Review: KÄRNA RAZER BOOMSLANG 2000

It's all about a mouse, a very special one though - a mouse for gamers. The Razor Boomslang 2000 by Kärna. I never liked those special "Gamers-mice" very much in the past since mice were simply a means to an end for me. The first time I recognized the impact of a mouse to gaming was on a lan-party when a clanmate of mine let me use his Everglide Mousepad. The first five minutes of playing were horrible though, but after some experimenting with the pad, i got used to it. Ever since I wouldnt play without such a cool pad :) The gain of precision in games is really impressive.

The same thing happened to my mouse now. My $10 Logitech Pilot Mouse with comperatively moderate resolution of 400 DPI had to give way for the kick-ass Razer Boomslang 2000 by Kärna with its massive 2000 DPI resolution. Even the unpacking of this piece from its round box it was shipped with was kinda ritual. The manual for example isn't just a piece of paper. It's printed on thick board paper in round format.

Well, what is so special about this really expensive $100 mouse. The first thing is the very high sampling rate of 2000 DPI, which is about 5x higher than the ones regular mice use (most about 400 DPI). To raise precision even more, Kärna moves the mouse ball more to the back to put the center of rotation into the middle of the players hand. Kärna achieves a very high sensitivity through that. Two huge and touchy mouse buttons take almost half of the mouse surface. It takes some time and huge hands to get along with those.

The standart features are completed with a mouse wheel which also acts as third button, though it might be a bit hard to move. For left and for right handers there is also a fourth button on each side of the mouse, which is programmable with macros. You can assign other mouse buttons or even key combos to it. Another thing you will probably need to get used to is, that the function of that fourth button is activated if you release the button, not when u press it. If a game doesn't support 4 mouse buttons you can simply put a key combo on the fourth button to work around that. It isn't possible to put something like autofire on it (like the secondary attack function in UT), because in macro mode only a short key press is recognized (+release). It would be nice to have some more options there, because especially the left-shot/right-jump players have their problems in games like UT with secondary attack function. The Boomslang doesn't help them very much either...

The further driver settings look very complete. You can adjust speed of the double click function as well as the movement sensivity (even from within the game through an onscreen menu). Last thing is a menu to adjust PS/2 transfer speed (for operating as PS/2 mouse through the PS/2 adapter included in the package).

Extensive possibillities of adjusting sensitivity.	Adjustment of the scroll function.	Precise definitions for the mouse buttons, the settings for buttons 4/5 could be improved.

Copyright: 10.04.200 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

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