Gigabyte Aivia M8600 wireless macro gaming mouse

Published on July 19, 2011, @ 12:00 pm by Michael Reed - Posted in Hardware, Peripheral 0

Creating a wireless gaming mouse for both lefties and right-handed people is hardly an easy feat. Logitech doesn’t sell such a solution and Razer only has only one. After working with the M8600 for barely an hour it’s easy to see why very few ambidextrous wireless gaming mice exist.

Making a conventional ambidextrous mouse is easy, Microsoft, Razer and Logitech have been doing it for years but when you have to cram in the demands of a gamer (minimum five buttons) as well as a long-life battery and wireless transceiver the whole package becomes a mess. The first problem with the M8600 is a ‘spine’, a hard ridge that runs the length of the mouse. This ridge makes using the mouse uncomfortable from the start but over time it becomes less of a distraction.

The M8600 has two batteries which Gigabyte claims will last 50 hours each and can be changed easily; although not in the two seconds that Gigabyte claims. The charging station, which also acts as the receiver, allows for the charging of the spare battery and the mouse but, puzzlingly, not at the same time. Using the included software the battery mode can be changed from gaming to power saving, dropping out of high-performance mode and extending battery life. If both batteries are dead the M8600 can be plugged into a separate braided USB cable that makes it a wired mouse. A handy option if you actually prefer a wired mouse but fancy the rest of the features of the M8600.

The M8600 uses a laser that has a maximum resolution of 6500 dpi and has four adjustable levels which can be selected using two buttons below the wheel. A toggle selector like that found on the Gigabyte M8000 gaming mouse would have been preferable though. According to Gigabyte there are ten customisable buttons on the M8600. At G3AR HQ we would hardly call forward and backward scrolling a customisable button. If you include the left and right scrolling actions as buttons (they click) then the M8600 has eight customisable buttons. The thumb buttons are a bit small and don’t protrude far enough from the body of the M8600, making using them a bit frustrating during an intense firefight.

Whether in right-hand or left-hand configuration only one of the pinkie buttons are useable while the other allows for quick switching between the five different modes. These modes are macro key configurations; meaning that your button assignments in COD: Black Ops can be different to that of Battlefield Bad Company 2. The macro settings are stored on the mouse using the onboard 32KB of memory.

The Gigabyte Aivia M8600 wireless macro gaming mouse is a decent mouse but at this price point its competing with two excellent atlernatives, the Cyborg R.A.T. 7 and its wireless brother the R.A.T. 9. These mice are both designed for extreme comfort and that makes having to put up with the odd shape of the M8600 unnecessary. However if you are a lefty and you want a wireless gaming mouse then it’s either the M8600 or the Razer Orochi, a notebook mouse.