ASUS ROG STRIX CARRY
Boy, you’ve gotta carry that mouse, carry that mouse a long time.
We love a beautiful desk, where function is the strongest attribute any peripheral can have.
Which brings us to the Asus ROG Strix Carry, a gaming peripheral that indeed bucks the trend. There are no lights. There’s really nothing in the way of glitz, outwardly, and indeed no room for it, because Asus has carved away just about all it can in pursuit of creating a portable wireless gaming mouse. And we like that: This doesn’t look out of place on any desk, it’s (technically) pocketable, if you don’t mind a mouseshaped bulge in your pants (or you could use the included pouch, like a sensible person), yet Asus has kept itself calm enough to avoid cutting the size down beyond the point of usability. Sure, if you’ve been mousing wrong for so long that your right hand has contorted into such a shape that you can only push a mouse around with the heel of your palm, then perhaps you’ll struggle, but for fingertip (or tentatively claw) control, this does just fine. After a few days as our primary mouse, we barely even noticed it was a compact design at all.
The whole of the Strix Carry’s top shell can be separated from its magnetic clutch to reveal its guts, which comprise a pair of AA batteries (no Li-on cells here), a teeny USB wireless module nestled in a handy internal slot, and a pair of Omron switches for its main two buttons. These are socketed rather than being soldered in, and there’s a replacement pair in the package (along with the requisite removal tool) should you wish to try out a different feel, or if you somehow click so frequently that you exceed their rated 50 million presses.
There’s good grippy silicon on both sides, although, even at this small size, the shell has been molded in such a way that it’s a distinctly right-handed mouse, with a pair of very thin and just adequate thumb buttons joining an excellent rubber-topped notched wheel in rounding out the control options. The tried-and-true Pixart sensor, in these crazy times, has half the sensitivity of the sensors in top-end gaming mice, but going beyond its 7,200 cpi would be overkill for all but the most twitch-wristed gamer. It coped perfectly well with all of our surface tests – this is a precision mouse.
In terms of connectivity, while there’s no wired backup on offer, you can opt, via a base-mounted switch, for either Bluetooth or Asus’s 2.4GHz wireless, which offers 1ms polling times at the cost of a slight hit in battery life. 1ms seems to be the new standard for peripherals, and when it works, it’s wonderful – but when we ran the USB module next to another similar dongle (using Corsair’s similarly fast 2.4GHz Slipstream technology), the input of the Strix Carry transformed into an unusably glitchy mess. Whether that was the fault of one module or another, it’s certainly something to be wary of – Bluetooth solved the problem, but Bluetooth is really a secondary mode.
So, this has its potential issues. And while all component boxes are checked nicely, and it certainly functions well outside of those issues, we do also need to wheel around on ourselves and get contradictory: The ROG Strix Carry is probably the most boring device ever to land in the ROG line. That’s a blessing, but it’s also a curse – this is a good mouse, but we can’t bring ourselves to get excited about it.