Logitech G9 Laser Mouse

The SetPoint Home Page looks rather bare, showing only the G9 Laser Mouse under Select a Logitech Device. No doubt, as more SetPoint 5.0-compliant devices become available from Logitech, they will also show up here with their own unique configuration property pages, if they are installed at the same time as the G9. Once you selected the G9, you're taken to the Overview screen, where you can access all the settings for customizing and setting up your Logitech G9 Laser Mouse. Note that you can also access the same options from the menu sidebar, and most of those options (with the exception of the Profile and Macro Manager) from Overview on the top menu bar. Regardless of which options you select from the sidebar, note that you can always access any existing profiles and create new ones from the drop-down menu under Profile.


*Select the Productivity* profile...**	...launch any application associated with it...	*...and the LEDs on the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse* changes color accordingly; in this instance, blue.**	*Select Basics* from either the Sidebar menu or by clicking Edit under the Basics category under Overview.**	*This will bring up the Basics window, where you can manage profiles. Clicking Edit* next to Onboard Memory...**


*...launches the Onboard Memory Manager* where profiles can be added, removed or assigned to any of the G9's 5 onboard memory slots.**	*Clicking Edit* next to Applications Assigned brings up the Application Detection Manager, where you can add and remove applications from profiles.**	I'm going to add Crysis to the gaming profile. First I'll select Gaming from the Select a Profile drop-down dialog box. Next, I'll click the Application button.	Now I'll select Crysis from its program folder.	Crysis is now part of the Gaming profile.

Let's look at the options from the SetPoint Overview main window. Also note that you can get help at any time on any particular option by clicking on the more info hyperlink underlined next to the option’s title:

Basics—launches the page where you configure profiles for the Logitech G9. Profiles are a collection of mouse settings that can be named, saved, associated with a particular game, application with its own LED color, and downloaded into the Logitech G9's memory. The Logitech G9 Laser Mouse can store up to five user-definable profiles in its onboard memory and ships with three preconfigured profiles out-of-the-box: General, Gaming and Productivity. While the three preconfigured profiles can be edited and modified, only Gaming and Productivity can be deleted. Once a profile is stored in the G9's onboard memory, you can unplug your G9 from your PC, plug it into another PC and have those profiles available for use without the SetPoint 5.0 software being installed on the other PC—a godsend for frequent LAN partygoers. SetPoint can simultaneously manage up to 30 profiles, including the ones in the Logitech G9’s memory, and can store an unlimited number of profiles on your hard drive or other storage device (limited only by the size and available space of the storage medium, that is).

You can also change a profile's LED color. Select one of the 15 colors below and click the Preview button to try out a new color.

If none of the 15 standard colors suits you, click More Choices...

...and bring up a larger color palette!

Buttons allows you to assign numerous tasks to the Logitech G9's five mouse buttons. You can also swap the left and right mouse buttons by checking the Swap Buttons box.

Clicking a more info hyperlink anywhere in SetPoint 5.0 will bring up the related help screen. To close it, simply right-click it.

Choose tasks from this drop-down menu.
DPI, pointer movement and polling rate settings can be tweaked from the Pointer menu screen.
You can crank up (or down) the Horizontal and Vertical scrolling rate of the scroll wheel on your Logitech G9 Laser Mouse here.

Profile Manager allows you to do just that. You can configure the Logitech G9 to switch profiles automatically when the profile for that application is running, or manually via the profile button underneath the mouse. You've already seen the Onboard Memory and Application Detection managers in action earlier. Let's create a brand-new profile. Click the New button.

Name the new profile.

Buttons—shows the page where you can assign user-defined macros and a wide range of tasks to each button on the Logitech G9. You can also swap the left and right mouse button. Naturally, you'll need to create a macro first under the Macro Manager (more on that later), before you can assign it to a button. Also, note that if you swap the left and right click functions on the two main mouse buttons, the setting will be applied on all profiles. The right mouse button must be assigned to Right-Click when swapping functions or you will not be able to select an object. If you do assign the right button to a function other than Right-Click and then swap buttons, you will need to switch to another profile so you can select objects: then undo the swap button settings in the changed profiles.

Here's our new profile ready to configure.

Assign the application of your choice to it.

Save it. All profiles are saved to the My G9 Profiles folder under My Documents, in .XLM format.

Clicking the Duplicate button creates a copy of any selected profile.

To get rid of any profiles that you no longer want or need, simply highlight the profiles and click the Delete button.

All cleaned up!

You can also import saved profiles by clicking the Import button...

...like so.

The Import Profile dialog box.

The Logitech G9's Macro Editor can only be accessed from SetPoint's sidebar menu.

Pointer—takes you to the page where you can adjust and fine-tune the G9's X and Y-axis sensitivity individually, or linked together. The DPI Sensitivity Levels determines how many pixels the pointer moves across the screen for every inch you move the mouse. The higher the DPI setting, the faster the pointer moves. Speed and Acceleration contributes to the baseline speed settings of the Logitech G9. Report or Polling Rate selects how many times per second the mouse reports its position to the OS. Note that the report or polling rate is a balancing act between mouse performance and CPU bandwidth. While a higher setting will give you smoother, more responsive pointer movement, which is good—it can also chew-up more CPU bandwidth—which is not so good. Although the Logitech G9 is capable of polling rates up to 1000 reports/second, 500 is the sweet-spot for the majority of games on the market today.

Scrolling—pulls up the settings where you can adjust the horizontal and vertical scrolling speeds of the G9's scroll wheel.

Profile Manager—loads the screen where you can configure the Logitech G9 to manually switch between profiles stored in the mouse's memory with the Profile button on the bottom of the mouse—or automatically when an application assigned to a profile is launched. Note the following for automatic profile switching:

● One or more applications can be assigned to a single profile. However, an application cannot be applied to multiple profiles.

● The General profile will launch for any application that is not assigned a profile.

● Automatic profile switching supports profiles in both the Logitech G9's onboard memory, and the SetPoint Local Profile Library—a fancy name for the default folder on your hard drive where your profiles are stored, which is My G9 Profiles under My Documents.

You can select a hot key combination to start and stop macro recording from this drop-down dialogue box.
The online help for the Macro Editor.
Let's record a sample macro. Right-click on New Macro and select Edit to change the name.

When you're ready to record the macro, click the Start Recording button or your selected <Alt>+<Function Key>.

When you're finished recording the macro, click the Stop Recording button or your selected <Alt>+<Function Key>.

One major advantage that Logitech's SetPoint software has over the competition, is that you don't have to record your macro all over again from scratch to make changes, or corrections. Another plus is that you have more granular control over recorded delays...

...like so. Simply by right-clicking on the desired delay entry, selecting Edit from the menu, and typing in a more suitable delay in milliseconds...

...I can type-in the precise delay in milliseconds that the macro needs—very useful for those particularly "picky" games and applications.

Now let's assign our macro to one of the Logitech G9 buttons. Under SetPoint's Buttons screen, choose the button you want to use and select Macro from the drop-down menu as shown here.

Now select the macro you create from the drop-down list. Save your profile, and you're good to go!

Macro Manager—launches a separate application window, where you can record a series of keystrokes or mouse button clicks for the purpose of assigning them to a mouse button. With many games requiring multiple keystrokes to perform either a single action or complex combo-moves, the advantage of recording the necessary keystrokes and playing them back with the click of a single button should be obvious. While a number of gaming mice on the market have macro capabilities, few of them can match the ease-of-use or flexibility in Logitech's SetPoint software. Macros can be edited without having to be re-recorded. Delays, which are sometimes necessary to record between mouse clicks and keystrokes are certain games, are often fixed at certain millisecond settings, with other gaming mice. With SetPoint, the user has more control over millisecond settings for delays—an important feature for games that require delays in specific milliseconds that are not available with the fixed delay defaults of other mice.

Logitech makes it easy to upgrade the firmware on your G9 Laser Mouse, recover from any overzealous tweaking of the default profiles, and getting product support and help, through Device Options.

You can manually check for firmware updates by clicking the Check for Updates button.

Or you can configure Logitech Update to do it for you.

Restoring the factory settings of the Logitech G9 default profiles is as simple as a few mouse clicks.

The Logitech SetPoint Restore Profile dialog box. Got a question? Need help? Answers and solutions are only a few mouse clicks away. You'll find similar software update options for SetPoint 5.0 under SetPoint Options, including the ability to hide the SetPoint system tray icon while leaving SetPoint active, if you choose.

Device Options—allows you to manually or automatically check Logitech's website for firmware updates for the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse. If you've modified the G9's three default profiles, and you'd like to put them back to the way they were before, you can use Restore Profile do just that. You can also learn how to contact customer support, find troubleshooting tips, and get help for your Logitech G9, by clicking the Product Online Help and Logitech Online Support buttons.

SetPoint Options—displays the current SetPoint and mouse driver version for the Logitech G9, and allows you to manually or automatically check Logitech’s website for the latest versions. Similar to the update function under Device Options, you can configure Auto-Update to prompt you before checking for updates, or download them without any intervention on your part. You can also choose whether or not to show the SetPoint icon in the notification or system tray area of the Windows taskbar.

The test system for the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse was configured as follows:

● Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Dual-Core Processor

● Intel D975BX2 Motherboard

● EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX Video Card

● NVIDIA ForceWare 169.28 Drivers (Beta)

● Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic Sound Card

● Windows XP SP-2 w/latest hardware and Critical Updates

● Samsung 244T 24” 1920 x 1200 LCD display

● Logitech G15 Keyboard (2^nd Generation, orange LCD)

● Logitech G5 Laser Mouse (1^st Generation w/SetPoint 4.24) and Logitech G9 Laser Mouse (SetPoint 5.0)

● Corepad Magna Mouse Pad

● Razer eXactMat Mouse Pad

The following games were patched to their latest versions and used for the test:

Crysis Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate Demo The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Nothing fancy for the test. First, I played through a few levels of each game in the test suite with my Logitech G5 Laser Mouse. Next, I uninstalled the SetPoint 4.24 software, installed SetPoint 5.0, and played through the same levels of each game in the test suite with the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse to see if there was any difference in overall performance. The Logitech G9 had all four 7g weights installed, as I prefer a mouse with a heavier, solid feel. The weight set-up I’m most comfortable with on the Logitech G5 is four 1.7g and four 4.5g weights, so that's what I went with for the test.

The first minor hitch I encountered was that the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse was a bit too fast for my tastes. Also while playing, I noticed that the CPU utilization being monitored via Everest Ultimate Edition (Version 4.20.1170) over the LCD display of the Logitech G15 Keyboard keyboard was 5-10% higher than it normally was. At first, I though the higher CPU utilization might have been related to SetPoint 5.0 and the new drivers of the Logitech G9. Checking the default Gaming profile, I noticed that the polling rate was set to 1000 reports/seconds. I ticked 500 reports/seconds, and the response was still fast, but less jumpy. CPU utilization was back to normal in the selected games. Once I got that sorted out, I was able to make a better judgment and comparison between the two mice.

First, the Logitech G9 did feel faster and crisper than the Logitech G5—but not by an earth shattering amount—which didn’t surprise me. With the exception of polling rate and maximum resolution, all the other performance-related specs of the G9 and G5 are identical. With both mice at a 500 reports/second polling rate, I wasn’t exactly expecting the 1200 DPI difference between the Logitech G9 and G5’s resolution to blow me out of my chair. But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t welcome any increase in performance, either…

Manually selecting the onboard profiles is easy enough, though a teeny bit awkward. You need to press and hold the profile button underneath the mouse, until the little "Running Man" LED on top of the mouse begins to blink, then use the “+” and "-" button to toggle through the profiles. When I created individual profiles for my test suite of games and stored them in the or how he memory; then plugged the Logitech G9 into another PC with the same games installed but not the SetPoint software, I was able to recall and use the stored profiles without incident. However, since I rarely use the same mouse on different computers, Automatic Profile Switching quickly became my favorite.

Even after loading all four 7g weights, the Logitech G9 is a fairly light mouse compared to the G5. Although it didn't take long for me to adjust to it, I would still have preferred the G9 to be a bit heavier. Also, when hefting the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse in your hand, you'll probably notice that it doesn't quite have the same "solid" feel as the Logitech G5 Laser Mouse. This is due to the interchangeable mouse grips, that have a slight bit of play in them when attached to the G9—which is probably necessary in order to make the grips reasonably easy to remove in the first place. Once you place the G9 on solid surface and use it, it feels every bit as solid as the G5 or any mouse without interchangeable mouse grips.

Like the G5, all of the Logitech G9’s buttons have excellent tactile feedback. The detents in the G9's MicroGear Precision Scroll Wheel in "Ratchet" mode are as solid and precise as you would want, when selecting weapons in your favorite first-person shooter. In fact, it's identical to the Logitech G5 Laser Mouse. In "Hyper-Fast" mode, scrolling through web pages or long documents is effortless—though I also actually found it useful in scrolling through long inventory and spell lists in the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Unfortunately, I was not able to get Crysis or Call of Duty 4 to work with the G9 scroll wheel’s side-scrolling feature, which really would have been handy with the Lean Left and Lean Right function of these games. It’s a shame that game developers still don’t take advantage of this capability for the mice that support it after all this time...

While playing Crysis, the larger thumb button of my Logitech G5 had a distinct advantage over the two thin and narrow thumb buttons on the Logitech G9. Having the Nanosuit Menu mapped to the larger thumb button and the Weapons Customizations Menu mapped to the smaller one proved to be problematic, as I found myself bringing up the wrong menu at the wrong time, or inadvertently bringing up a menu at the worst possible time—like in the middle of a firefight. I eventually ended up not assigning any function to the smaller thumb button, and using a function key on the keyboard, for the Weapon Customization Menu, as with the G5. As for customizing the LED colors for each mouse profile, I found the default 15-color palette more than adequate. Although SetPoint allows you to choose from an even larger color palette for the LEDs, in practice I found it hard to differentiate between the more varied shades of the same color when used.

For me, the Wide Load Grip for the Logitech G9 was the most comfortable. I simply could not get used to the Precision Grip; it was too narrow for me to use for any extended period. Compounded by the G9’s shorter length and lower height, my wrist became stiff and fatigued after an hour of gameplay. Even with the Wide Load Grip installed, in terms of personal comfort I would still have to give the nod to the Logitech G5. Its longer overall length and the taller “hump” in its back makes it a bit more comfortable for me to use. However, using the Logitech G9 with a mouse pad like the Razer eXactMat, which includes a padded wrist rest, did improve the comfort level of the G9 with the Wide Load Grip installed.

Final Impressions and Conclusion

No doubt, the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse offers some impressive and worthwhile improvements over its older brother, the G5. Most notable are the interchangeable mouse grips. Logitech plans to offer additional grips for the G9 in the near future, which can only enhance its flexibility and versatility (especially if they offer grips for left-handed users). Then there’s the ability to store up to five user-definable profiles in the G9's onboard memory, which can be accessed on any PC without requiring Logitech's software. Speaking of Logitech's software, SetPoint 5.0’s revamped interface is not only easier to navigate and use, but a live more attractive than earlier versions. In addition, if you need more control and flexibility over creating macros while keeping things as simple as possible, SetPoint can't be beat. Nothing gets tiresome more quickly than having to re-do macros from scratch, simply because you made a mistake. Or being limited by fixed-length recorded delays when you have picky games and applications that require more granular delay settings. The G9’s custom-color LED display adds a tasteful bit of bling, while showing which custom profile and DPI setting is currently in use at a glance. Useful bling. Now there's a concept…

So is the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse a worthy follow-up to the venerable G5 (there’s currently no indication that Logitech plans to discontinue the G5, so I don’t want to be premature and call the G9 its successor)? Absolutely! With “on-the-street” prices ranging from $60 - $75—lower with rebates and other discounts—for a premium gaming mouse, the Logitech G9 is certainly more attractive now that it was when it was introduced last fall with prices closer to the $99.99 SRP. But the real question, is should you upgrade to the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse—particularly if you currently own a 1^st or 2^nd generation G5?

Well, it depends…

I think that when it comes to a gaming mouse—or any mouse—user comfort should come first before performance. After all, what difference does it make how many DPI’s and megapixels per second you’re rocking, if you end up feeling like a candidate for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome after using the mouse for an hour? In an effort to differentiate their products from the competition, it seems like more mouse manufactures these days are emphasizing higher resolutions, megapixels per second and designs that are flashy and radical—but not necessarily ergonomically practical—for their gaming mice. While selling more performance and bling is easy, comfort is another matter. The Logitech G9 Laser Mouse is physically shorter with a lower-profile, than the G5 (and other mice of similar design). Whether or not that becomes an issue of comfort for you depends on several factors—namely the size of your hand, the length of your fingers, and your individual style of holding and using a mouse for work or play. Although the G9’s overall performance is more evolutionary than revolutionary, with the untapped potential of its swappable grips, it’s good to know that Logitech values user comfort as much as aesthetics and performance.

If your current mouse is working well for you regardless of which brand and model it is, yet you find some of the Logitech G9’s features too good to pass up, then I would recommend the following:

If your local computer store has the G9 on display, drop by and try it out (with both grips if possible).
Order the G9 from an online retailer that has a more customer-friendly return policy that won’t sock you upside the head with a restocking fee if you find that the G9 isn’t for you and decide to return it.

There will always be some period of adjustment required when switching from one type of mouse to the other. Only the individual using the mouse can determine just how much of an “adjustment” is acceptable—or not. If there were anything I could change about the Logitech G9 to make it absolutely perfect (at least for me), I would make it a bit longer and taller (but not wider). I’d definitely make the thumb buttons larger. I’d also move the Microgear and Profile buttons to the top of the mouse on a rocker button identical to (and above or below) the DPI/Profile switching button. And I would make a version for left-handed users.

While I have no intention of retiring my Logitech G5 Laser Mouse any time soon, with the additional flexibility of on-board profiles, customizable LED display, weight-tuning, swappable mouse grips, excellent software and a 3-year warranty, the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse has earned a top spot right alongside it.