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Wireless Mouse Technology Testing at the Logitech Daniel Borel Innovation Center

2016-04-04
logitech brought us here to switzerland to check out the g 900 chaos spectrum an interesting looking mouse but with some really bold claims especially when comparing it to a wired mouse which traditionally would have been a lot better in like almost every possible metric they claim however that it has now reversed s-- they're claiming that the g 900 is better than a wired mouse let's do some science and figure it out so we're starting off the RF labs this is probably one of the most important things about this most is its wireless performance that's what they've been trumping really really hard this whole time so we need to benchmark it we're going to test it with huge amounts of interference without interference all this different kind of stuff and see how it compares to other mice we're going to do that by coming inside of an anechoic chamber but this time it's on the anechoic chamber in terms of sound it's an anechoic chamber in terms of signals so RF Wi-Fi bluetooth all that kind of stuff isn't going to be able to leave the room once the door is closed and is gonna be able to come on in to the inside but to cause that interference we have this antenna right here which is going to be shooting out massive amounts of amplified RF Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals what they did was they went to a land of about 300 people measured the signal noise and then amplified that by a little bit more to make a crazy worst-case scenario over on the other side the room there's all this foam kind of stuff everywhere that's so that signals aren't bouncing around throughout the room and you just get a solid trajectory so it's better and more consistent for measurement here we have the most rigs so this is a jogger that keeps a pad moving under the mouse so that the actual sensor is constantly firing and sending information which is important because you need to most be actually working and then the mouse is held in place above that across the room a little bit right here is the receiver so this guy is actually talking to the mouse that wire goes through a tube to the outside and then we're measuring actually the tracking of the mouse out there where the actual interesting stuff is let's check that out so as you can see back here on the spectrum analyzer they have a crazy amount of noise being fired in that room right now but over here you can see a tracking tester where it's just tracing the cursor movement of the mouse as that joggers going around and it is in a very I'm going to reset this you can see it drawing it isn't a very consistent kind of pattern which is good there's going to be some drift from the sensor but that's actually fine all sensors have some amount of drift but the good thing about it is that it's consistent it's not going all over the place and if you're not making robotic exact circular movements it's going to be extremely pretty where everything's going to be anyway so this is a good sign and this is for the G 900 so now we're testing the Razer Mamba exact same scenario this time we're going to try it with the signal noise on and with the signal noise off so you can see what it is in a more perfect scenario the Mamba is currently set up and good to go powered on joggers running and ten is over here let's go check the results all right so the Mamba 2015 is hooked up inside that's what's running right now on the tracking tester as you can see on the spectrum analyzer in the back there's nothing really going on that's because we have the antenna off so what I'm going to do is come back here crank the antenna on so I'm going to turn this dial a little bit there that's all good to go the spectrum is now crazy you'll see it actually moves where it's where it's kind of firing huge amounts of spectrum so it's not going to be a consistent problem you can already see on here I'm going to reset it so that we have some more room to actually see it get messed up but it's jumped all over the place these lines that you see is where it stopped tracking completely for a second and then engage back in somewhere else you can see that instead of just simple sensor drift it's actually jumping all over the place I'm going to reset it here it's going okay at the start but then you see one big jump there I'll wait for it to do a few more there's one jump right there so there's going to be bad spots sometimes it'll be okay because maybe it's away from where the antennas firing huge amounts of information but then other times as you saw before it might actually start jumping all over the place because it's kind of getting overpowered which is not very good so there's a line there there's another line there it's getting a little bit worse now yeah so that's the mob of 2015 let's move on all right next up on the chopping block is the Ouroboros a little bit of an older Mouse it's currently running on the jogger it's sensor is currently over here we're good to go one other little bit of information that I want to give you guys is this is the antenna that's receiving the signal so when we show you guys the spectrum analyzer this is the thing that's outputting that information just in case you're interested so next up razor or Bose that's on the inside right now you see it going with nothing really happening on the spectrum analyzer seems fine a little bit of sensor drift which is completely normal now let's hurt it a little bit Oh turn things up there we go spectrum analyzers going like crazy stuff sweeping across like we saw before moving back now that happy little bit of sensor drift is no longer really very happy as you can see there's already two major jumps and it's completely changed direction three major jumps now yeah so not the clean nice patterned thing that we saw with the G 900 it's a little bit more of a mess now looking back there's one two three four five six major jumps I think and instead of just drifting nicely upwards like it was before you're going up and then cranking way over to the right and it's probably going to screw up again later on not the end of the world but not perfect last but potentially not least is this sensei so we have the sense I rigged up on the jogger and we have its receiver on the other side something to notice about the configuration of things as well the receivers are always placed in line with the very front of the mouse and the way that the jogger works there's little arms going all the way around so that it can hold it in place perfectly despite the movement of the actual jogger and it doesn't have to press any button so it's not pressing left or right buttons it's not pressing the back buttons it's not doing any of that kind of stuff and it's holding it in place which is pretty cool so the sensei isn't doing so great you can see on the spectrum analyzer there's nothing really going on we basically have it off and that's not just simple normal nice unified sensor drift that's quite messy let's start over again somewhere clean give it a nice clean slate and then hit it with the antenna as hard as we can go just to see what happened Wow okay so this one oh that is just that is horrible so one of the interesting things that this one does that none of the other ones actually had a problem with as you can see the lines get kind of squiggly and they start doing weird spirals and actually making things that aren't at all the shape of what it's doing which is a huge unusable problem again something to remember this is an insane worst-case scenario it's beyond like a normal kind of worst-case scenario because they went from a like 300 person ComputerLand which is an insane scenario for any wireless device that made it a little bit harder but this thing is completely failing the other ones were failing pretty hard and the G 900 had zero issues whatsoever so I think that's pretty cool so to create the device the G 900 that beats all of the other devices in this crazy worst-case scenario test it takes a lot of things skill science testing all that kind of stuff it's not just by the better thing put the better thing in and then you have a better object it's not that simple so what they do is they use simulators in order to test what the actual end result is going to be that's not always perfect and just putting something in there and running a single error won't magically solve all of your problems that's where the skill component comes in they're able to get their RF simulator results to be extremely similar to their actual measurement through skill that's extremely important because it helps with your iteration process you that way you don't have to build a new full device every single time you want to test it which is going to help a lot because they have to release a product sometime then they also have to pay attention to where different components within the mouse go like the battery battery is a huge deal with some older mice that even Logitech had the positioning of the battery could cause weak spots in your signal as it went around but the sizing and the positioning of this battery is a little bit better they they have it on a different z-axis within the mouse so that the emitter should be able to have a strong signal going all the way around super cool next up we've got the sensor lab so what we're going to be doing here is testing motion latency so how long it takes for a movement of the mouse to actually go to the computer we're not worried about the last rest of the latency in the system this is just what Logitech would have control over so we're going to do that by coming in here and using this turntable the service on here is just like a SteelSeries qck type surface so probably something that's pretty common in someone's home we're going to start with the logitech g930 exactly how much someone would be pushing down on the surface because II don't want to grind against the mousepad you don't do anything like that that would mess up with the results next up we'll have a Razer chroma which is actually a wired mouse so we'll compare it against that and then we have a Mamba 2015 which is another competitor wireless mouse there's a little bit of plus/minus here that could be plus zero to one millisecond or anywhere in between due to polling rate but spoiler alert it's going to win by more than that so it doesn't really matter another thing I forgot to mention is that the mouse is placed very specifically on the turntable mousepad it's placed at a 45 degree angle so that x and y axes are contributing the exact same amount they have to be very precise about these things because extra variables like that could screw with something in a way that would mess up your results so they have the right amount of tension down they have the right angle and they have a huge amount of samples all of which are good alright so we're going to run our first test here you can go right now and what you'll see on the screen in a moment is it's going to accumulate data over time so what's actually going to be displayed graphically is rounded a little bit just more for presentation so that you can kind of see where about things are but below that is more of the hard core math no rounding and you can see the mean so we have to wait a little bit for it to gather some data and then we'll give you a more accurate need so after taking 33 samples of movement the mean latency was four point seven nine milliseconds so that might not sound impressive yet but just wait till we try the other mice we're about to run test - this is against the Razer chroma which is actually a wired mouse you can see here in the device info it is in fact the Razer chroma we're going to be comparing it against our previous file which was running the G 900 so we're gonna have blue data showing up on the chart that's for the previous Mouse and the green data you as you can see in here color green will be actually for the chroma so let's run the test so we have our first results the G 900 versus the Razer chroma as you can see here the green is much higher than the blue which means that the green lost this is motion latency so you want a low number as you can see the mute in for the G 900 was 4.8 as we already discussed the blue is the same numbers that we had running on our previous tests but the mean for the chroma is about six point eight eight which is two milliseconds more which is a lot because you have to pay attention to each segment of your latency throughout the entire entire equation so your graphics card your monitor your mouse all that kind of stuff and reducing each one by relatively small amounts is a huge deal so you can get the total number lower so having Logitech's number of the input from their mouse due to motion lower is good and that means that it's lower than a wired mouse which is pretty damn impressive another kind of cool thing to look at is that the lowest so the fastest rate at which the motion was able to go from the mouse to the computer for the Razer Mouse was about five point five which tied the highest or worst results from the G 900 just kind of a fun little tidbit so this time the most we are testing is the Razer Mamba as you can see in the top we're comparing it yet again against the G 900 so the compare with file is the original G 900 tests that we ran again we're doing 33 33 trials the exact same that we're doing every time this time it's going to show up as pink so yeah let's get started okay so we're done testing the Mamba 2015 and this is kind of why I haven't liked Wireless mice in the past and probably why a lot of people haven't either look at the data it's a mess you've got results from 0.5 which are junk data we'll explain why that's junk data in a moment all the way up to 18 point 5 which is probably caused due to lag in the transmission of data over the wireless signal if it misses a report and then has to do it later it's going to be massively delayed your mean is at about nine point three which is much higher than the four point seven nine of the G 900 but probably more within the actual capabilities of the sensor the problems with the junk data and the really really high late reported data is more due to the implementation of the sensor instead of the standard capabilities last but not least we have click latency so realistically what all of these different stations have been explaining is that we don't necessarily need to be afraid of Wireless anymore I was afraid of Wireless before but I think that was justified before this mouse came out because as we've seen there were some problems with wireless mice now click latency would be a huge one if it was worse than say a wired mouse so what we're going to do here is actually measure that so I'll explain how we'll do that now they have a wire going into here but you can see that it's not the actual normal one this is wired directly into the switch instead of actually the mouse itself so that you have your wireless adapter still running that has been done on the G 900 arrival 300 and a Razer chroma so you can see there's two wires going into each one of these because these are more naturally wired mice I'm going to move these guys out of the way this wire from the switch is going into a signal adapter this then sends it to a latency measurer so what this one is recording off the bat is exactly when the switch is pressed and then it starts a timer from that point in time to when this adapter is able to send the signal to the USB analyzer so that's when it actually receives the signal that the switch was pressed because that one isn't wired in that's a wireless signal so you get to see the total latency of the mouse within your system similar to how we were testing total latency of the mouse in previous sections this isn't the total latency until something would appear on your screen because there's other things within that equation like your graphics card on your monitor and whatnot but this is what Logitech can control so in order to actually run the test they set up this kind of game thing where you go click on the lit up circle this is just causing you to click a number of times at different intervals so that can be recorded over here much like the motion testing motion latency testing that we did earlier it'll show up a graph which will have some slightly rounded numbers but will give a good visual representation of the results so we're going to run this about 30 clicks and then get a result after that so as you can see graphically our average is about 4.5 it kind of all Huddle's in a nice bell curve right around that area and our called not really rounded as much average is at about four point three so prizing lee similar to the latency in our motion input latency tests so yeah let's move on and try the other mice the first contender is the SteelSeries rival 300 which has its firmware updated to the most recent one since last Friday so it's a wired mouse so theoretically up until now it should be faster so we'll see if it rains and holds that title let's begin the results and then compared against the G 900 okay so looking up here we can see the blue data is from the logitech g930 naita is from the SteelSeries rival 300 you can see again the mean or general average from the Logitech G 909 300 it's kind of less of a more perfect bell curve the mean looks somewhere around 7.5 though moving over to the actual math of things it looks like the average is d about 7.6 which is a pretty significant increase which is not good you want a lower number again it's more like golf so it's not over yet let's try one more so the program can only store two sets of data at a time so for round three I'm actually going to have to redo the G 900 so here we go G 900 test two and then the G 900 test two will be compared against the Razer chroma okay so that's not really very good for the other team looking at the graphical average now it's probably at like a little bit below 11 and yeah that's about right ten point nine milliseconds compared to four point two nine sounds like Wireless wins okay that was actually kind of Awesome I'm pretty convinced let me know what you guys think in the comments down below or on twitter at luke underscore la Fr thank you to Logitech for sending us here if you guys want to see more stuff click up here we've got videos that we show usually this goes at the end of the intro this I'm switching the game up it's going to the beginning this time like the video if you liked it dislike the video if you just like to be sure to stay subscribed so you can see all of our - tech tips content if you want to use our Amazon affiliate code that's cool you can buy stuff we get a fun kickback it's all nice you're going to check out the forum we canwe contributor there that's super helpful if you want a shirt check the description down below see you guys next time
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