Cougar Sport Orange 300M Optical Gaming Mouse Review

Introduction

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The latest Cougar gaming mouse is here at last! We’ve already reviewed a few Cougar peripherals here at eTeknix, such as the 600M mouse, 200k mouse and keyboard combo, 600K and 700K keyboard reviews. With so many products in the last year alone, I’m happy to say that Cougar is quickly becoming one of my favourite peripheral manufacturers and that’s a trend I hope to see continue with our review of their latest product, the 300M optical gaming mouse.

The 300M takes its inspiration from the classic IntelliMouse shape, one that has proven popular with gamers and PC users in general for many years. It comes with seven programmable buttons, three profiles, a 16.8 million colour LED and a range of funky and bright colours to choose from. The hardware sounds good too, with a trusty ADNS-3090 optical sensor, 1ms response time and Omron gaming switches; that’s nothing crazy overall, but it certainly ticks enough boxes to make this mouse attractive to both gamers and day-to-day desktop users alike.

The packaging is nice and tidy, showing a good image of the mouse as well as a quick rundown of the main hardware specifications.

Around the back, you’ll find details of the UIX system and buttons, but we’ll take a closer look at each of those in a few minutes.

There’s pretty much nothing extra included in the box, just a hard-wired mouse and the user manual; not that you need much else of course.

The cable comes with a durable black braided cable, which looks great and should improve overall lifespan of the cable.

The 300M is really nicely designed, although that’s hardly much credit to Cougar, as the IntelliMouse shape is something we’ve seen virtually ever manufacturer copy over the years. This is no bad thing of course, it’s a good size and shape to compliment most people’s hands and that’s exactly what you want.

The black and orange looks pretty cool in my opinion, others may disagree. There’s a pair of switches down the left side of the mouse, with long buttons to make them easy to access with your thumb.

The finish on the 300M is pretty slick, with a soft grippy rubber that provides excellent grip, despite the fact it looks and feels silky smooth. This kind of finish is also great for maintenance, as it’s easy to clean and difficult to scratch.

There’s a nice rubber-gripped scroll wheel which colour matches the side panels of the mouse, as well as a programmable button which is set to DPI toggle by default.

As you can see, the 300M ergonomics are designed for right-hand use.

The base of the mouse has two absolutely massive slipmats, that’s a better finished that most other mice. This means that the 300K glides like a cloud in a breeze on virtually any gaming surface, especially so thanks to the lightweight design of the mouse in general.

The seventh mouse button is tucked away on the base, perfect for using as a profile toggle, or DPI changer for those who don’t like having such a button within accidental pressing range mid-game.