ROG Chakram, which is a very unique mouse with a joystick amongst its other additional features.
In the Box
It comes in a big box, and after being greeted with the mouse, you get a very good zipper carrying case which even has the ROG logo on its slider, then you get an accessory box containing two replaceable Omron Switches and joystick, and a tweezer to pull out the switches.
Then you get this plastic piece which you can customize to add your personal logo. You get a braided Type C cable, A USB A to Type C Female adapter, then you get some stickers and badges in typical ROG fashion, a manual, and then we of course have to take out the mouse too.
The USB receiver comes attached inside of the body of the mouse, which is cool, And this rog logo piece can also be replaced with that white piece I showed earlier.
The shape of the ROG chakram is just one of the best that I’ve tried on a mouse. I’ve also tried other Asus mice and they were also nice, but on this mouse, they’ve just nailed it perfectly, and I think it should fit well in hands of different sizes.
The mouse doesn’t have any rubberized coating that you get with some other premium mice, but the plastic used here feels really nice, and I think they used it instead of rubber to keep the weight down.
At 121 grams, this is definitely not a lightweight mouse, but as a Logitech G604 user, I found the 14 grams difference to make this quite lightweight, and I think that has a lot to do with how well it fits in my hand, and how well it glides on my mousepad.
The default RGB effect on it is quite jumpy compared to the extremely smooth ARGB on the budget G102 Lightsync, which is not great.
So I hope they fix this with a firmware update, even though it’s not that big of a deal as you can easily change colors in software and it does look nice, diffused through its translucent body.
Design
The mouse has a very modular design, and you can really open it and close it up in a very cool way as the different parts snap into place with help of magnets.
Now, this is such an over-engineered way of piecing this mouse together, but it’s just so fun to do, and it is also useful because you don’t have to use a screwdriver to insert or remove anything.
One of the biggest advantages of Asus mice is that they have easily replaceable micro switches, so you can try different switches that feel the best to you, but most importantly, if this mouse develops double-clicking problems,
which generally happens with all brands, you can easily replace it in under a minute, especially on this mouse, so that is just going to extend the life of this mouse a lot, and I have a drawer of unusable double-clicking mice so every brand should copy this feature.
Mouse Buttons Quality
The mouse buttons are pretty good, and the pivoted mechanism with spring and hinge isn’t there just for show as you can click anywhere on this button, even at its extreme rear, and it will register the click.
The scroll wheel is also really good, the middle click is nice, the steps are easy to feel, and it is a light scroll wheel so you can easily scroll up and down quickly.
The mouse has two programmable buttons on the side, they are tactile and require just the perfect amount of force for activation, even if they sound different from each other for some reason.
There’s also a joystick on the side, and it can be either programmed to be used as 4 separate buttons, or it can be used in an analog joystick mode which we’ll talk about in a moment.
Joystick
Now the joystick is a little further from the point where you keep your thumb, so you do have to reach out to it, which is not a problem for me as a person who has relatively big hands, but for people with smaller hands, this may require a shift in the way you hold the mouse.
Now at first, I thought that they should’ve kept it at a more accessible position on this mouse so it would be easier to use, but the problem with that is that that would’ve created issues when you just want to play fps games, as the joystick could have interfered with the natural grip of the mouse.
Hybrid and palm grip work the best on this mouse, and claw grip can work, but then the joystick will become difficult to access and you’ll have to press click buttons at your rear.
You can also switch how tall the joystick button is as you get another taller one in the box, and if you just don’t like this, you can also replace it with this plastic piece and that will make it flush with the surface and it will feel like it never existed.
You also have pairing and DPI buttons at the bottom along with the power switch, and you can also use it to set it to Bluetooth mode, which is very helpful if you use it with a TV/Laptop or phone without using the adapter.
