The Cougar 450M is a decent mid-tier gaming, ambidextrous 5000DPI gaming mouse with a modest price tag. If it wasn’t so damn shiny, it would be a fair bid for your gaming dollars. But unless you’re partial to shiny, smudge-prone plastic that only serves to make a mouse look more like a sports car, you should probably just steer clear of the 450M.
The 450M sports an ambidextrous and attractive design backed by solid mechanical switches and an excellent scroll wheel, but glossy plastic only looks gorgeous for the 30 seconds or so you spend admiring it. In day-to-day usage it gets quickly smudged (especially if you have youngling gamers in the house) and tends to feel a bit ‘tacky’ after extended use.
Cougar 450m feature highlights and technical specifications
The Cougar’s LED lighting, like many of its competitors, is limited to the logo and a single button located directly behind the scroll wheel. You can set 3 different colors for the button (to indicate DPI setting or profile in use for example), and you can set yet another color for the logo.
Cougar 450M gaming mouse technical specifications
- Sensor: PMW3310DH Optical gaming sensor
- Resolution: 50-5000 DPI
- Polling rate: 1000Hz / 1ms
- On-board memory: 512KB stores up to 3 profile settings
- Programmable buttons 8* (4 thumb buttons, in addition to left, right, scroll up/scroll down)
- Switches: OMRON gaming switches
- 2 zone, 16.8 million color LED backlighting
- Maximum tracking speed: 130 IPS
- Maximum acceleration 30G
- 1.8m Braided USB cable
Check out my Gaming Mouse Buyer’s Guide for information about gaming mouse features.
Performance
The Cougar 450m delivers solid, stiff clicking and good tactile response across all of its buttons (courtesy of its quality OMRON switches), and a similarly stiff, precise scroll wheel—generally everything a good gaming mouse should deliver. And Cougar’s UIX software is definitely among the better driver software packages for PC gaming peripherals in terms of intuitiveness, usability, and features.
Cougar’s UIX software doesn’t do anything more than its competitors, but it does as much, and it does it well — with expected features such as 3 different DPI settings (adjustable in 50 DPI increments), adjustable polling rate, and a good macro recorder with customizable timings.
The thumb buttons require a little more travel distance than is typical for most thumb buttons. Although this can be good in that it helps avoid accidental presses, it still took me a little time to adjust to it, which resulted in more than a few “whiffs” trying to drop the hammer down on an opponent in SMITE (and other games) or use them for other functions.
Otherwise, the 450M performs well, provides all the features you need, and a capable macro-editor to boot.
Overall: 6/10 – Good
For about $50 the 450m generally gives you what you need and at a reasonable price—and a bit less than many competitors with a similar feature set but more brand prestige.
Conversely, the Cougar 450M does little to really differentiate itself from its competitors, and its glossy plastic construction is not something I personally recommend to friends and family when I recommend gaming mice.
If the glossy plastic doesn’t bother you, then the 450M is a decent mouse for its relatively modest price—but I’d still tend to recommend Cougar’s own 300M gaming mouse instead, which is about $10 less on average, offers a very similar design and feature set, and is covered in soft-touch rubber. Aside from not being ambidextrous, it’s the better of the 2 mice.
Note: I rated the mouse as 6/10, but if you truly love glossy, shiny mice you can add a star to that. (4/5 stars)
PC & Video Gaming Examiner 
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