Many moons ago in the year 2000, a company called Karna sent us a few of their shiny new Boomslang mice to give away as prizes for our first FRAGtopia big LAN party. Many of the staffers also ended up buying them, and the Tshirts that we all purchased as the same time went into immortality thanks to Prae and Dillinger's little cartoon, 3 Finger Salute. I don't use the mouse anymore, but I do still have the tshirt and wear it on occasion. The Boomslang was.. interesting. It was extremely expensive. The 2,000 dpi version was around $130 Canadian at the time, but it did look sweet and it came in a great tin box. It was a really nice mouse for gaming, extremely twitchy, (unusable until the drivers were loaded) and comfortable with it's giant buttons. It was hard to get used to though and while I did like it for games I wasn't very big on using it for anything else.... and so it was replaced rather quickly and relegated to the test mouse container at work. I'd heard that Karna was having some problems with financing a while later, and had apparently packed it in. I was saddened but consoled myself with games and another mouse.

Isn't that just the sexiest thing ever? Photo from Razerzone.com

Fast forward to the year 2005. Razer is back. (But not Karna anymore?) Protocal strolls into work one day with a new Razer mouse, the Diamondback. Wow. A few weeks later the current ubermouse, my Logitech MX1000 started acting stupid so I got mad at it, went out and got one of the Razers and thus begins this review. Let me start off by saying that the Diamondback is one hell of a sexy mouse. The model I picked up glows blue but is also available in red. I'm thinking that the blue model will far outsel the red one simply because blue tends to be the favored color for lit keyboards and cases. When you look at the Diamondback it's distinctive good looks really jump at you. It's longer than most mice and very narrow so it should be comfortable for people with any size of hands. The two main buttons are massive and cover roughly half the surface of the mouse. There are two side buttons on the sides of the mouse as well, and a pretty lit up scroll wheel that functions as another button. I've never been able to press a wheel successfully so I've just got that disabled on my setup. The back end of the mouse is partly transparent as well and nicely lit. The cable is a touch longer than on a standard mouse, seven feet. It's also much thinner and more flexible, about half the thickness of my Logitech cords. The connector is gold plated. One of my major complaints about wired mice is getting the cable tangled in things, or it being so stiff it's hard to use the mouse without having something sitting on it to give you a little slack and reduce drag. With the Diamondback it's not an issue. It's the closest thing to a cordless you can get and still be wired. Even with the wire stacked on my desk there's no weight or drag to it.

The little foam padded "lan pack" that came in the box is very nice as well. I haul my mouse to work and home with me every day and I'm a little concerned my pretty new mouse is going to get all dinged up but it's riding all snug inside it's little case right now so it should be okay. :)

The Diamondback and it's "Lan Pack" padded carrying case, available with the Plasma Limited edition.

After unpacking the mouse I hooked it up, booted my computers and stuck the driver disk in. Windows will pick up the Diamondback as a standard mouse untill you get the drivers loaded in. I was rather amazed to learn that the installation cd is called "my cd" when you view it (They obviously burned the original with Nero.) and that it doesn't have an autoplay. It's pretty unusual that a company wouldn't have taken the time to write a little menu and installer for their software. No huge problem as you can just open the cd-rom folder and double click on the setup icon, but you're just asking to cause some confusion with less tech savvy customers with that one. Also notably absent was a manual or installation instructions of any sort. I checked with two other people who've bought this product and neither of them recieved any instructions with it, other than the cd was packacged with an orange piece of paper filled with dire warnings about booting the computer with the mouse not plugged in and a note that the USB ports on your computer may not power up fully from a cold boot and you might have to restart for it to properly see the mouse. (Would that be annoying or what?) We did try plugging the mouse in after the computer was powered up and the warnings are 100% right. It won't work. Make sure it's in before you power on. Once we'd messed with this a little I plugged the mouse in, booted the computer up and ran the drivers/utility cd which installed into Windows XP with no problems. After a reboot I was off to the races. (Editors note: I downloaded the updated drivers a few days after the review and they're a .zip. They should be a self extracting .exe file. Some people aren't good with figuring out how to uncompress files. Bad Razer! BAD!)

The first thing you notice about the Diamondback after you get done drooling all over it is that despite it's odd shape it's super comfortable and that it feels quite natural to hold it. It's extremely light, even when compared to other wired mice such as the Logitech MX500. The buttons are quite sensitive and easy to click and the scroll wheel has a nice crisp feel to it. The wheel and the side panels have a rubberized non-slip surface to them that'll come in quite handy during those heated gaming sessions when your hands are getting sweaty and hot. By default the buttons the right side of the mouse are disabled, which I'm assuming is since right handers would never use them. The left side buttons are set to adjust the mouse's sensitivity. That's right you can change your mouse sensitivity on the fly. Personally I never used this feature on the original Boomslang but several of my gaming buddies really liked it. I've got it disabled and I've remapped the buttons to my teamspeak transmit keys.

A solitary hunter, the Diamondback is able to consume up to ten times it's weight in average mice. Here we can see it glowing to attract it's prey.

Speaking of remapping keys, when you install the drivers it also installs a little control panel application that lives down on your task bar and also replaces the default Windows mouse control panel button. Not to worry, if you uninstall the Diamondback you'll get your old mouse control panel back. The Razer control center allows you to change pretty much everything about the mouse. You can set the sensitivity of motion and your wheel as well as playing with the mouse's DPI, setting acceleration (booo!), and remapping the buttons to whatever you want. You can disable the on the fly sensitivity if you like. If a button gets in the way, it can be completely disabled. I know a few people who can't stand having side buttons active as when playing games they tend to grasp their mice like it's trying to escape from them and this results in the frequent hitting of the side buttons, and horrible screaming death in games. (Also in some horrible, unprintable screaming in real life.)

We remapped some buttons to odd keys that most mice won't let you do, such as caps and num lock and everything worked great. Remapping is done from a pulldown menu that lists standard functions, as well as "assign a key." If you get a Diamondback you can set it up exactly the way you want no questions asked. I like that, a lot. I would have liked a button in the software to set everything back to defaults. It's not hard to do yourself but the option would have been nice. The "update" button in the drivers currently doesn't work, as it just takes you to the main Razer site when you have to click on a drivers download button.

Remap those keys to whatever you want. You have the power. Hmmm.. Power...

The defaults work great, but those of you who like more sensitivity can have it.

And you can even mess with the scroll wheel settings.

Using the mouse in games was an excellent experience. With a few short minutes of orientation and getting used to the feel of the device I was fragging away in Battlefield 2 and Quake 3. I can't think of any other mice than I've gotten used to so quickly. On the default sensitivity and speed settings turning is amazingly quick, and since the mouse is super lightweight you can spin and maneuver on a dime. Even after playing for a few hours non stop my hand was still as comfy and cramp free as when I started. For standard office and internet use the mouse is just as good, and in Photoshop it's a dream come true. Moving those few pixels when you're editing is simply effortless, which it should be at 1,600 dpi.

Overall, the Diamondback gets an almost perfect score but it's held back slightly by the fact that it might be a little tricky to install for the novice user. (Add an autoplay to your drivers cd Razer!) The device itself is perfect and as the name implies it's a true predator king among mice. I can't find anything I don't like about it. Go. Get one.