Software
The ROG software is called the “Armory”. I had previously used an older version of the Armory when testing the Gladius mouse. When I opened the Armory software, I checked to see if it was up to date and it claimed it was. However this version of the Armory software did not recognize the mouse until I uninstalled it and downloaded a new version. Even then the recognition wasn’t automatic. While the mouse would work in wired mode, I could not get it to pair with the base station. Pairing is supposed to be automatic, but even following the instructions from the ROG support page I couldn’t get it to pair. After a firmware update and about 20 attempts and i was able to finally get the pairing to work. Since then it’s only lost it’s connection one time. Once the mouse has paired with the base station (or if it’s plugged in with a wire) then the Armory will show configuration options for the mouse:
Once you have configured the buttons, you can then configure the CPI settings:
The CPI switch button only changes the CPI and only swaps it between two settings listed as “Light On” and “Light Off”. This is different to EVGA’s software which can swap up to five CPI settings as well as changing a few other settings. However using profiles can enable many more features to be changed on the fly instead.
There are plenty of other settings here too. Mostly they are useful to show that the mouse isn’t using any weird settings. Personally I like no angle snapping or acceleration and I tend to set polling to 1000Hz. I’m not sure why anyone would slow down the button response below 8ms – perhaps some non standard switches can generate long rebound clicks. 8ms is the equivalent of 125Hz, so it seems strange to me that while you can poll at 2000Hz for x/y data that the mouse clicks are only being registered at a maximum 16 times slower. Having said this, I don’t know what the competition is doing so this might actually be better than I’m thinking.
Next we get to customize the all important RGB LEDs:
The nice thing is that the LED brightness can be varied between wired and wireless mode. Thus saving battery life when the battery is being used. Using half brightness gave us about two days of usage on a fresh charge. Initially we just left the mouse to color cycle. But the color cycling mode stopped working and became static red instead. This was strange, but changing it to random got our rainbow effects back.
Armory also allows you to calibrated lift off distance:
You can calibrate manually or it also includes some presets for various surfaces. For testing we will be using our standard Razer Goliathus Control mat, with the “cloth mousepad’ preset surface calibration. It should be noted that the Goliathus favors regular optical mice, while laser based sensors like the Spatha uses seem to do a lot better with a hard mouse pad.
Next up is the power page –
This will tell you how much battery is left in the Spatha as well as configuring an alarm for low battery power.
In the top right of the window is a wrench icon. This brings up the settings window:
