Mionix’s flagship mouse is a wide body unit with a braided cable and gold USB connector. The unit itself is solid black with a smooth rubber surface encompassing it and a Mionix logo in the center that lends itself to illumination. Buttons include a standard left and right click button, clickable scroll wheel, up and down DPI selection buttons and left side thumb buttons. The scroll wheel has a grippy rubber surface, nice tactical feel and is easy to depress. The edges of the scroll wheel light up as part of the customizable lighting system. In addition to the two thumb buttons on the left side, there are also three lights that indicate which DPI profile you are using. The right side of the mouse has no buttons and is contoured to fit your ring and pinky finger nicely. Meanwhile, the bottom features the tracking laser in the middle and four smooth feet for a quiet glide across your mouse pad. The Mionix NAOS features a unique weight system with two separate bays to install weights into – one on each side. This allows more flexibility when weight-tuning your mouse. Each bay is held in place with a removable cover and can hold up to four weights. You can add up to 20g per side in 5g increments, for a total of 40g. The NAOS is a plug-and-play mouse and works perfectly without software, but like most other mice in the round-up, you will need to install the downloadable software from Mionix’s website to gain full access to all of the mouse’s features. After installing the software, I was prompted to update the firmware as well. The software suite is a lot like what we saw with the Roccat Kone. Everything is laid out in an easy to understand fashion and there are no proprietary slang terms to confuse the user. You can store up to five profiles as well as macros directly to the mouse using the internal 128kb memory and transport them to other computers. A lighting management system allows you to illuminate your mouse using several different colors, or none at all if that isn’t your cup of tea. This system isn’t as robust as the one found on the Roccat Kone, but it certainly gets the job done. Another neat feature in the software is the Surface Quality Analyzer Tool. This test uses the laser sensor to analyze your mousing surface and gives it a rating between 1 and 10. I messed with this a good bit and found it to be 100% consistent. I tested with three different surfaces: a white sheet of paper, which scored 4 out of 10, a white plastic folding table top that scored 7 out of 10, and my Roccat Sota mouse pad which scored 8 out of 10. The NAOS performed exceptionally well both in Windows and while gaming. The ergonomic design is very comfortable even after extended use. I did notice that my had started to sweat after an hour or so of gaming, but much like the SteelSeries Xai, once your hand warms up, grip seems to improve. Tracking was very smooth and the DPI selector worked flawlessly. I usually don’t care for a heavy mouse, but after installing all eight weights into the NAOS, I really liked its heavy feel. The mouse slid across my mouse pad smoothly and quietly. As of this writing, the Mionix NAOS 5000 is only available at Medusa-USA for $94.05 and Newegg for $84.99.
