As Icrontic’s resident peripheral fanatic, I was excited to see a shiny new box show up at my doorstep recently. Inside it? The NZXT Avatar gaming mouse. Take a look inside to see how it stacks up.

The Hardware

Almost Razer-esque packaging...

Right when you see the box, you notice the distinct styling. The gull wings at the rear of the mouse are rather pronounced and sharply angled, giving it some flair. The box’s front panel opens up, revealing the mouse inside and a diagram, and the panel itself houses the drivers and instructional manual.

The interior of the box houses the mouse itself and offers a quick glance at the available buttons on the Avatar. All of them are user-programmable from the driver front end, as is the polling rate, DPI setting, and current profile. The mouse wheel even has more specific options where you can reassign a scroll upwards to a specific action separately from a scroll downwards.

Before we jump into the software full force, let’s quickly run down the hardware. The Avatar hosts 7 distinct buttons – left click, right click, two buttons under the mouse wheel, forward and back (on the right and left of the mouse, respectively), and the mouse wheel itself – which makes 8 if you make use of the advanced scroll up vs scroll down functionality mentioned above. The click travel and rebound of the main buttons is pleasant and simple; they take just enough force to prevent you from inadvertently clicking willy-nilly. The scroll wheel, on the other hand, takes nearly the hand of God to spring into action. This is not the mouse for you if you’re a fan of scrolling through long documents, but it might be if you’re a gamer that relies on a defined number of clicks to switch between weapons or inventory. It’s got a good stiff resistance to scroll, and the driver has a scroll speed setting that is just a different way to get to Windows’ own scroll speed settings. The whole package is powered by a single USB connection with a decently long cord.

The reveal!

The full Monty.

As for its physical form, this mouse will not win any awards for size. It’s a slim, sleek gamer’s mouse, but it’s neither the smallest nor the largest mouse you’ll see. There’s room enough to fit your index and middle fingers of a standard-sized hand on the mouse, and almost nothing else. The thumb rests along the side, under the back button, to provide some measure of grip; the ring finger can grip the opposite side under the forward button for the same effect. The clicking surfaces have the rubberized texture we’ve been seeing in lots of mice lately, and is grippy enough to make the mouse usable despite sweat or oils, but slick enough to release when you want to. The sides are more rubberized than the tops, providing a good tack for your thumb and ring finger to grip onto to help control the mouse. The mouse feet are Teflon, similar to many gaming mice, and the mouse slides effortlessly as a result. The interior of the mouse is lit with a blue light that comes up slightly around the outer edges of the clicking surfaces, and there’s a three-tiered LED indicator to display what your current DPI level is. Empty lighting equates to 600 DPI, while one is 1200 DPI, two is 1800 DPI, and three is 2600 DPI. These aren’t the highest in the gaming mouse world (several go to 3200, 4000, or higher DPI), but it’s certainly respectable and won’t  be an issue for anybody’s gaming. With a 5.8 megapixel/second framerate from the sensor, the mouse is more than responsive enough.

The Software

The Avatar's configuration window

The Avatar’s software sadly requires a restart, but that can hardly be held against it. After restarting, however, you’ve found a way to unlock the rest of the Avatar’s potential. Here, you can remap all of your buttons, adjust sensitivity in the second section, and adjust scroll speed and double-click speed (Windows settings) in the third section.

As you can see, the Avatar allows you to remap every single key, including the left click button–but thankfully, it requires that at least one button be the “click” button, so it’s not possible to get yourself into a bad situation where you can’t accept, close, or change anything back. Aside from that, you can assign each button (including scroll up or scroll down) one of the following actions:

• Click
• Menu (standard “right click” functionality)
• Universal Scroll
• Double Click
• Advanced
• Back
• Forward
• DPI Up
• DPI Down
• Switch Profile
• Button Off

The macro configuration utility you see in the screenshot is a result of choosing the Advanced function for one of the default DPI buttons. Here, you can assign a single keystroke to be executed on button press, choose additional functions (think cut, paste, undo, save, etc) or media functions (play, pause, next track, volume controls, etc), or design a macro to be run. The macro, sadly, appears to be limited to 16-byte entries, and doesn’t support entering mouse events. In other words, you get 16 keydown events, 16 keyup events, or some mix thereof; if you want to type EXPLODE!!, you’re out of luck – shift down, E down/up, X down/up, P down/up, etc. The macro assignment window also has very poor editing support; you get it right on the first try or you switch back to the “Single Key” tab and back to Macro to start over.

You can also set whether the Avatar is being used right- or left-handed, the polling rate, the DPI, and the current profile. Polling rate can be chosen from 125Hz, 500Hz, or 1000Hz, while DPI ranges from 600 to 2600 as mentioned above. There are slots for 5 profiles, so you can write a maximum of 5 macros to assign to different buttons here. Note, however, that unless you assign “Switch Profile” to one of the buttons, you’ll have to go into the software to change the profile.

Conclusion

In sum, the NZXT Avatar is a solid mouse. It eschews a front-back rocker on the thumb side that could have allowed another configurable button in the place of the forward button on the right side. It has some awkwardly-placed buttons directly behind the scroll wheel – and the scroll wheel itself takes a small mountain of force, in relative terms, to move. The DPI stops aren’t user-definable, and the driver requires a restart. It’s still got more than enough polling sensitivity and DPI to satisfy all but the twitchiest of gamers, and the existence of macro options are better than a lot of mice are doing. The Teflon footing ensure a smooth gaming experience, and the sensor provides enough information to track smoothly across all of your standard mousing surfaces. At around $70 MSRP, including from our friends at Newegg, the mouse isn’t a steal, though you can find it closer to $55 during some sales. While it isn’t going to win in most of the competitions that gaming mice usually have, it’s a solid entry from NZXT, and Icrontic can recommend it if you’re looking for a quick mouse with a narrower profile and a nice clicky scroll wheel. Have fun fragging out there, everybody!