Mionix Naos 5000

The Mionix Naos 5000 is a high-end gaming mouse with adjustable weight and seven programmable buttons.

It has a slightly rubberised plastic surface, which personally I find feels a little strange, but does provide excellent grip. The Naos 5000 is designed for right-handed users only, and has a contoured rest for your thumb on the left side, ring and pinkie fingers on the right side. It’s comfortable, and should keep your hand from touching the desk at all. I did find my pinkie finger slipped off a bit – a wider rest on that side would have been even better. Those with large hands might have worse results – the Naos is pretty slim and low as far as gaming mouses go.

There are seven customisable buttons in total – left and right click, scroll wheel click, sensitivity up/down buttons atop the mouse, and two thumb-buttons which default to browser forward/back.

I’m not fond of the thumb-button positioning: both sit above your thumb, so you have to actively reach up to press them. This might be good if you have them assigned to occasional-but-critical functions you don’t want to activate by mistake, such as quicksave, screenshot or some kind of mega-attack that uses every item in your game character’s inventory then sets your character on fire. However, I like to use thumb-buttons for things like melee or alternate attacks, where it really helps if the button sits naturally under the tip of your thumb for quick and effortless activation.

The scroll wheel is the ‘clicky’ type, not smooth scrolling. It doesn’t freewheel at all, which is excellent for accurately switching weapons, menu items and so forth – the kind of tasks scroll wheels get roped into when they venture into gaming territory.

Sensitivity is adjustable on-the-fly between three presets, as long as you allocate two of the seven buttons to that purpose. An LED indicator on the thumb-side shows which sensitivity is selected. The three presets can themselves be adjusted in the mouse’s utility software, from 90 to 5040 DPI – horizontal and vertical DPI can be defined separately for each preset.

The mouse’s weight is adjustable, with two banks, one on each side of the mouse, each with four weight slots. Eight five-gram weights are included, for a maximum of 40 grams extra atop the existing 106 grams (excluding cable).

The two-metre cable has a braided nylon sheath, which makes it durable but weighty and likely to drag on your mouse pad. A mouse bungee would be a very useful accessory here.

Adjustable-colour lighting rounds out the hardware and adds a little flair, on the scroll wheel, sensitivity buttons and the Mionix logo on the palm-rest. Only a single colour can be set for all lights, but each can be toggled on and off individually.

The downloadable utility software is simple and usable, letting you configure up to five profiles – each with its own button assignments, sensitivity levels, colours, etc. However, it lacks the common feature of binding profiles to specific running applications. I suspect this is because the software is only used to configure the mouse – it’s not a driver which sits between the mouse and your operating system. This means macros are executed on the mouse itself, which is good for portability and performance. However, it also means the mouse has no idea what application is currently running on your PC, and can’t switch profiles accordingly. Given that the Naos 5000 ‘only’ has seven buttons, the likelihood of having vastly different configurations for a slew of different games is low, so this isn’t really all that bad.

One very cool aspect of the software is the ‘Surface Quality Analyzer Tool’, or ‘S.Q.A.T.’. This lets you use the mouse to check the quality of your mousing surface (mouse pad or desk), and gives you an assessment of how well the Naos will track on that surface.

I liked the Mionix Naos 5000, but wouldn’t buy one myself due to the thumb-button positioning. If that doesn’t sound like an issue to you, and you don’t have massive hands, then this is a strong option for a wired gaming mouse.