Logitech G600 MMO Gaming Mouse and Wireless Gaming Mouse G700 review

I’ve always been a fan of Logitech and have bought quite a lot of their devices over the years. When it comes to PC peripherals, you really can’t go wrong with them.

A couple of days ago I went ahead and bought myself a Logitech G600 MMO Gaming Mouse, though for the last couple of years I’ve been enjoying the awesomeness that is the Wireless Gaming Mouse G700. I thought I’d write up a review of these two mice together and share my thoughts on how they both shape up as gaming mice and for general use.

Since I’ve spent the most time with the G700 playing various types of games and also using it for everything else, we’ll start with that and then move on to the newer G600.

Logitech Wireless Gaming Mouse G700

I bought my Logitech G700 back at the end of 2010 soon after it was released. At the time a lot of people recommended that I should buy mouse made by Razer rather than investing in Logitech since I was looking for one specifically for gaming purposes. Despite the advice of others, I went for the G700 because it followed the lineage of the mouse I was using at the time, a Logitech Performance Mouse MX which is a wireless productivity mouse.

The big selling points for the G700 when it was launched was that it was a high precision, low latency wireless gaming mouse but let you also have the option of plugging in the USB cable provided to turn it into a wired gaming mouse at will. The second big selling point is the G700’s array of 13 buttons, all of which are customisable except for the left and right clickers. At the time the G700 was touted as Logitech’s answer to MMO gaming though recently they have released the G600 which directly competes with the Razer Naga.

The G700 is more of an all-rounder in terms of gaming performance and works well with everything from twitch based games such as the plethora of first person shooters you see everywhere to the more deliberate slower paced games that require some tact.

Using this mouse feels extremely good, especially once you figure out how that all you really need to do to press the four buttons on the side of the mouse is to tilt your thumb and apply a little bit of pressure. These buttons were definitely made with twitch based gaming in mind, but at the same time I have never once accidentally pressed these buttons in the many hours of using it.

All of the buttons have unique sculpts and there’s a hell of a lot of thought put into their placement… even though some of them seem out-of-place at first. When you rest your thumb on top of the set of four buttons on the side of the mouse you can instantly detect all four of them as separate buttons and identify them unconsciously. The same applies for the three buttons located on the left edge of the main left mouse button, the three buttons which many people tend to think are located very awkwardly. Of course, once you start playing through a few games with it these three buttons end up finding a purpose as you refine the customisation of the buttons for each game.

As mentioned before, this mouse follows the MX series lineage and has a very similar body sculpt to the MX Revolution and Performance Mouse MX. It is an extremely comfortable mouse to hold in your hand, especially for lengthy play sessions and is a mouse that is very kind on your thumb, giving it a nice place to rest. It also has a mechanical button under the scroll wheel which engages and disengages the click scrolling of the scroll wheel which allows you to choose between click and smooth scrolling.

The G700 seems to use its own version of Logitech SetPoint (strangely enough) instead of the Logitech Gaming Software that all of the other Logitech gaming devices use but it really doesn’t matter since it’s has a hell of a lot of options and is fairly easy to use to set up the customisations for each game or program. I particularly like the individual pointer and scrolling options for each game/program and the many customisable options provided in the software. Though the big downside with the program seems to be that it doesn’t have any automatically loaded presets for various games, shame, but not that big a deal if you’re the type to go all out with your customisations.

It’s a hell of a good mouse and everyone I encounter who has used this mouse agrees that the G700 is great for gaming and for productivity use.

Logitech G600 MMO Gaming Mouse

Now I’ve only spent just under a week with the G600 but I can already feel the differences between this and my trusty G700. This mouse is true to its name, not because of its collection of 20 fully customisable buttons, but because of the way the buttons feel when you press down on them. Each button on the side of the mouse is easily accessible but despite the fact that your thumb will be all over these buttons at all times, you’ll never press them accidentally. The buttons on the G600 all need a little bit of pressure to activate compared to the G700 that is suited for its primary function, as an MMO gaming mouse.

As mentioned before, there are 20 buttons in total, however the key feature of this mouse that put it on a different playing field from its competitors is the GShift button which most people will press down with their ring fingers (this is by default but you can set any button as the GShift button). With the GShift button held down all of the other buttons on the mouse will change to a different set of customisable keys. This isn’t like turning the “1” key into “Shift+1″… we’re talking about changing the map completely to whatever you want it to be. With this feature, 20 buttons turns into 39… now that… is awesome.

I quit Star Wars: The Old Republic awhile back (I’ll have to post an article about that some time…) so I no longer play any MMOs… which probably has some of you asking why the hell I would buy this mouse to begin with. The answer is because I use it mostly for non-gaming purposes.

When it comes to mice, I LOVE having a fuck-tonne of buttons, it’s great for gaming but even better for regular programs such as Adobe Photoshop and your preferred web browser. I have both Firefox and Chrome’s set of identical keyboard shortcuts set to this mouse and my web browsing experience is so much better because of it. Flipping through tabs, opening, closing, undo closing, back, forward, refresh, home… everything and more is on the mouse which means that I speed through the net with just the mouse alone and occasional use of the keyboard. All of the controls are there on the mouse and once memorised it’s a glorious thing to behold. Having those 39 possible buttons right there at my right hand without any real effort is just awesome, I love it.

The only real problem with this mouse in terms of productivity is the scroll wheel. It’s a lot tighter than the one on the G700 and the software provided has no options to customise it at all. Of course, that’s not really a complaint since I’m using this mouse for a purpose it was supposedly never designed for… but why should I really need to have different mice for different purposes to begin with? Why can’t I just have one mouse that does it all?

Both the G600 and G700 are great mouse for their different purposes, but I’d love to see a mouse from Logitech that covers all of the bases. In the meantime, dedicated MMO gamers are going to love the G600 and all-rounder gamers are going to want to go for the G700.

They’re both exceptionally good mice.