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Over the past few years, I have mainly reviewed laptops and desktops from Acer. Their peripheral side of the business is relatively new as far as I am aware.

The Acer Predator Cestus 500 is an 8-button programmable RGB gaming mouse priced at around £80 on Currys and Argos.

It features a semi-modular design allowing you to add plastic side panels making it suitable for different grips such as claw or palm.

The mouse clicks are also customisable with Dual Omron Switches to offer a total of 70M (50M + 20M) clicks with the option of adjusting the click force via a cleverly designed toggle on the base.

There are five programmable profiles allowing you to alter sensitivity on the fly while gaming with all these profiles configurable via the Acer Quartermaster software.

It’s an optical mouse which has a movement resolution of up to 7200 dpi, but I was unable to find much more info on this from the product page.

Build and Design

The Cestus 500 fits in with the Predator branding across the Acer range, and that is a very stereotypical PC gamer aesthetic. You have the aggressive looking logo on the rear of the mouse which is RGB, the mouse buttons flare up at the edges giving a sort of devil horn appearance, then the sides of the mouse feature more programmable RGB along with the mouse wheel.

All the RGB is a bit over the top for my liking but this is personal preference, and obviously, a lot of gamers like it.

The overall build of the mouse is plastic, so it does not feel quite as luxurious as the AZIO Aventa Gaming Mouse, but it does keep the weight down. The Acer product details are a little thin on the ground so I can’t find the official weight, but it feels marginally heavier than the Dream Machines DM1 Pro S or the Logitech Pro.

Out of the box, I found the pre-programmed sensitivity not to my liking, they were dialled down far too much, and it felt like my computer was lagging. Thankfully this is fixable once your download the Quartermaster software.

On the base of the mouse is two switches and these are supposed to control the resistance of your mouse clicks. I didn’t notice much difference between each mode if I am honest.

Software and Customisation

I would say this is one of the more impressive pieces of peripheral software I have used. The level of customisation is extensive, plus it is well designed and easy to use.

You can pretty much customise anything you want on the mouse. All the buttons apart from left click can be customised to do what you want.

You can then tweak the RGB where you have three zones, the side, logo and wheel. There are eight different lighting effects, and you can control the brightness and speed of the lights. You can also optionally switch all the lighting off. I had to dial down the brightness, lots of bright changing lights in my peripheral vision has a tendency to trigger headaches for me, but once I toned it down it was fine.

With the DPI you can assign settings to the memory buttons with speeds to your liking from 400 to 7200. I like to keep things at 2000 during work use but then will up it a little during gaming.

Polling rate is also customizable, and this is set at maximum by default.

There is something called angle snapping which automatically fixes the cursor movements to linear.

Lastly, there is calibration which allows you to set what sort of surface you are using.

Some of these settings I found little to no difference, angle snapping and the surface settings didn’t offer a great deal of improvement. However, it is nice to have the option to tweak these things, and the overall software is very impressive.

There is one major caveat with this software, I am also reviewing the new Aethon 500 Gaming Keyboard, and that does not use this software. So if you go all in with Acer, you will end up using two separate pieces of software to control your peripherals, which is quite annoying.

Performance

I have used the Cestus 500 as my primary mouse over the past week, so it has been used for office work, general day to day web browsing as well as gaming. Once I had it set up to my liking it has been quite pleasurable to use, it is comfortable to hold while also being fast and responsive.

With the side buttons not being on many mice I did find I would accidentally click them at times, but after a day or so use I became accustomed to them.

Moving from office work to gaming was no issue and upping the responsiveness I found the mouse more than capable of its primary purpose of gaming. I am far from a professional gamer and not a huge fan of FPS but it handled several of these sessions perfectly well based on my skill, and I think it would suit gamers of all levels.

Conclusion

In the UK this is priced at around £80 which places in the upper mid-level of gaming mice and I think the overall performance and level of customisation make this worth it. However, it is a crowded marketplace, and Acer is not really well known for their gaming peripherals so I think it could struggle to draw in buyers at this price point.

In the US it seems to be quite different, it costs just $58 on Amazon and I can import it from there for $19.26 shipping and fees making the total price just under $78 which works out at around £61.50. At the £60 price point, things are still competitive, but I think the Acer does more than enough to stand out with a great level of features for the price.

Acer Predator Cestus 500 RGB Gaming Mouse Review

Product Name: Acer Predator Cestus 500 RGB Gaming Mouse

Offer price: 79.99

Currency: GBP

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Overall
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  • Build and Design - 80%
    80%
  • Features - 90%
    90%
  • Price - 70%
    70%

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