HyperX Pulsefire Surge review: A subtle mouse, a style statement
If you are looking for a fancy gaming mouse these days, then there are plenty of options available at affordable prices. Most of them feature unique RGB illumination and crazy designs to make your PC gaming experience a bit special. HyperX is one of the many peripheral brands coming up with unique, yet quality gaming peripherals at attractive prices and their latest addition seems to be following the same philosophy — the Pulsefire Surge gaming mouse, priced at Rs 5,999.
At first glance, the Pulsefire Surge looks like any other regular mouse — there are no extreme graphics or an alien ship-like stealthy shape unlike what the competition offers. It feels normal and gels well with conventional PCs as well. The top offers ample palm support and is surprisingly satisfying to hold and use for longer sessions — thanks to high-quality plastics and a firm weight of 130g. The ergonomic shape also makes it easy to reach all the buttons across the mouse even those with smaller palms.
Since we have mentioned buttons, there’s set of Omron buttons on top that are extremely responsive and provides a satisfying tactic feel, especially when you are playing multiplayer battle games. There’s a DPI adjustment key below the rubberised scroll wheel and two customisable macro switches to the left — a highly useful feature especially for gamers, and can also be used for browsing gestures.
HyperX has given the Pulsefire Surge a braided wire, which prevents tangling and is strong enough to prevent it from damage whilst carrying it around in your backpack. The wire is pretty lengthy (around 1.8m), which more than enough even for desktop users. And as usual, a USB 2.0 male connector resides at the end.
The Pulsefire Surge uses a Pixart PMW3389 optical sensor for doing the tracking duties. The sensor supports a resolution of 16,000 dpi, which is more than enough for those requiring ultra-high precision tracking from their input device. Using the dpi adjustment button, one can switch between three levels of responsiveness — 800 dpi, 1600 dpi and 3200 dpi. For most parts, the 1600 dpi setting was comfortable for regular PC jobs such as navigating through web pages, drag-n-drop files between windows and move around the cursor on word documents. The 3200 dpi setting was more suitable for gaming, especially for FPS games where a high level of precision and accuracy is most crucial.
HyperX is not only stressing the performance, but also the RGB light decals. Unlike most gaming mice that overdo the gaming-dedicated theme with extreme illuminated graphics, the Pulsefire Surge only offers an LED light ring, which runs around the bottom edge of the mouse, and the illuminated HyperX logo. The ring supports up to 16.7 million colours and features up to four brightness levels. The illumination featured on the Pulsefire Surge is pretty subtle yet makes a stylish statement — it doesn’t feel ostentatious. The glowing HyperX logo is also subtle.
However, that’s not all. You can add more value to the Pulsefire Surge with their NGenuity app. Users can customise the lighting effects from a preset of five lighting effects. Each lighting effect can be further customised by changing colours as well. The NGenuity app can be further used to assign custom macro shortcuts.
The HyperX Pulsefire Surge is a superb gaming mouse for the price it demands. It can withstand the bashing while the adrenaline is rushing to higher levels or be a subtle style statement when you are doing normal data crunching. The RGB light ring is a spectacle and beats the boredom during long sessions of office work. If you want an exciting looking gaming mouse that performs reasonably well under Rs 7,000, the HyperX Pulsefire Surge is your best buy.
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