BenQ ZOWIE G-SR-SE Rouge Gaming Mouse Pad for Esports

Product Information

People often think that all cloth mousepads have the exact same glide, but that’s a common misconception. The Zowie G-SR is living proof of that. When compared to (most) other cloth gaming mousepads this one offers a very controlling glide with a pretty large amount of surface friction. This won’t please everyone (then again, no product does) but it is a great option for people who have a tendency to use large, aggressive swipes or for gamers who often find themselves overshooting their target. Lastly there’s also the fact that a gaming mousepad is generally better for the long term health of your mouse. If you’ve got yourself a shiny new gaming mouseyou don’t want to be sanding down the feet of your mouse by sliding it around on a wooden desk or a plastic cutting board you’ve found in the kitchen, for example. Zowie has always made a point out of not adding any unnecessary drivel to their products, and although they have released some rather ‘gamer-y’ mousepads in the past the G-SRwould not look out of place in a more formal setting. The pad has stitched edges and is finished with a small stitched on Zowie logo on the side of the pad. That logo does technically interfere with gameplay if you glide your mouse over it, but if it comes to the point that this becomes a problem ingame then you were probably going to get fragged either way, so this is a non-issue really.

I should mention that there are games that actually need you to use faster mousepads for best results, so there are situations where balance is not the absolute best option. The materials used here are quality, the stitched edging is very well done, the performance is consistent and well-balanced, and the price is good value for money. The foam that the pad is made out of is pressed together very tightly, so there’s almost no bubbling.This doesn’t mean much if you’re playing on a perfectly smooth surface, but once you get to a slightly rougher surface you’ll find that the G-SR-SE handles that a lot better than pads of a similar size. It won’t cover up any major imperfections but it’s definitely good enough to use on most desks that you’d see at LAN parties and the likes, doubly so because the pad lays flat almost straight out of the box. Plenty of professionals use a special customized version of a certain pad with a team logo or gamer tag on the surface, but those pads are essentially all the same when it comes to the overall specifications and performance, so we added those to the count of their unbranded/non-customized versions. These special colorways and personal editions usually have the logos and names added to the pad by sublimation, so the glide isn’t affected at all. Logitech G640 The Endgame Gear EM-C is a little bit thinner than the G-SR II, but other than that it’s a very similar mousepad. The EM-C has a bit more static friction than the G-SR II, but less dynamic friction. The differences between the two are extremely small, however, so I see the Endgame Gear EM-C as the most obvious alternative to the ZOWIE G-SR II.

Games

Mousepads come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it’s mainly up to you to figure out which one is going to be right for you. All of the pads in this article are going to be doing exactly what they need to do when it comes to sensor performance and what not so it’s mainly a job of figuring out what suits you. If you’re completely unsure we would recommend you to go for a nice middle-of-the-road cloth pad to start out with. When it comes to humidity, the G-SR II has definitely improved upon its predecessor, but it’s still not perfect. On sweaty days, you are going to feel your sweat and skin oils impacting the overall feeling of the pad somewhat, but the days where a couple drops of liquid made the mouse come to a full stop are well and truly behind us. On the G-SR II, the humidity issues have been dropped down to just a mild annoyance rather than a full-blown performance limiter, so that’s definitely nice to see. ZOWIE G-SR II Alternatives The humidity resistance of a mousepad greatly depends on your personal circumstances, of course. If you live in a humid climate andyou get sweaty palms you will be more susceptible to humidity issues, but ZOWIE’s promises of handling this issue have been fulfilled if you ask me. ZOWIE G-SR-SE Rouge Review – Conclusion The Zowie G-SRis a premium large sized pad which offers a very smooth, though very controlled glide with plenty of stopping power.

The build quality of the Zowie G-SR is pretty solid, so maintenance is something that the manufacturer certainly considered. The stitching on my unit shows no errors and isn’t raised above the playing surface in a noticeable way, so there were no comfort issues during my testing period. The surface is on the rougher side (as you’d expect from a control pad) but it feels very consistent, and the same can be said for the foam underneath the playing surface, though more on that later. The mousepad looks like a relatively large but thin mousepad. It’s not so thin that I’m worried about the mouse digging so deep into it that it starts to scrape the desk, but it looks quite thin.It’s definitely faster than some of the mousepads that I’ve tried, but the glide is not overdone and it handles fast-paced FPS games pretty well. Don’t get me wrong, though: this is a very consistent control surface, and there’s pretty much no speed to it at all. There’s always going to be resistance when using the G-SR II, both when swiping as well as when you’re doing very small micro-level mouse movements. When designing this new iteration, ZOWIE also made changes to the durability and humidity resistance. To test this, I made parts of the pad a bit moist with a cloth and found that the glide remained pretty similar. I also did this test with an older G-SR-SE and there I felt like the difference between the moist spots and the dry spots was a lot more pronounced. It’s perhaps not the most scientific of tests, but it should give you an idea. It’s still not perfect at handling humidity, but it does perform better than its predecessors.