Patriot Viper V570 Full RGB Laser Gaming Mouse Review

Patriot Viper Mouse Software and Features

The Patriot Viper Mouse Software controls the Patriot Viper V570 Laser Gaming Mouse and while it is not needed to be installed to use the mouse, it does have many features that we will go over here.  Another thing to mention, the software does not come in the box, you need to download it separately form Patriot’s website, http://www.patriotmemory.com/

BUTTONS

When you start off the software, you will be on the “Buttons” tab and “Profile 1”.  Profile 1 by default provides each button with a specific function, except 6 of them.  There are the 5 you can see above that say “No Function” but then just below the button labelled “DPI loop”, there is one that has no label what so ever.

That button allows you to change in between Profiles, on the fly switching while you are gaming.  The no function buttons and really any button can be reprogrammed however you would prefer.  When you click on the “No Function” label, it will bring you to the “Advanced Functions” menu.

In the Advanced Functions section, you can either leave it with No function, to be a worthless button or you can give it some meaning.

ADVANCED FUNCTIONS

“Launch drive menu”, allows you to open up the “Patriot Viper Mouse” software if it is not already open.

“Adjust lift – off”, allows you to change the distance the laser tracks the surface after the mouse is lifted.

“Adjust DPI”, allows you to adjust the DPI settings.

“Lock Y – axis”, allows you to lock the Y axis, the Y axis is Up or Down.

“Lock X – axis”, allows you to lock the X axis, the X axis is Left and Right.

“Sniper function”, allows you to set the Sniper function.  The Sniper function by default and when pressed and held, lowers the X/Y axis dpi settings down to 400DPI for better accuracy.

“Angle snapping on / off”, allows you to enable/disable the angle snapping feature.  Angle Snapping, allows you to reduce jittering of the mouse when you are scrolling, perfect for video demonstrations where you want your mouse movements to seem so jittery.

“Virtual touch”, allows you to simulate a virtual touch on a touch screen.

Since we are in this menu, I will go over the other tabs in this menu.

MOUSE FUNCTIONS

I will skip many of these function as they are self-explanatory, but there are a few I will go over.

“Tilt left/Tilt right”, This mouse does not have the ability to tilt the scroll wheel left or right, so with this you can set one of those functions to act as a tilt left/right function.

“Fire button” acts as pushing the mouse forwards while pressing the left mouse button. This is useful for games where you just have to run and gun, holding this button down you will continue to go forward and fire.

By clicking change when selecting this button, you can change the duration of that action from 10 milliseconds to 2500 milliseconds.

“On – to – go fire”, like the “Fire button” acts as pushing the mouse forwards while pressing the left and right mouse button. This is handy for games where you can dual wield and control each gun individually, or maybe cast a spell and reload mana, just throwing ideas out there.

KEYBOARDS FUNCTIONS

Keyboard functions, allows you to select an individual keyboard key, even down to a multi-media key for a mouse click.  This is a very handy feature for FPS’ and MMO’s alike, really any type of game where you can select a weapon (of many), spell, defense allowing you not have to reach out as much to your keyboard.

MACROS

Allows you to create different types of macro and macro combinations and assign them to the selected keys.

Within the “MACROS’ tab, we find the sub tab “MACRO EDITOR”.  From here we can create macro with such great detail, better than explaining each button, I decided to label them for you as they show up.

Very fine detail here, and you can even give these macros to friends and receive them as well and make your own modifications.

At the bottom of the menu, you can “Create New macro”s and “Record delays”, if you don’t want to record delays, just uncheck the box.

The left of the MACRO EDITOR, allows you select between saved macros to either use or make modifications to.  It also shows you how much space you have left under “Mouse memory” to make more macros.

KEY CYCLE

This is an odd feature, that I guess can be beneficial to some.  In the example above, with “Cycle” selected, I set the 3^rd key on the mouse so that when I click it, the letter E gets entered, if I click it again, then the letter G gets entered and if I click it again the letter H gets enter.  After that, if I click it again, it starts back up with the letter E.

If I select “Reverse Cycle”, does the same thing I mentioned above, just backwards.  “Current position”, depending on which position you are on the “Key Cycle” will continue hitting that key.  For example, if I hit the button 3 times and was left with H, with current position, it would continue to hit H.

So backing out of the sub functions, let’s go back to the front facing portion of the software.

Switching over to “Profile 2” allows me to show you that when you do switch a profile, you can also select the color of the profile which also reflects on the mouse itself.

SENSOR

Under the “SENSOR” tab, we can select each DPI setting for the 4 different DPI modes.  By default, when we slide the notch up and down, the X and Y axis will go up together.

Click on the “X / Y axis independent” radio button on the bottom allows up to select the X and Y axis independently here.

Clicking the “Auto Speed” radio button, allows up to set the High and Low DPI selection per profile.

We’ve already discussed the “MACRO EDITOR” so we will now move on to the “SETTINGS” tab.

The “SETTINGS” tab allows us to see “GENERAL OPTIONS”

From here we can select the USB POLLING RATE down from 125Hz all the way up to 1000Hz.  USB Polling is how often the mouse reports to the computer its position.  At 125Hz, it will report to the computer its position 125 times, at 1000Hz, it will report to the computer 1000 times per second.  The higher the polling rate, there will be a decrease lag between your movements and what shows up on the screen.

From here, we can also toggle the “Angle snapping” feature as well as “Enable DPI / profile OSD”.

When you click the DPI button on the mouse, you will see this on the top left-hand corner of your screen, really tiny to make sure it’s out of the way.

When you click on the Profile selector button on the mouse, you will see what profile you have moved into.  Like the DPI OSD, it appears on the top left-hand corner of the screen very tiny and out of the way.

We can also toggle “Disable mouse acceleration(OS)”.

Then we can also see “INFORMATION”, which gives us the Model number, Driver version and Firmware version the mouse currently has.

We can also BACKUP our current settings, RESTORE our previous settings and RESET the settings back to default.

I go over a lot of the settings on this video as well

I go over the lighting options in the video, and I will here too.  On the top right-hand corner of the VIPER software, we see a color wheel that when hovered over reads “Light effect”, let’s check that out.

When you click on that, it shows you the mouse and its 7 lighting Zones, of which you can individually select.

Here you can boringly select one of the already selected colors, or you can go on the chart above and granularity select colors

In the example above, I clicked on the gradient somewhere inside of where I have circled.  Selecting that, shows me how much RED, GREEN and BLUE is in my selection and then I can click OK to finalize my selection.  By default, the colors are breathing, slowly pulsing on and off but you can select it as “Always ON” if you prefer.

You can also select the “Wave”, “Wave(invert), “Random 1” and “Random 2” settings.  Rather than explaining those, since the software provides a visual, I will show you how it works.

Works pretty nicely I think and is very customization, I am referring to the entire VIPER software, not just the LED Lighting effects which are also very customization.

Here we can see the mouse wheel lit blue, as well as the DPI/Profile indicator lights.

The front 2 lights and the mouse wheel light.

The lighting along the inner side of the mouse.

Then we have the VIPER logo along the back of the mouse.  Now I want to go over a very difficult thing to convey, comfort.

Comfort is a very difficult thing to get right because everyone has their own comfort level but this mouse brings a little more to the table in what comfort means, at least to me so it will get its own page.