The AW558 from Alienware is an advanced gaming mouse that provides you with lightning fast speed and comes with 3 DPI settings that can be changed on the fly. It also comes with ultimate sensitivity control with 5000 DPI and 100 IPS. With the AW558 at your disposal, you are always on top of your game as it doesn’t allow to miss even a single target with its advanced optical sensor. So let’s look at what the AW558 has to offer for the gaming community.
The Alienware AW558 is highly durable and also easy and comfortable to handle thanks to its ergonomic design. Unlike other products, the AW558 comes with a low-profile design and also a bit wider than other gaming mouse’s available in the market. The mouse comes with a smooth black color except for the mouse buttons in gunmetal colors. The design takes some of angled design style from other Alienware products as both the left and right mouse buttons are angles both at the top and to the middle of the mouse. The Alienware wordmark can be seen on the corner of the right mouse button.
The scroll wheel can be found in the inset between the left and right mouse buttons and almost looks like a tire rim except without a tire on the rim. The scroll wheel are embraced with rubber rims for additional grip to your fingers. We can also see two arrows pointing to the tilt feature of the scroll wheel.
And a DPI toggle switch is found below the scroll wheel that allows you to the toggle DPI settings even in the middle of the action. And the top of the mouse design ends with a couple of LEDs running along the border of the mouse buttons towards the left and right. And there is also a third LED button that can be seen running towards the center of the bottom portion of the mouse.
The left side of mouse comes with two side buttons that has protruding edge to provide the necessary support and the feel for the buttons. But sometimes the protruding edge seems to be a problem as you accidentally hit that without knowing. And when it comes to Alienware, there needs to be some x-factor to the design and that is the flanges present on the either side of the palm portion to comfortably rest your thumbs.
And coming to the bottom, there is nothing special as you can see the optical sensor located in the middle along with a couple of sliders that runs on both the left and right sides of the mouse. Initially the mouse was not smooth on the mousepad and out of suspicion had a closer look and noticed a small piece of plastic for safety purposes on the slider components.
Once the plastic stickers were removed the movement is smooth. Apart from that minor glitch of the accidental touching of the side buttons on the left mouse button, the Aw558 was pretty much comfortable and comes with a decent design.
Software
Most of the gaming mouse nowadays come packed with a gaming software to allow you to easily customize the mouse settings according to your requirements. With the help of the software, you can change the lighting, allot macro functionalities to keys as well as customize other settings.
The Alienware Control Center (ACC) is divided into 3 main screens namely lighting, macros and settings. In the lighting tab, you can easily change the color choosing from 6 preset color combinations and also adjust the tempo as well. Creating macros is pretty much simple with the ACC as you can easily assign macros or keys to the side buttons located on the left hand side of the mouse as well as to the scroll wheels.
During the middle of the game, you can see the assigned macros getting lost and you need to reprogram them to use them. Even though we couldn’t tell yet to what possibly could have caused that issue. But it definitely a show-stopper when you see a macro is not working when you are in the enemy lines and when they are closing in on you.
The settings tab allows you to customize various options including toggling the mouse acceleration, adjusting the click speed, changing the DPI levels and also customizing the polling rate delay etc. Using the ACC, you update the firmware of the AW558 gaming mouse and other peripherals as well.
Performance
AW558 comes with a decent performance. You cannot see any lag or delay in response even during high action based games. Mouse clicks and movements work pretty much as expected from a gaming mouse.
One major glitch with the AW558 is that it comes with only 5000 DPI which may sound normal for most of the gaming mouse available in the market, but lately you can see gaming mouse’s coming with higher DPI.
But the major improvement with the AW558 is the ability to change the DPI on the go as all you need to do is just push the toggle switch to increase the DPI and push it lower to decrease the setting.
And the lighting setting is pretty much combined with your DPI setting as every DPI setting comes with its own color and hence you can easily identify the DPI setting based on the color in the lighting.
Pricing
The AW558 Advanced gaming mouse from Alienware is priced around $39.88 which is largely reasonable for a full-fledged gaming mouse that provides with a decent performance as well. Even though it comes with some minor limitations, the AW558 is definitely worth the money.
Bottom Line
The AW558 gaming mouse was built to assist you through thousands and thousands of games without any major issues. It also comes at a reasonable price and the performance is also upto the mark as the mouse comes with all the features that you would expect with a gaming mouse.
