Zowie Gear is a known company in the world of pc peripherals for gaming mice, headsets, keyboards and mouse pads. Frankly, every product we ever received from them for reviewing left with a good remarks from our side. They may have been not in the industry for long but do know how to get things done right. The company constantly strives to improve its products to satisfy the massive gamer community.
Back in April, Zowie Gear had announced the availability of a speed variant of their best selling mouse pad, the G-TF. Only this one has ‘Speed’ as an extra word on it.
Before I’d continue on with the review, do keep in mind that this is a gaming surface and not your average mouse mat for your office/design needs. This pad has been designed mainly for pro gamers and enthusiasts.
Anyways I would only be analyzing the gaming aspects of the pads here so keep that in mind before you question its value.
The G-TF Speed version comes in a rectangular cylinder like box that has a small plastic window to show what product lies inside. The simple yet elegant packing does leave a good impression that is of a matte finish.
The main features of the mouse pad are listed on two sides in 8 different languages.
The mouse pad is fairly oversized for wide sweeping movements. The surface has more of a rough feel but more over, I checked with my Razer Abyssus and I felt a tiny bit of resistance. The mouse fairly glides over it but does somewhat makes noticeable noise when moved across the surface.
I checked from 800 to 3600 dpi on the mous and Zowie yet again proves it bang on! The surface is easily detectable even for fast huge sweeping movements that require precise tracking.
On flipping the mat over, the pad had a glossy back surface to stick onto any slippery surface the pad would ever be placed on and would’nt budge from it’s place.
To test this, I placed the pad over a quarter if it’s surface area and then checked on the base grip by pulling it from one side. Surely enough, this pad sticks to the surface it’s placed on whether rough or smooth.
As far as the edges are concerned, the they are triple stitched edges to prevent them from fraying over long term use.
The pad itself measures 440 x 320 x2 mm. Compared to the last mouse pad I had reviewed was the Razer Ironclad and comparatively this is much larger than I expected it to be.
For testing, I had chosen a combination of Counter Strike: 1.6, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, World of Warcraft and Crysis 2 for posing its performance in different scenarios.
I included WoW in my testing as to see how good the pad actually is when it comes to making wide sweeping movements.
While three of the games in my test setup are FPS, they are drastically different from each other. I first tried Counter-Strike: 1.6. Counter-Strike’s gameplay is dominated by tactical impulse driven actions and one needs to react in a split second for getting making a kill.
So you need a perfect balance between fast glide and precise control. From my playing experience, I am quite of a semi professional player when it comes to FPS titles such as the COD series. I easily kept up hanging around the top 3 positions. That too since the pad did improve my game play and gave me a split second more at times when it came to pwning my opponents.
Now it’s all left down to COD. This is where the Speed Edition really kicked into use. In terms of wide sweeping movements, I was quickly and easily able to take down all my opponents without a hitch. The only thing odd to me was the rough scratching sound the pad made on huge sweeps.
Zowie Gear has indeed improved its mouse pad with the Speed variant of the G-TF. The pad is easy to transport; just roll it up and you’re good to go. I tend to do a lot of photoshop work and the oversized pad tends to suit designers in their cases.
On the other hand the oversized pad surface is a definite advantage for MMORPG players, as they require huge sweeping movements with extreme accuracy.
I’d choose functionality over aesthetics any day. But in this case, it’s the best of both worlds. Either you’re a gamer or a designer working on Corel Draw, this is will be a good buy for both.
Did I mention the SpawN logo looks nice on the pad too! 😀
