PC Gamer awards Xai Editor’s Choice
Feeling sort of an awesome feeling of rendezvous creeping in, I’m happy to let you guys know that PC Gamer has awarded the SteelSeries Xai Laser Mouse with an Editor’s Choice award and a 95% score - as it happened with the SteelSeries Ikari Laser back in 2008 (97%, though).
PC Gamer wrote:
“The Xai is in every way equal to the SteelSeries Ikari - the hands-down best gaming mouse of all time that received a whooping 97% in October 2008 - except for one thing: It’s ambidextrous, with two thumb buttons on each side.
That, as a right-hander, I much prefer the contours of the Ikari is rather predictable, but doesn’t diminish the Xai’s internal hardware, including a laser that picks up more megapixels than my camera and boasts SteelSeries’ peerless tracking.
Oh, and there’s the extra-fancy 32×128 display tucked underneath the mouse, which allows you to swap profiles and save settings without ever having to use the included software (which is exceptionally well-designed - simple, minimal, effective). So take notice, right-handers: the lefties just leveled the playing field.”
VERDICT: 95% - Editor’s Choice Award.
US residents, make sure to pick up this months issue as it, besides the SteelSeries Xai review, also has a SteelSeries Kinzu feature.
Have a great weekend. :-)
/Casper
February 9th, 2010 16:25
Im going to give Xai probably around 8,9 or 9 points of 10 in future review.
It is very good mouse, but its not perfect.. in fact, there is no perfect mouse so far.
Going to write comparsion review between Ozone Smog, Steelseries Xai and Logitech G9x. I will probably translate it to English and publish on XS forums. I can give you a link, if you want.
Btw. I hope you’ll release some new FW soon.
February 10th, 2010 10:17
#1 - sure thing, I’d be happy to receive a link to the review. :)
Firmware updates are happening on a regular basis and will continue to do so going forward.
February 10th, 2010 18:53
Ok, if you can forward this to your FW engineers.
In few games (QL for example), mouse scroll lags and then moves or moves too much (eg. one click forward doesnt mean that it moves one click forward, sometimes 3 clicks, sometimes lags and then like 6 clicks).
If you switch weapons that way.. its bad, you know switching to machinegun instead of BFG really sux. :D
I can solve that by simply assigning one weapon to mousewheel up and another to mousewheel down.. but obviously, it should work even normal way, but it doesnt.
Other mices dont have that problem.
I tried your support (before I bash mice for this in review), but no answers so far.
Yea and one thing, any way to regulate LEDs on 7G? (except painting it). Cause it really hurts my eyes.. I had Arctosa from Razer, switched it for this (hoped that this will be better) and no.. your LEDs are even more brighter. Seriously.. Steelseries want blind gamers?
Otherwise, amazing keyb..
Yea and thanks for answering my post.
February 10th, 2010 19:12
#3, a lot of people have the scroll wheel issue (including myself). Casper, is this an issue with the actual scroll wheel or is it some kind of issue on some of the mice?
February 10th, 2010 19:37
Casper, i know your guys are getting the fix soon, same thing happened to logi, do notify us when the new firmware is out, of, btw, mind to release a changelog on it? If possible, give a more technical description about the change log, damn i want to get the xai so badly =D
February 10th, 2010 22:52
Wait what? What do you mean with same thing happened to Logitech? They haven’t released any fix for the “acceleration” issue, have they?
About the scroll wheel issue: Can’t reproduce it myself but it could be related to the driver/CPU/polling rate.
I remember that the Copperhead once had a delay on the side buttons when clicked. The strange thing was that it happened only in games and not on the desktop or in idle mode.
Well, the cause of this was that while gaming the CPU load was around 100% and therefore handled the mouse with less priority, which resulted in delay. The solution was to raise the priority of the driver process of the mouse.
I don’t know if this helps with the Xai (from what I understand the driver is just for configuration purposes) but it shows that the cause can be a “too weak” CPU or the game consuming a lot of CPU time so it cannot handle the mouse inputs properly.
February 11th, 2010 00:12
Its not CPU related, unless you think that mouse can occupy 8 cores at 3,4GHz (4+4 HT - i7 920) .. and seriously QL cant load even one core to full use. :D
It might be polling rate.. going to try 500Hz instead, but as I play only 1KHz, its not what I want.
Another thing might be, that there are three ways how to get reading from mouse. Direct Input, raw data and via OS somehow (not sure about last).
As mouse is working fine in OS, I guess it can be some SW/FW bug.
February 11th, 2010 01:13
Yeah it’s really strange for sure…
In which games do you also have this behaviour?
February 14th, 2010 15:39
Quake-Live, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (beta). Tough, I’m sure, its not cause its beta..
I tried SS customer service… jeez thats a mess, after they responded I gived up, cause I can’t find where to respond to their question..
February 14th, 2010 16:21
Hmm… I play BC2 beta myself with the Xai and don’t have this behaviour. Might still be something with your system… which OS do you use?
February 14th, 2010 16:27
i play bc2 beta with the xai no problems at all
February 16th, 2010 00:35
I didn’t know ‘rendezvous’ was a feeling. I think you meant deja vu.
February 16th, 2010 23:58
BC2 was rare, could be just mistake. But UT3 confirmed (DirectInput switched on/off) and Quake-Live does same in every input selected (and that have 3 different). I guess I’ll RMA it.
February 22nd, 2010 00:03
I play Left 4 Dead 2 every night with my Xai and it rocks :)
Didn’t have any problem with BC2 beta as well, apart from my old dual-core needs an update to get a good FPS :(
February 22nd, 2010 16:53
my question is, is this mouse any better or have better support then the World of warcraft mouse you released? Lets be frank here, I purchased three World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mice. I paid for Dearly for these because Honestly usually you get what you pay for. Yes at first I was thrilled, until the buttons started sticking/not working for no reason what so ever. My first thought was, quality product, contact their quality support. WRONG!
In my opinion when you have to wait weeks for any type of response this is by far NOT quality support, in fact it is the worse support response time I have ever seen. So now I am left wondering .what exactly did I pay so much for? it wasnt product quality/ reliability, it sure wasn’t for quality support, and last but not least, Please before you purchase anything, take note that there are no phone numbers to call if you need assistance and you WILL be waiting for weeks to get a reply from their support order.
February 23rd, 2010 22:06
@Christina Pinkley
Same thing here.
I bought the XAI and installed it in windows 7.
Now the profiles doesn’t work and the “support” doesn’t reply me.
February 25th, 2010 01:45
Well, support answered once.. now Im waiting if theyll answer rest before I bash it in review. :)
In meantime I got G9x + Gigabyte Ghost. First is perfect, except really hard to press middle-mouse button.. second is just perfect if you have right mousepad (in this case it was ROCCAT Taito and nothing else..bit wierd, but works).