Mad Catz R.A.T. TE Gaming Mouse review - by Ino

REVIEW OF MADCATZ R.A.T. TE

I will be reviewing the new MadCatz R.A.T. TE (Tournament Edition) with the new iteration of Philipps Twin Eye Sensor. Thanks a lot to CeeSA for borrowing me his R.A.T. TE for this review!

http://imgur.com/H9UKRtR

Boxing

The box is really small, like the previous R.A.T. boxes.

What's included:
- MadCatz R.A.T. TE
- Some stickers
- Quick manual

I cringe a bit at the German translation of Lift-Off (Abflughöhe) which is closer to take-off (in a plane) than what it means with mice. Anyway...

Box:

http://imgur.com/AEQWA6x

http://imgur.com/6DqHPBU

http://imgur.com/3yUTjvC

http://imgur.com/RqwyNNY

Weight & Shape

The R.A.T. TE to my surprise is really light, at 90g without cable.

Weight: 90 g
Height: 37 mm
Width: 88 mm
Estimated width at grip position: 67 mm
Length: 113 - 128 mm
Number of buttons: 9

http://imgur.com/gKKITBb

http://imgur.com/ETAYgO4

http://imgur.com/xxDDgjp

http://imgur.com/cCcHdKp

As the back of the mouse is adjustable I tried to measure the min. and max. length of the mouse.

http://imgur.com/MyTDfMx

Now some pictures how I hold the mouse

http://imgur.com/62a1jGV

http://imgur.com/Z6r1olR

For comparison: My hand is around 19.5 cm from the tip of my middle finger to the base.

I think the shape is okay, but not too great. It is suitable for both palm and claw via the adjustable base. But I didn't find any of the settings to be that comfortable, mainly because for both the lower back of the mouse stays hollow which feels awkward to me. Most mice have a rather well rounded butt while with this mouse it feels like you're touching a hip bone. I'd rather not have too skinny a butt on my mice.

Of course shape is completely individual preference, so everyone has to try for himself in the end. The perfect shape for me might be horrible for others. So please keep the pictures of my grip in mind for comparison.

Sensor / Performance

Now this was the part that interested me the most in this mouse, because it's the new PTE sensor. I must admit I never tried any older PTE mouse, but they had the so called Z-Axis bug where the sensor would track vertical movement which caused misplacement of the cursor with every lift of the mouse. This was highly annoying to everyone who lifted their mouse often (for example low sens FPS gamers). Other than that the sensor was reportedly very responsive and allowed high tracking speeds.
First thing I tried with the R.A.T. TE was of course the lift-off behaviour, and oddly enough I couldn't find anything remarkably different from the usual slight cursor misplacement when using a normal optical/laser mouse. Also MadCatz seem to have implemented some fine tuning to lift-off that allows you to set it to values as low as 200 µm (0.2 mm) which is probably the lowest I've seen on any mouse. Amazingly it works, the mouse tracks on the pad, stops as soon as you lift it just a tiny bit. Downside to this is that the highest LOD you can set is 1 mm, which is still lower than any other mouse I know, so anyone who dislikes low LOD better stay away from this one.

http://imgur.com/4vpZOyh

There also is a feature called "sensor damping" which I disabled during my tests.

http://imgur.com/54HxaKB

It should limit the influence of vibration on the sensor, but somehow setting it to the highest value or leaving it off made no difference. It wasn't really moving around oddly from normal vibrations in the room, but when tapping on the mousepad next to the mouse I could make the cursor jump/jitter on any setting, so I decided to keep it off for the most raw sensor performance.

After everything working on the desktop I ran the usual speed tests with MouseTester. And this is the part where the sensor disappoints me. It tracks really well, but only up to 3.2 m/s. No matter what setting, 3.2 m/s is the end of the perfect control speed. Max tracking seems to be a lot higher, as I couldn't make the cursor skip ever, but who cares for max tracking if the PCS is too low.
There also seems to be some kind of path correction at higher CPI, but only with slow movements. At least that's how it felt to me. With the lower CPI settings (400/800 CPI) I didn't get that feeling.

Also there is no manual setting of the polling rate, it's always 1000 Hz (disclaimer on the box says "Dynamic up to 1000 Hz")

There seems to be only very little jitter, even at the highest CPI setting. Personally I find 8200 CPI to be impossible to control, so that might add to the weird feeling, but as I already said it seems like there is some path correction applied there too.

Speed related accuracy test
I tried to be just below the PCS limit for the test, and up to 3 m/s the accuracy is rather good. On par with most 3310/3090 implementations it seems.

Lift Off Distance

I already covered that at the sensor part.

Buttons / Switches / Scroll Wheel

Buttons all click quite well and are rather light. The scroll wheel is very good too, I quite like the feel of it. I do not like the sidebuttons, mainly because they are placed too low on the shell and I triggered them on accident a lot. The CPI switch feels rather cheap too.

Build Quality

Now this is difficult, because the build itself is rather good, however because they chose form over function with the style of the mouse (as with any R.A.T. before) it feels cheap to me. If you press a bit harder on it shell just flexes because the shell isn't closed which puts momentum on the connection points. Maybe my complete dislike for the art style play a role in that feeling too, because I think the mouse looks like a butt ugly abomination (once again, like all R.A.T.)
Also if someone had troubles with Zowies mouse feet you will not like this mouse, the feet are very thin here, too, which makes me wonder why they recommend a hard pad with the mouse.

Conclusion

I have mixed feelings towards this mouse, on one hand its performance is rather solid (if you never move faster than 3.2 m/s), on the other hand it's still ugly and I don't like the feeling.