 2.0’s bandwidth. A setting of 500 is more than enough, and it is good to see a true alternative to “overclocking your mouse”. You can also adjust the time for your autofire feature (called the “Keep Shot DBTU”) in this tab. You can also adjust the scroll-wheel’s LED brightness (Always On, Always Off, On when executing a macro, or flash when executing a macro).
You can put the mouse into “One DPI Switch Button” mode, which allows you to toggle through all DPI settings using only one of the rocker-switch buttons, leaving the other button available for programming.
The DPI Level Control Mode is what most people will probably tweak. By default there are several modes to select, each with a different number of steps.
- 4-level (4/8/12/1600)
- 4-level (2/4/8/1200)
- 8-level (1/2/3/4/8/12/16/2400)
- 6-level (2/4/8/12/16/2400)
- User Defined DPI (any 4 steps of your choosing)
Because there are only four LEDs to indicate your current DPI setting, the LED indicator can get confusing if using a 6-level or 8-level DPI mode. You can select “Binary encoding” which may make sense to you if you know how binary numbers work (0001 = 1, 0010 = 2, 0011 = 3, 0100 = 4, etc). You can also select a 3-LED, 2-step method, a 4-LED increment, 4-LED decrement, 2-LED Gray Encoding method… you get the idea… there’s a lot of freakin’ ways to show your current DPI level.
For simplicity purposes I use a 4-level mode with 4-LED increment, so it looks like a bar graph (1 LED is lowest, 4 LEDs is the highest). It must be noted that the only way to achieve 3200dpi is to manually set it in the “User Defined DPI” setting.
My Favorite Profiles
This tab will interest to gamers who have a LOT of different macros they want to use between games. This tab lets you load and save profiles customized to a particular task. Once you’ve created the settings you like in all the other tabs, you can save it to a slot, name it, and update your mouse’s configuration with one click.
There is also a “reset to default” button, which loads the manufacturer’s default settings from file. This process basically re-flashes the mouse’s memory and takes a few seconds. I’ve had to do this more than once when messing with the mouse’s settings, and am glad this feature exists.
The Hades H1 is a mix of extreme goodness offset by things that need improvement. On the plus side, this is the only mouse that is so configurable that it lets you mess with the optical sensor. It’s extreme tweakability is handled through customized software, which can be difficult to use at times.
Hades claims that the H1 is the “most advanced gaming mouse in the world”, but there are several facts that dispute this claim. For one, Razer has introduced their Lachesis mouse which supports an insane 4000dpi. Even though the H1 is very similar to the Logitech G9, the H1 uses “outdated” optical technology and has no customizable grip.
The hardware has great potential, but the included software is a usability nightmare, and there is no other way to access the mouse’s configuration. Not only is there no explanation about what most of the settings do, but you can very easily crash this mouse without knowing what you’re doing. Feature-wise it nearly matches the Logitech G9 Gaming Mouse, but uses a more familiar mouse design. If you’re a fan of Logitech’s previous offerings then you’ll feel right at home with the Hades mouse.
Despite these differences, the Hades H1 has replaced my 800dpi laser mouse for gaming and desktop purposes. Being able to dial up and down your resolution on-the-fly is a feature that I can no longer live without, and is a feature that is helpful for graphics and office work, in addition to gaming. The mouse isn’t as ergonomic and comfortable as some of Microsoft and Logitech’s offerings, but this rodent was designed for performance, and it definately does deliver. If you need a high-performance mouse (regardless of your reason), then the Hades H1 is a decent alternative to the Logitech G9, Microsoft Sidewinder, and Razer Lachesis.
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