 A mouse, like so many things, is all about the feeling in your hand. Is it satisfying? Is it fatiguing? Is it erotic? For the Logitech G502 Proteus Core tunable gaming mouse, boy is that ever a mouthful, the answers fortunately are yes, no, no, and did you seriously put that double entendre in there?......... Hotspot Shield Service makes your internet browsing safer, more secure, and fully private. Click now to learn more. We'll start with the shape. After so many years of loyalty to the classic Logitech performance mouse shape that I've personally been using off and on since 2004, I was worried that Logitech had gone too far out into left field and screwed things up. I was pretty worried about the G502's ergonomics when I'd only seen pictures of it. Now that I've actually used it, it's clear to me that they really haven't changed much other than to extend the thumb rest, add some much-needed extra buttons, improve the feel with soft touch on the back and a super satisfying textured rubber on the sides, add a blue LED G logo, and otherwise just give it a very sexy makeover. The new buttons have been very thoughtfully laid out, and unlike most gaming mice, I'm able to comfortably reach each and every one of them without altering my grip. The default mappings, which of course you can change in software, are left, right, and middle click, scroll left and scroll right for the mouse wheel tilt, profile switching behind the scroll wheel, toggle button, DPI up and down to the left of the index finger, forward and back in your browser, above the thumb, and shift just in front of the thumb. This lets you hold down a button to temporarily change to your assigned shift DPI for more accurate sniping. The one thing that can't be reprogrammed, at least right now, is scroll up and scroll down, something that some gamers will definitely miss, but this is actually not my biggest complaint about the scroll wheel. First good stuff though, Logitech has vastly improved the implementation of their free spinning mode versus the G9's bottom mounted toggle by moving the aforementioned toggle to the top of the mouse, so switching between the normal clicky mode versus the spreadsheet friendly free spin mode is now super fast. The backward step on the scroll wheel though is the metallic finish combined with a fairly heavy click in clicky mode that caused my finger to slip quite frequently when trying to scroll. If I end up keeping this mouse as my daily driver, I will be looking for something to cover it with to improve the situation. I don't like this at all, and it's easily my biggest criticism of an otherwise outstanding design. Onto more things I do like, Logitech doesn't name the exact mechanical micro switches they're using in the left and right buttons, but they rate them at 20 million clicks and they have a very satisfying, not too heavy, not so light you accidentally hit them all the time like that bloody Death Adder 2013, weight to them. The other buttons are each individually tuned so that the ones that are intended to be hit by leaning on them are light and very easy to press, and the ones that are intended to be pushed like a normal button are heavier. What a nice touch, kudos to Logitech for that one. To wrap up ergonomics, I'll say this, like seemingly everyone else writing reviews on Amazon of this mouse, I loved the G9's shape and performance. In fact, my clearly well-used G9 cord finally started flaking out recently and I've been considering buying one on eBay or something. And, like everyone else, I think the best way I can describe the G502 is to call it a worthy successor to the G9, and that really is high praise coming from me. For my small hands, I guess they'd be medium if I was a lady. The increased height doesn't affect the claw-ish grip that I use, and the increased length doesn't bother me one bit. Because I click almost as easily in the middle of the left and right buttons as I can at the end of them. The fact that it has more buttons and I can easily reach them all is a huge bonus, and I think my only real complaint aside from that slick material on the scroll wheel is that it's a touch on the heavy side, even without the included handy-dandy weights. However well-implemented that system with its handy-dandy magnetic cover on the bottom might be. Another thing that might be contributing to the heavy feel of the mouse is the unusually thick, also heavy, cord that drags more than I'm used to when moving it around. Get yourself a mouse cord anchor of some sort to go along with your G502 for sure. Here's the one I use at home. So, on to performance stuff. On the bottom of the mouse, we've got Slippy Feet rated for a massive 250 kilometers of travel distance before they're supposed to wear out, and then, powered by a 32-bit ARM processor under the hood, is what Logitech's calling the highest performance optical sensor on the market with zero acceleration, zero smoothing or filtering, and zero pixel rounding. Damn. Other than a couple dissenters on the forums who claim there is some acceleration based on like moving your hand and thinking, feeling the acceleration, the general consensus is that this is one seriously badass piece of gear. The sensor goes from 200 to 12,000 DPI in 50 DPI increments without any interpolation, extrapolation, or other tomfoolery, which is something that most people, like that, at the very high end, will never leverage, but does speak to the overall accuracy of the optics of the mouse. Now, I lack the testing equipment to validate Logitech's claims here, but what I can say is that having recently switched to a perfect sensor mouse, the G502 delivers an equally enjoyable experience, at least. Now, most of the software stuff I've briefly covered in the rest of the video, but there are a few things I want to point out specifically. All of the changes are applied to the hardware in real time, which is a little bit frustrating when you're changing DPI settings because as you set up each one, the mouse's speed changes instantly, making it hard to move to the next one, but for everything else, it works fine and it's very, very efficient. Logitech has updated their macro creation interface since the last time I used it on a mouse, and it's super intuitive now. Basically, click on the button, pick what you want to bind, decide if you want pauses or not, and then save your config profile either to your PC or to the onboard memory on the mouse itself, and then you can switch between those things with the click of a button. Angle snapping is handled by a single on-off switch, but, hint, guys, just leave that off. They also have a new surface tuning feature. Now, it's not the first time I've seen this kind of thing, but it's definitely a first for Logitech anyway. So what you do is you run the utility, do figure eights on your mouse pad for a few seconds, and then I guess it's optimized. I didn't personally notice any difference on this mouse pad anyway, but I think that's more of a testament to how well it tracks before tuning than a criticism of the tuning feature per se. So this is where I would normally do a conclusion, but I think I've said all I have to say about the G502 Proteus Core. So I'm going to shake things up here and close this video with a petty complaint. Here it goes. It is unusual for an $80 mouse to lack customizable lighting colors, and the fact that I even noticed stood out to me because when I'm reviewing a mouse that I don't intend to actually put next to my system where I'll have to stare at it, not matching my PC for months on end, it's easy to say, ah, I don't really care about the LED colors. When it's a mouse whose performance and ergonomics I like so much that I'm thinking of switching to it permanently, all of a sudden those little details matter a lot more. So there you have it, the finish on the scroll wheel and the blue LED. That's about all I could find wrong with it, which is a pretty strong endorsement. Speaking of something wrong with it, you may have noticed that my attire changed a couple of times. That was no glitch, and in fact it's related to our brand new sponsor, 5.4 Clothing. The way it works is this. You go on the website and it prompts you to do a little survey about colors you like and styles you like that 5.4 claims you can do in under 60 seconds. Turns out that their test subjects for this were probably people exactly like me because it took me 54 seconds of sitting there going, yeah, whatever, just make this decision for me because I can't be arsed, and clicking on things for me to finish it. And that is the point of the 5.4 Club. If you don't like shopping because salespeople make you uncomfortable, or you don't like shopping because you get lost in the mall, or you don't like shopping because your wife wants to go with you and you have to watch her endlessly try on stuff you hate and sit there and tell her it looks good. Anyway, the point is if you don't like shopping, you sign up, and for 60 bucks a month, they send an equivalent of at least $120 worth of clothes to your door that are hand-picked by your own personal stylist to make you look good. They offer free shipping and easy size exchanges, and the longer you're a member of the club, the more you'll expand your wardrobe with new exclusive designs so you don't look like a hobo. So head over to 5.4Clothing.com, use offer code LINUS to save 15 bucks on your first month. And another cool little trick is that once you're a member of the club, anyone you refer saves another $15. Say, for you. Yeah, I was almost all the way through that. Saves you another $15. Anyway, the point is, guys, there's a bit.ly link in the video description, go check it out. I think by the time this video goes up, there's gonna be like a landing page of me like modeling the clothing, so for, if nothing else, there's the hilarity factor of that, and you guys can definitely check that out because we all know I have no style, and even seeing me in clothes that looks somewhat remotely good is just, has blown the minds of two of the people here in the office already, and the other two aren't even here. So that's pretty much all I have to say about that. Anyway, guys, thanks for watching. My team and I worked hard on this video. We hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please like and share it. If you didn't, please dislike it and leave a comment with your thoughts. We do take constructive criticism very seriously. Also linked in the video description is a support us link to buy t-shirts, give us a monthly contribution, or use our affiliate code when you buy random stuff on Amazon. Again, thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. The average speed of that paragraph was reasonable.