Released in 2005, the G5 is still a respectable mouse (even our favorite) for all types of uses: games, office, graphic art, etc.  Logitech received nothing but praise for this product and so it must have been difficult to finally change such a popular model.

Two years later, however, this is what they are doing with actually more modifications than what was originally announced.  On the outside, besides the color, the body seems identical.  Actually, the coating went from smooth to crackled with some relief for a better grip.



Finally (!), there is a second button under the thumb to facilitate, for example, navigation in web pages.  On the inside, there is a nice surprise not mentioned by Logitech upon this product’s announcement ; we discovered that the transmission frequency of 500 Hz on the original G5 now increases to 1000 Hz.  More specifically, this means that instead of sending its position every 1/500 = 2 milliseconds to the computer, the new G5 can attain a rate of 1 ms.  This is what differentiated the G5 from Razer’s high end already at 1000 Hz for two years now. Logitech thus catches up in an area important to the most demanding gamers as well as graphic artists who can now benefit from more precision and fluidity when drawing lines.  You may recall that a standard mouse functions at 125 Hz or one transmission every 8 ms.

So full speed ahead with 1000 Hz? Not necessarily!

While this mouse gains in precision, increasing the frequency has one major inconvenience in that more resources are used.  (By the way, it is limited to 500 Hz by default and you will have to adjust this setting in the driver).  This is far from being negligible, especially on older machines.  We tried it on two computers, one equipped with a very recent Core 2 Duo, and the other with an "antique" Pentium 4 2.4 GHz.  The first was roughly half as affected as the second; however, the difference is comparable when we make this jump in frequency.  On the P4, here is the varying percentage of CPU use:

Up to a 40 % CPU use at 1000 Hz! And this was on the Windows desktop without any application open.  You can imagine the result when the computer needs to calculate the behavior of hundreds of units simultaneously.  If you are having problems in your game at 1000 Hz, before lowering the graphic quality, (and this is original) lower the frequency of the mouse.

Finally, this is potentially a very fast mouse with a max resolution of 2000 dpi.  Going up this high only concerns giant sized systems such as a 30 inch dual configuration.  Otherwise, the cursor goes too quickly to be precise.  Logitech’s advantage is still their system of changing from one resolution to another in a single click of the mouse.  The driver allows programming 5 levels, of which we gladly take advantage.  Like on the previous G5 that we’ve had for two years now, we go from 800,1000, 1200, 1600 or 2000 dpi depending on our use.

One last thing to maybe dampen your enthusiasm is that some of our office didn’t find the new design attractive.