Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Gaming Mouse Review

First look at the Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 7

To say the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse is highly customizable and configurable is understatement of epic proportions. In the past, other manufacturers have tried various techniques to broaden the comfort level to as wide a niche as possible and while the Logitech G9x, does succeed to a certain extent its interchangeable "skin" pales in its abilities to this bad boy. Not only does Mad Catz include three different palm rests, three different pinkie rests, a weight system but also manages to cram in X and Y adjustment for the thumb area AND the palm area! The R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse literally can be used comfortably by "palm" and "claw" users alike with equal comfort.

Here's front and back view of the Cyborg R.A.T. 7 mouse.

The default "size" of the R.A.T. 7. The pinkie rests consist of the stock "smooth" rubberized grip that should fit most, but not be perfect for everyone. It has a nice tacky rubberized feel to it, which does provide a very good grip. If this "standard" size fits your hand nicely but you want even more secure grip, the second pinkie rest is for you. It is the same standard size but has a much more aggressive tread like pattern to it. If you prefer a palm grip, either of these pinkie rests will be good choices and it will come down to which feels better. If you are more a claw grip kind of guy, the third is the one you most likely want as it afford the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse much more support. It has the same rubberized feel to it as the standard grip but down right dwarfs the other two in terms of size. The only thing missing was a fourth option that combined the size of the large pinkie rest with the ultra grip of the diamong tread patterned second option.

Where the thumb area is more important then the pinkie area (as it has forward and back buttons AND the kick ass precision aim button) this side of the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse gets the royal treatment. You may not be able to swap out the standard side panel like you can the pinkie rest, but you can adjust how far back or forwards the buttons are as this panel literally is on a screw that can reposition it in nearly infinitely small increments. Taking the thumb side panel to the next level is the fact that it not only can move forwards and backwards, but also with a simple loosening of one screw it can swing IN and OUT! See the rotating images on the right for demo.

Quiet honestly, if you can't, with some trial and error, get the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse's thumb area "perfect" then you are not trying hard enough. It is not only unbelievable the amount of movement they have built in, but it's truly scary how EASY it is to adjust. Simply unscrew the built in screwdriver from its holding place under the palm swell and use it to independently adjust the swing or even forward / backward motion. That is all there is to it; no need to swap out finicky, rubber skins, just adjust a screw or two and your are DONE.

This 'screw' is how to adjust the thumb rest angle.

The R.A.T. 7 mouse comes with a nice accessory box for storing all these different parts.

While the ability to make the R.A.T. 7 mouse thicker or thinner depending on your hand (via the pinkie and thumb adjustments) is nice, the palm swell is what wraps this mouse up in a bow and makes it into a veritable God's gift to users. Three palm swells (as shown in the image on the right) are include and with a simple push of a locking lever you can not only change it out but also change how long the mouse is and where your fingers and palm will rest on the R.A.T. 7.

The customization abilities of the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse are simply unmatched, but Mad Catz didn't forget about the "standard" features either. You get what is becoming the new standard in ways of buttons with dual thumb, left and right buttons and even a DPI on the fly changer and the scroll wheel. You also get that awesome precision aim button that can be set to slow the DPI settings down for making headshots almost too easy (it seriously almost feels like cheating). Heck, they even threw in the ability to have different presets for all the buttons and the ability to change them via the "mode" button!

Close up of the precision aim, forward and backward buttons.

Helping make you an even better "twitch" gamer is the adjustable dual laser 5600 DPI sensor the R.A.T. 7 sports. This bad boy literally has one laser for tracking X movement and a second for Y movement. I doubt many will be able to harness the full 5600 DPI abilities of this wee beastie, but its combination with the customizable features offered, I have a feeling that many will come closer than they ever did before.

Close up of the main buttons, scroll wheel, mode button and DPI changer.

Installation & Software

Once the drivers and software are installed you are presented with a seemingly simple little program. In fact, it is so simple there is basically only four "pages", but really only two are the real meat and potatoes of this software. The other two "Product" and "Support" are as there name implies less than important. The Product page shows you what mouse is plugged in (in our case the R.A.T. 7) and gives you a brief over view of it... as if you didn't already know what you bought; whereas the Support page includes a manual, driver and software update page as well as a host of other support related features. To my way of thinking they are more there to help round out the software than anything else, and while nice additions the other two pages are the key to this software.

The first of the two important pages is called "Settings" and its only job is to set the four DPI levels. In their default configuration, these are 800, 1600, 3200 and full power 5600 DPI, which does give a fairly well rounded starting point. As time goes by and you get more used to your new mouse, you will most likely tweak these to be more comfortable to your particular needs. As expected you can set X and Y DPI values independently of each other. Four presets for the built in DPI quick change button is about par for the course these days, and while nice was not anything spectacular. No, what IS amazing is the Precision Aim button! This little thumb side button allows you to half the DPI sensitivity for only as long as you hold it down! It literally makes precision aiming in fast twitch games almost simple without causing you do resort to rapid, yet permanent DPI changes via the DPI quick change button. Even nicer was the fact that while its default is 50% of whatever the current DPI setting is (both X and Y are halved) is you can easily adjust this to any percentage. For extremely high DPI scenarios the ability to go to 20 or 30% of its current setting, for example, was bloody amazing!

Sensor DPI adjustments page with Precision Aim adjustment.

The other crucial page is the Programming page; as the name implies, this page deals with setting up each of the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse's buttons and each of the three modes. Basically with less than a couple minutes work you can setup your mouse buttons to do not only complex macros, or simple key presses, or even remap a left mouse button to act as a right mouse click (for example) but you can do it so that each of the three modes causes the buttons to act differently! Where the mode button on the mouse glows a different colour for each of the three modes this is not confusing. This may not sound like much as there are other "gaming" mice with 4 or more built in custom modes but in practice three is about all a person can really use without getting confused or accidentally choosing the wrong setup.

Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Mouse Real-world Performance

The second set of testing consist of real world usage. While everyone dreams of gaming for a living very few people will ever achieve this. For this reason even a "gaming mouse" had better be comfortable and more mundane tasks or you are not going to be a happy camper! To this end a combination of excel, Photoshop and FireFox web surfing over a 8hour period will help replicate a more "mundane" really world scenario.

Gaming Results
For both FPS games, the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse allowed me to react faster, smarter and more precise then I have ever done before. For example, in MW2 Singe Player mode on Veteran difficulty I was able to start and finish the game in a little over 6 hours. This is a full 20 minutes faster than when I used my Gigabyte "Ghost" M-8000 Xtreme. In L4D2, my headshot average went up from 32% to 43%! The precision aim button (set to 33%) to sloooooow things down and make it nice and precise really was amazing and is not gimmicky in the least. The only minor grip I had after playing both of these games is the fact that the weighting system is not granular enough. Six gram increments is just too much for such a precision piece of engineering like the R.A.T. 7!

Notice Mad Catz provides four 6 gram weights. For more precision, 3 gram weights should have been included.

For both games, two 6 gram weights was almost too much, yet with only one weight in the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse, it felt a little whippy and I had to dial down the DPI a notch from 4000 DPI range to about 3500 DPI. If there had been a 2 or three gram weight option, it would have been perfect and I probably would have been able to boost the DPI settings even higher than 4000. In any event, my hand was not fatigued in the least by the end of either gaming marathon sessions, this is something which happens all too often for me and some mice I literally have to take a break or risk hand cramps. Of course, I took the time before starting in to tweak the various adjustment settings the R.A.T. 7 mouse offers and much like Goldilocks... it was just right before I started to get my game on!

In Star Craft, the same situation reoccurred, great, fast paced fun that allowed me to achieve total domination via macros and keyboard shortcuts! The R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse really is enjoyable to use across a wide spectrum of games and genres. However, once again I did wish for a second size weight as two 6 gram weights installed was too slow, yet one reduced my precision to the point where I did have to rely on the precision aim button even more than expected.

Real World Usage
In Photoshop, I found four of the 6 gram weights in combination with a fairly mild 2400 DPI to be a perfect setup for the R.A.T. 7 mouse. When I needed even more precision, I simply held down the precision aim button and then released it when the finessing was over. For excel the ability to setup multiple macros and switch between them with a simple touch of the mode button did come in handy.

As with Excel, I found one 6 gram weight and a 2400 DPI to be nearly perfect for mundane Internet web surfing. Both forward and back buttons were easy to reach and use. Interestingly the precision aim button the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse features was not all the useful, but then again neither was the multiple modes. One mode is all that is needed for surfing the Internet, but it was nice to have one set of defaults just for Internet surfing, another for excel and a third for Photoshop! I really do wish they had included a couple smaller weight options with the R.A.T. 7 mouse, but I did manage to get it fairly close to my personal "ideal" settings with some trial and error.

The only other minor nit worth picking has to do with how you add or remove weights. The screw locking mechanism is a bit of hassle and is a lot slower than some other manufactures way of doing things, but then again, it is also a heck of a lot more secure. Unless you are tweaking things to the Nth degree, like I was for each program and game, I doubt once you find a comfortable weight this will be an issue as the R.A.T. 7 mouse really is that good and that adjustable.

Recap

Hell the only issue with this mouse is not whether or not you are going to like it, its how much you are going to dislike your other mice afterwards. It really has shown me how inferior the feel and overall handling of what I considered some pretty kick ass gear really is. The only minor issues I ran across with the R.A.T. 7 mouse is, it is not a "plug and play" piece of hardware. You are going to have spend some time tweaking and playing with the various options until you get the fit perfect. For me it took about 30 minutes for the major tweaks and another couple hours of fine tuning. This time is worth the effort as the result was a device that is simply "made" just for my hand.

With that being said, not all is perfect as I really did wish they had included a fourth pair of pinkie and palm swells. A large pinkie and large palm swell with extra grip and texturing really would have taken this mouse to the next level. However, with such a perfect fit for me, this is nit picking and I doubt I will ever "miss" not having them. The other issue is if your system is used by more than one person you and the other users are going to have to negotiate a compromise setup; as what fits your hand perfectly may be down right uncomfortable for others. Seriously, this is small potatoes and until you use this mouse, you really haven't experienced what a professional grade mouse is and what it can offer you. If you can afford the asking price, the Mad Catz R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse is highly, highly recommended.

Reviewed by Anthony Garland, Technical Editor