Patriot Viper V560 Mouse Review
A Closer Look at the Patriot Viper V560
The mouse is 22 cm (8.7 inches) long, so it supports the entire hand. On the left is a textured rubber pad where the thumb rests. The rest of the mouse is made of slightly textured matte black plastic, save for the thin strip of plastic running around the scroll wheel. This strip is a glossy, slick plastic.
On the bottom are five ceramic footpads, a red release button for the side grip, and the laser sensor. Curiously, the mouse does not sit flat on hard surfaces, and will slightly rock back and forth while it’s used. This isn’t an issue when using a soft mousepad, but it could be irritating without one.
The ceramic feet are arranged in a five-point pattern, which allows for the mouse to be supported under all parts of its body. The mouse has a fairly long and wide body (necessary to completely support the hand), and the five points do a good job of ensuring that the hand and mouse is supported evenly. The mouse is approximately 5” long, and conducive to being used in a palm grip. Being a fairly large mouse, I feel this design is better suited for larger handed players. With that being said, people with smaller hands can probably still use this mouse with ease.
There are nine programmable buttons, and four non-programmable buttons: left mouse button, the mode select button, sensitivity increase, and sensitivity decrease. All buttons can be easily be clicked except for the two behind scroll wheel. To click these, you need to contort your middle finger to a full ‘U’ shape, which pulls your entire hand back about an inch. Button actuation is firm enough that you don’t have to worry about accidental actuation, with shallow actuation that allows quick hits.
The lift-off can be calibrated to your specific mouse pad material by using the top mouse button closest to the scroll wheel. In my tests, I found that the lift-off engages somewhere around 2.4 mm.
There are two interchangeable side grips, shown below.
These grips are removed by depressing the red button on the bottom of the mouse. For some reason, the grip shown on the right would not release, while the one on the left would easily pop out with the press of the button. The right grip could be pried out with brute force, but this clearly isn’t the way the piece is supposed to work. Fortunately, I prefer the grip on the left, but I’d recommend anyone with a similar problem to use the mouse’s generous 2-year warranty to get a replacement plate.
After removing the grip plate, the weight tray can be removed and loaded with the included weights.
The weights are held snugly in place by the foam holder. The tray is released by pressing a small button next to it, and it clicks back into place after loading. I found myself preferring an unloaded mouse for quicker, snappier movement, but the ability to weigh down the mouse is still a nice option for the diverse market of gamers.
Depending on which profile you’re using, the mouse will pulse on and off a different color (red, green, blue, purple, or aqua) out of two ports in the front and one wide one in the back. These lights are visible under regular room lighting. In addition a white light shines out from the four-barred sensitivity indicator, but this is only visible in low light.
I couldn’t find any way to disable or change the color effects, which I found to be a little disappointing. Patriot’s Viper V360 headset allows you to disable the earcup LEDs, which is a feature I enjoyed while testing the product in a professional workspace. On the flip side, I didn’t really like the pulsing effect; if I’m gaming and need to very quickly check which profile I’m using, I want the LEDs on full blast and not in the fading/ off part of their light cycle.
