Creative Sound BlasterX Siege M04
A precision gaming mouse. Give it a big hand—it needs one
A NAME ONCE familiar to PC builders, before onboard sound on motherboards ruined its fun, Creative Labs has been branching out as more of a general peripherals manufacturer, keeping the Sound Blaster name alive, and focusing on sound with amplifiers, headsets, and even PCIe soundcards, while also producing keyboards, webcams, and, now, mice.
The Siege M04 has a truly awful name, but one or two things going for it. The first is something of an oddity, a celebration of absence in a marketplace where more is always, well, more: the complete lack of software prediction of where your pointer will end up, and no acceleration (although you can turn this on in software). This, according to Creative, leads to a more precise mouse, and maybe when you’re playing an RTS in 4K, this will be the case. In the real world, we found it very hard to notice a difference.
Adding to the chorus of precision is a PixArt PMW3360 IR LED sensor (“Gaming Grade” apparently, but given you can game with a touchpad, we’re not sure exactly what this is trying to tell us), with its own 32-bit controller chip. This sort of thing is standard for pricier pointing devices these days, and, to be honest, we’d have been a bit disappointed if it hadn’t featured.
The Siege is one of the first mice we’ve encountered that needs a firmware update before all its functions work correctly. We shouldn’t complain—it’s a sign of Creative’s commitment to supporting the product, after all, and we had to update the firmware on a memory card reader once— but we’ve got used to things just working when we plug them in.
Physically, the Siege is a long and tall mouse, enabling palm-grippers to get plenty of contact, and with enough ribbed rubber patches for claw-grippers to be able to get a purchase, too. It’s not going to be the claw-gripper’s mouse of choice, however, and left-handers are completely out of luck, thanks to the Siege's rightiesonly ergonomics. It’s nicely built, though, with the two main buttons as separate panels, rather than blending seamlessly into the top surface of the mouse, as we’ve seen from many other manufacturers, and it doesn’t crunch or flex too much when you squeeze it. Lighting is confined to the mouse wheel, an X logo on top, and a strip around the bottom of the mouse body. It’s almost tasteful, in fact, and easily controlled from the Sound Blaster Connect software. UNDER THE THUMB It’s when you start to use the thing that doubts begin to creep in. Despite being the right size for the Maximum PC Test Hand, which is one of the biggest we could find, the side button placement necessitates using a position slightly too far toward the front of the mouse to be called truly comfortable. If you like to lazily rest your wrist on the desk or mousepad as you rodent about, the sniper button, low and front on the mouse’s left, is completely out of reach. Every button is programmable in Sound Blaster Connect, so you’re losing 14 percent of your programmability just because your thumbs are stumpy. The top two side buttons sidestep any problems, by being long enough to press from any position, while the wheel has a decent rubber tire, and rolls easily under gentle finger pressure.
Creative’s stab at a mouse isn’t bad at all, let down only by some suspect button placement and excessive length. Its main issue is that, for slightly less money, you can get several models of Logitech mouse, including the G502 Proteus Spectrum. And that’s a problem Creative is going to have to work hard to overcome. –IAN EVENDEN