Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries

Hardware staff writer, Joanna Nelius, and senior editor, Jarred Walton, reveal the gear that improves their lives

LEXIP PU94 GAMING MOUSE

I saw some neat peripherals at E3, but one stood out to me in particular: the Lexip Pu94 gaming mouse. It’s specifically designed to work with flight sims and city-building games with its two built-in joysticks. One is a small thumbstick on the left side, where some gaming mice have buttons; the second is built into the top half of the mouse, and is controlled by rocking your hand slightly in all directions. Both joysticks make this mouse incompatible with FPS games (you’re better off with a standard five-button mouse), but being able to control X and Y axis movement with one hand is seamless, and makes playing flight sims with a keyboard and mouse nearly as easy as using a regular joystick.

I’ve spent a little time with the Pu94 since E3 ended, and I like building homes in TheSims4 a lot more. I’m able to fully customize the mouse controls to the game—and let me tell you how much more I enjoy tilting the mouse to pan across the screen instead of moving my mouse cursor over to the side or using the arrow keys. And instead of right-clicking to rotate objects, I use the thumbstick. Sometimes small things make all the difference.

$129, https://lexip.us

KILL-A-WATT EZ

How much power is your PC using right now? You probably have no idea, unless you’re using something like P3’s Kill-A-Watt. It’s a super-handy device that I’ve had in my arsenal for years. It’s also inexpensive, and can easily pay for itself by helping you cut down on power use. Our modern PCs have sleep modes and power-saving features, but fire up a game, and it can be surprising just how much juice your system drinks. My GPU test bed idles at 72W, but can draw over 500W while playing games with a 2080 Ti, depending on what CPU I’m running. I also discovered that setting my Nvidia card to “Prefer Maximum Performance” instead of “Optimal Power” caused it to draw about 45W more power at idle.

The Kill-A-Watt measures outlet power, which is what most people want to see. It won’t tell you power-supply efficiency or how much energy just your graphics card uses, but switching from a generic PSU to an 80 Plus Gold unit should cut your PC power use by 10–15 percent. It’s not just about PCs, either. That box fan in my bedroom uses 60–100W, depending on the fan speed, while my upright vacuum cleaner chugs 1,100W. And do you remember the Falcon Northwest Mach V that I tested back in March? It peaked at over 950W while gaming.

$20, www.p3 international.com