You’ve got the most accurate mouse on the planet, the fastest video card available, a 21” monitor and a CPU overclocked so high that your machine needs more cooling than most thermonuclear power plants. What more could you possibly buy to give you the edge in deathmatch? A new mousepad! Before you raise a cynical eyebrow, yes we’re serious. The mouse pad has long been overlooked when building a new system, even more so than the digital rodent that sits on top of it. You might not think it matters, but after testing a few of the contenders for the Best Mouse Mat Crown we’d argue that point. In fact, we’d say it matters a lot.
The three mouse mats we’re going to be looking at are the Everglide Mousepad, the Ratpad and the 3M Precise Mousing Surface (we’d like to know when “mouse mats” suddenly become “mousing surfaces”). All have been out for a while now and garnered much praise from gamers and press alike for their increased smoothness over your average cheap mousemat. However just in case you’ve yet to pick up one of these improved mouse pads, we’ve decided to put them through a bit of testing to see just how good they are. So, in true Sharky Extreme style, we’ve benchmarked them.
Call us insane for doing this, but we can’t say you’d be the first to do so. While we’ll give you our general thoughts on these pads shortly, the only way to really see how these mats stack up against each other is to pit them head to head in a controlled situation with a bog standard pad thrown in for comparison. We tested the mouse pads by playing three games of Unreal Tournament with each mat, with the same bots, auto skill adjust off, the same level (Cliff Blezinski’s excellent DM-Turbine) and of course the instagib mutator enabled to perfectly test just how accurate our shots were with each of the mouse pads. cont...