ASUS ROG Chakram X review – Sticks the landing

At first glance, the Asus Chakram X, which falls under the ASUS ROG banner, looks like your average gaming mouse. It has some admittedly funky RGB piping running through the front so that you know it’s for serious gaming business, it has a sloped design that you can rest your palm on, and it has a pair of fangs with a scrolling wheel in the middle. Pretty standard stuff, until you swivel your eyes to the left side and spot… an analogue stick.

That’s right, the Chakram X is a mouse that comes equipped with a side-mounted joystick and while it may come off as a gimmick, it’s genuinely one of the most useful additions to a time-honoured design that I’ve ever made use of. Can it do the same for you? Well that depends on how much investment you’re willing to pour into this peripheral, because the customization doesn’t end with a bit of console gamification.

Before we dive into a feature that likely has PlayStation and Xbox users screaming about heresy, let’s look at the mouse itself.

The overall shape is a solid one, featuring a great matte finish texture that’s in line with ASUS’s ROG products, a stripe of lighting that projects out the front, and a solid selection of buttons. In addition to the two main clickers, you’ve got a scroll wheel with a generous amount of ratcheted spin, three more buttons on the left side above the analogue stick, and some nice textures to give you a decent grip. It’s a good-looking mouse, with just enough personality to distinguish itself as an ASUS product, but also thematically similar to Logitech and Razer’s input devices within this category.

Fortunately there’s more substance to the Chakram X beneath the hood, thanks to pairing and DPI buttons that make setting it up a cinch. Just plug the receiver into a spare USB port and you’re good to go, or alternatively use a USB-C cable to give it a charge. Easy.

Internally, the Chakram X has some mighty horses under the hood, like the new ROG AimPoint optical sensor that delivers between 100 to 36,000 dpi sensitivity levels. It can register movement at speeds of up to 650 inches per second, at up to 50 g acceleration and it has up to 8000 Hz polling rate, although it’s worth noting that you’ll only hit that ceiling for polling if the mouse is wired.

If you fancy a bit more customization, you can also fiddle with the push-fit switch socket design and drop in 3-pin mechanical switches or 5-pin optical micro switches, which allows for operating force and feedback to be further tailored to your needs. These also make for handy replacement parts, although ASUS says that you’ll get 70 million clicks before you need to think about hot-swapping them in. That’s a lot of clicks!

The real appeal here though is that analogue stick. It has proven to be incredibly useful even in its default mode, which allows it to operate as either a four-way directional pad or a 360-degree control stick. Its placement feels natural and unobtrusive, and while it comes with a caveat that it’s only for right-handed setups, I quickly found myself incorporating it into my daily life and work.

Like most ASUS hardware, installing the Armory software is a must for getting the most out of the gear, especially if you’re looking to assign keys and macros. That’s just what I did, but I also started tinkering in the back end of some of my favorite games to make better use of the analogue stick. For example, I managed to assign face button attacks in Batman: Arkham Knight to the joystick, and within seconds I was pulling off advanced moves in combos by using arcade Mortal Kombat mentality. You haven’t lived until you’ve broken a criminal’s arm in Gotham City while using a quarter-circle swish command.

To give a less abstract idea of what you can do, imagine a round of Overwatch where you can activate a special ability without needing to do finger ballet on your keyboard; or unloading the rock-paper-chainsaw of death special attacks in Doom Eternal with the flick of a stick. There’s definite potential in the Chakram X to assign more functions to it, taking them away from the keyboard, and I felt like I was just scratching the surface with what was possible with it during my testing across several games.

That key feature, coupled with the rest of the Chakram X’s strengths–long battery life, solid design, and satisfying clickiness–makes for not only a reliable mouse, but one that has its own distinct identity in a competitive ocean.