ASUS TUF Gaming M5 Review

👤by Matthew Hodgson Comments 📅22-01-19
Performance Testing
As we mentioned on the previous page, connecting the mouse and installing the software was a bit of a farce. The mouse worked fine straight away and the RGB lighting lit up, but to alter the software in any way, we were forced to find a way of getting the application to work. We’ve tried a reinstall of the software on multiple machines, one AMD and one Intel, all to no avail. The first hurdle isn’t great, that’s for certain, but moving onto comfort.

The M5 is most-certainly designed for a claw/fingertip grip style, with it being far too small to be comfortably used by a palm-grip, but don’t let that make you think the mouse isn’t comfortable at all. If you use a fingertip or claw grip, the lack of any kind of rear on the mouse helps a lot. The thumb buttons, on the left, are useful for right-handed users, but the ambidextrous shape is somewhat wasted when ASUS don’t include the same buttons on the opposite side, so if you’re left-handed you may find that a little annoying.

Next up is performance, and despite the low pricetag the M5 shines brightly here. The 6200 DPI sensor is accurate enough at low DPI settings, or anything under about 3000, which is where most people will use a mouse anyway, but it did feel a little “numb” compared to slightly more expensive options. Responsiveness is perfect, however, thanks to the 1000Hz polling rate on the mouse.



Directly related to the performance is the overall feel of the mouse in games, which is when the performance really matters. We tested this out with some Battlefield V and War Thunder, two games which require completely different mouse movements. Battlefield didn’t fare well at all in our testing, despite giving it a few evenings worth of testing to adjust from our order-of-magnitude more expensive daily driver mouse but it never really caught on; on the other hand, War Thunder faired much better. The smoother, more fluid motions required during flight were translated brilliantly on the M5, we found ourselves with 6 aerial kills within the first 90 seconds or so, in the first game. It felt right.

Build quality. This isn’t somewhere that we can give too much praise. It feels well-made, but “well-made for a £35 mouse” kind of well-made. The button clicks are loud and the scroll wheel lacks any tactile feedback, feeling almost like a free-wheel affair.

It wouldn’t be right to review a gaming mouse without RGB lighting. The rear of the TUF Gaming M5 lights up in all the colours of the rainbow; by default it cycles through the colours but you can choose a static colour or make it react to clicks of the mouse, which seems a little redundant because your hand will be in the way. The lighting is bright and clear and syncs with other ASUS Aura products if you own any.

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