 This right here is a prototype of the Atom Palm Hydrogen, the best gaming mouse on the market, theoretically. Although the hardware is actually fairly standard for a high-end gaming mouse, has a Pixar PMW3360 sensor and Omron switches, everything about it has been tuned to offer the lowest possible response time between you moving the mouse IRL and the cursor moving in game. So is this the new competitive edge for gamers or have we passed the point of human capabilities long ago? Well, one thing humans definitely aren't capable of is fully appreciating my ability to say which we're sponsor. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. All right, in a perfect world, the movements that you make in real life with the mouse would be 100% accurately represented in the computer. But in practice, there are a bunch of things that can lead to imperfect mouse tracking and ultimately you missing that sick headshot by a couple of pixels. So what can you do to have a perfect mouse tracking and a perfect mouse tracking? Well, I'm not going to go into the details of that, but I'm going to show you how to do it. So what can you do to have the best possible chances? First of all, disable your mouse acceleration. Then most games also have an option for raw mouse input. So you should enable that too. While we're talking about easy ways to up your game, disable motion blur. This won't affect your mouse, just, f*** motion blur. Why does anybody use it? The next problem is sensor spin out. This occurs when you move the mouse faster than the sensor is able to detect. And generally this results in the mouse failing horribly kind of like someone running on a treadmill that's going too fast. On office mice or cheap generic gaming mice, this can be an issue, but basically every real gaming mouse these days is capable of tracking anywhere from 30 to 50 G's of acceleration. Is that a lot? Well, I was curious how that relates to what's humanly possible. So we found this fun article by H. Negasaki from 1989 called asymmetric velocity and acceleration profiles of human arm movements. And in those tests, the maximum arm acceleration was 11.4 G's. And referencing other less reputable sounding studies, we haven't found anything above 20. So basically there's no chance of you physically outrunning a properly tuned modern gaming mouse. What can introduce errors though are sensor flaws. For instance, the PMW3310 has a problem where if you lift the mouse and then set it down, it can stop tracking properly for a brief time. Undoing all that work you put into lining up your sick flick shot. Fortunately, finding a sensor without those kinds of game breaking flaws these days is actually pretty easy. Sensor.FYI has a list of sensors and mice that are considered flawless. So you can just cross check with that before you purchase a new gaming mouse. Once you have a sensor that isn't doing anything weird, make sure then that you have the lightest possible mouse. A light mouse has two benefits. For light mice ergonomics kind of matter less since picking it up is so easy. And they also have less mass, which means less inertia. So quick moves and adjustments should be easier. Now at 45 grams, the Hydrogen is not actually the lightest mouse. That goes to the Zonkonig MK1, but the MK1 lacks a scroll wheel or even side buttons. So the latest properly featured mouse is the Hydrogen. Bringing us nicely to the party piece of the Atom Palm Hydrogen, the 8,000 Hertz polling rate. 8,000 Hertz polling rate? Woo! What? Okay, to really appreciate why 8,000 Hertz kicks butt, let's start off a bit lower. In the Atom Palm software, you can change the polling rate to, well, anything you'd like. So let's set it to one. Right now, the mouse is updating its position about once per second, and it's horrible. What's kind of funny about it though, is that it's not that it's totally unusable. It does still work, like it's still accurate. It's just not a ton of fun. Changing the polling rate to something like 125 Hertz. Oh my God, this is gonna take me a second. There we go, that's not bad. And that makes sense. 125 Hertz is kinda like the standard. So if you have an office mouse at work or something like that, chances are that's its polling rate. And with a maximum delay of just eight milliseconds between when you physically move the mouse and when the computer gets that information, you can definitely tell when a mouse is polling at 125 Hertz versus one Hertz. But you can also tell the difference between 125 and something higher. So let's flip to what, like say a thousand? A thousand, yeah. A thousand, all right. This is what I would expect from a high-performance gaming mouse, and it really does feel more responsive. Everything from like snapping around to targets to even just clicking folders and opening them and closing them. It's just more responsive. But the jump from 125 Hertz to a thousand Hertz is a seven millisecond difference. Whereas going from a thousand to 8,000 Hertz, even though we're going eight times faster again, it's just a 0.75 millisecond difference. Is it possible to feel such a small change? If people are saying this is better, I do have to wonder if it's kind of a placebo effect, kind of like how we had a bunch of people buy shirts on lttstore.com and tell us what better gamers they were. I mean, we're not saying it doesn't work that way. You could try it for yourself, but for the mouse anyway, we need some more concrete evidence. So let's do a little bit of math. With a thousand Hertz polling rate on your mouse, the maximum possible latency between moving your hand and the computer receiving a signal that it has moved is one millisecond or a thousand microseconds with an average latency of about 500 microseconds. With an 8,000 Hertz mouse, the maximum latency is now just 125 microseconds and the average is 62.5. Now our contact at Atom Palm says that it's this average response time that is so important since with a thousand Hertz mouse, you will get used to that average 500 microsecond delay. While over time, you will actually get muscle memory for the 8,000 Hertz mouse and move it quicker. Just how much more accuracy can you expect from that? To find out, Alex was locked in a dark room until he emerged with the grand unified theory of Leet, which I will present to you now. This allows you to input the parameters of your mouse movement and find out the maximum possible error due to the polling rate of your mouse. Since the most Leet gamer move is of course, the 360 no scope, let's start there. After studying Epic gamer moments, we found that the average 360 no scope happens in about 0.4 seconds. And by plugging that and average mouse and game settings into the grand unified theory of Leet, we found that the maximum error on paper with a 1000 Hertz mouse during a 360 no scope is 19.2 pixels, while the 8,000 Hertz mouse is just 2.4. Damn. With that said, most people are not, no offense, 360 no scoping all the time. So for a more realistic movement of 20 centimeters over a span of one second, we're looking at about an error of 6.3 pixels or 1.77 millimeters, which looks a little something like, ooh, yeah, that's, that's not a lot. But at 8,000 Hertz, it's less than half as much. Anyway, this potential for error is not taking into account adjustments on the fly as you're making your shot because no one closes their eyes and makes all one second shot on muscle memory alone. You see where your aim is going and you correct your movement with the muscle memory for a 1000 Hertz. Now people were insanely good at quake with 125 Hertz mice. So theoretical and accuracy doesn't always translate to missing the shot in real life, which brings us then to the biggest question. Why the heck does any of this matter? If best case scenario, your display is running at 360 refreshes per second anyway. Well, we were curious too. So we're gonna set up our most scientific of tests. Our test consists of our mouse testing robot moving our device at precisely 2000 millimeters per minute, the ASUS ROG PG259QN running at 360 Hertz and our Khronos high-speed camera recording the movements at a 1000 frames per second. I should note here that high-speed cameras need lots of light and comparatively, monitors are not very bright. So the footage kind of looks like, but surprisingly our test results did manage to show a difference between 8,000 Hertz and 1000 Hertz. What we're looking for here is a perfectly spaced mouse movement with no gaps. The gaps happen when the pulling rate and the display mismatch leading to the highest possible latency and micro stuttering. What I'm surprised to see is that there is measurable stuttering at 1000 Hertz and even 2000 and 4000, but at 8,000, it is almost perfectly spaced. Being honest with you guys, I did not expect to see any real world difference here and only performed the test because Blurbusters thought that 1000 Hertz might show stuttering at refresh rates of 240 Hertz and higher. I really was not expecting the differences to be, ah yes, this clear. Now it is possible to overclock a small number of gaming mice to 8,000 Hertz that don't have support for it out of the box. But for most mice, the maximum 1000 Hertz pulling rate is hard coded into the drivers, which means unfortunately that the Atom Palm Hydrogen is, well, unfortunately for all the other mouse makers, I suppose, legitimately the most accurate mouse on the market. Although being accurate is meaningless without also reducing click latency. Unfortunately, we don't have a reliable way to test the debounce and latency of a mouse yet, but Atom Palm wrote a research paper about how they have the lowest theoretically possible click latency by doing some fancy debounce stuff in the microcontroller. If you feel like checking their work, you can go read that. We're gonna have it linked down below. The final hurdle though, of course, for Atom Palm is reliability. As far as that goes, well, only time will tell. We haven't even been able to test a final production unit yet, so we can't properly comment on that or even the build quality, because this one right here is 3D printed. But Razer has announced plans to release an 8,000 Hertz mouse if you need a little bit more reliability. So anyway, this is it, the Atom Palm Hydrogen, theoretically the most accurate gaming mouse. And although chances are that you are not cool or skilled enough to experience any of the benefits besides the placebo feel goodness of having the best, most legit mouse, man, then, you know, bummer. But hey, if you're an elite gamer, you should consider picking it up for just a little under a hundred dollars. Would you buy it? Oh, heavens no. People should just get the G305. It's light, the battery lasts basically forever, and it's relatively cheap. But hey, you know what's not cheap? The hours of labor that my writing staff puts into creating videos like this and segues to our sponsor like this. MSI's Vigor GK50 Elite Gaming Keyboard features Kailh mechanical switches, an ergonomic high-low keycap design to reduce strain and pain for your hands and wrists, a brushed metal top plate and octagonal shaped keycaps, and it comes with bright perky RGB lighting with various effects. You can fine tune the detail settings with MSI's Dragon Center software, and you can check it out today at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy, oh, what was that slow-mo mouse nonsense? No, no, not that one, the one where we test wired versus wireless mice with a high-speed camera. It was great. And you could also check, does high FPS make you a better gamer? Oh, and hit the bell.