Sensor

Thankfully, Corsair went with one of the best sensors, which is as expected because this mouse is pretty much a flagship model. It operates with a PixArt PMW3391 tracking unit, which is yet exclusive to Corsair, and it's a really good sensor for sure. It's very raw, responsive, and doesn't feature any unwanted acceleration. It has some smoothing above 2,000 CPI, though, but more on that later.

As for its specifications—the nominal maximum tracking speed and acceleration values are ridiculously high at 400 IPS and 50 G; there is no way of hitting these values during regular use. Resolution can be set from 100–18,000 CPI in steps of 1 CPI (which is still unique to this sensor). The available polling rates are 1000, 500, 250 and 125 Hz, which translates to nominal response times of 1, 2, 4 and 8 ms respectively. Lift-off distance can be configured in the software's surface calibration option.

Paint Test

There is no jitter on the reasonable CPI steps, and I couldn't detect any unwanted angle snapping or sensor rattle either.

CPI Divergence

CPI divergence is essentially the same as on all PMW3391-equipped mice, which means the measured values are somewhat higher than the nominal ones. If you come from a mouse with a perfect CPI accuracy, you should consider lowering your in-game sensitivity.

Perfect Control Speed

Perfect control speed (or PCS for short) is extremely high on this sensor as 400 IPS is over 10.6 m/s. There is absolutely no way of hitting it while using the mouse normally (or abnormally).

Speed Related Accuracy Variance

This test shows the sensor's accuracy at different speeds. You can see me doing a fast swipe to the right before I slowly slide the mouse back to its original position. There is pretty much no acceleration or deceleration here, or if there's any, it's due to human error.

Polling Rate & Stability

Input Lag & Smoothing

There is no measurable smoothing or any other delay until right above 2,000 CPI. Then some smoothing kicks in, resulting in about +2–3 ms of input lag. It reaches about +9–10 ms on 18,000 CPI, which is the highest available resolution. For competitive gaming, I would highly advise staying below the smoothed values. For anything else, feel free to use whatever you like if within reasonable bounds.

Click Latency

Click latency is roughly +7.2 ms when compared to the SteelSeries Ikari, which is considered as the baseline with 0 ms. The data comes from this thread and my own testings (please note that this review's chart only contains right-handed ergonomic mice for comparison). Testing was done with a Logitech G203 and the Nightsword, using qsxcv's program.