You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/asus-rog-keris-wired-gaming-mouse.1849/

As gaming kit goes, I’m somewhat saddened to say mice have never caught my attention. I want something reliable, and something that’s comfortable. Beyond that though, what really makes a mouse great? Is it its precision? The sensor? The lighting? The customisation options? Provided with the opportunity to give Asus’ wired ROG Keris a go, I’ll be diving into this mousey world to give you my thoughts and feelings.

Out of the box, there’s one thing that’s impossible to overlook: the weight. Coming in at just 62g, the Keris is by far the lightest mouse I’ve used to date, and in the beginning at least, it left me with somewhat mixed thoughts. It’s designed to be light, so it’s difficult to hold it against the mouse, but coming from beefier mice and only really having light things in schools or offices, I had mentally associated the feeling with low quality items. After a day or so of use though, the weight just felt natural.

The mouse itself looks incredibly plain, which could be a positive to some. It’s a sleek black design made for use with the right hand with an accommodating form factor. The shape is nothing that’d necessarily prevent a left-handed user from holding the mouse, but it’d be far from an optimal experience. Looking to lighting it’s again somewhat plain. All you’ll get is the ROG icon where your palm sits and the scroll wheel. What I will say here is that it is some of the most defined and clear lighting I’ve seen on a mouse to date. The colour shines through the wheel magnificently without pulling attention too much as to be a distraction.

Though this is a wired mouse, I was somewhat disappointed to see the cable was not detachable. To the cable’s credit, it is the least cable-like cable I’ve seen attached to any product. ROG’s paracord takes a braided cable to the next level. It just doesn’t bend or kink. It flows. If you can imagine a centimetre-or-so-thick piece of string attached to your mouse, that about sums it up. With a wireless Keris available with this very cable being detachable, it’s a huge shame to see it tethered this way, especially when such consideration is placed into longevity elsewhere. With the quality of the cable, I have no doubt it’ll last, but being able to identify such stress points always puts me on edge.

Perhaps the flagship feature for the Keris, the ability to swap out the switches lurking beneath each main button was what initially interested me about the mouse. It’s an incredibly simple operation to swap out the switches, which makes for a really interesting design. Pop out a few rubber caps, remove two screws, and pull away the case. From there, it really is just pulling the switches out and putting new ones in. Even somebody as inept as myself when it comes to tinkering could do it, though I did face some issues lining up the case and putting it back together. I got there in the end. On top of the added longevity of being able to swap out parts should they reach the end of their life, the doors are opened to customisation based on your preference, even if mouse switches aren’t quite as commonplace as their keyboard counterparts.

Switch swapping isn’t where the Keris stops in terms of cool features though. A bit of an underdog in the feature set, I really came to appreciate the on-the-fly DPI customisation. Where other mice I’ve used allow you to save profiles with set DPI configurations that can be swapped between on the press of a button, the Keris goes further in letting you just use the scroll wheel while holding a button on the bottom of the mouse. With this, you can tweak and finetune the DPI to your liking all without software. You can also just press the button for the more traditional profile swapping to go between in-built presets.

Of course, Asus have their own software too if you want to go to the trouble of making your own presets. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me. I have a somewhat jaded history with this kind of driver software, with Roccat’s Swarm being the most recent featured area of misery. Where Swarm crashed, Asus’ Armoury Crate just doesn’t detect my hardware at all. For my curiosity, I also gave it a shot with the Claymore II keyboard I had handy for a separate review, but that wasn’t detected either. I will concede it’s likely a fault with my PC, but with this being the only one available to me, I wasn’t able to check as thoroughly as I’d have otherwise liked. Looking to the software without having a chance to use it though, it seems to tick all your usual boxes. You can configure lighting, mess with calibration settings, and map buttons. If you’ve used Roccat’s Swarm or Razer’s Synapse before, you’ll generally know the range of options to hand.

Now the part I saved for last is by far the area I’m least knowledgeable in, and I’m completely open to admitting that. The sensor. For your enthusiasts, it really can be the make or break of a great mouse. With specific tests, I frankly wouldn’t know where to start, but I can at the very least provide the basic details. The PMW3389 under the hood is a flawless sensor, this basically meaning it doesn’t have any kind of forced modifiers to how it performs. This means no mouse acceleration, no jitter, no interpolation, and no kind of prediction or correction to your inputs. Though a lot of these things can often be configured using software (and perhaps can be configured using Armoury Crate!), the key thing is that they aren’t built into the hardware. I won’t go much further into detail here, but I can say I had absolutely no issues with using the mouse, and after the initial adjustment of switching to a mouse where you forget the DPI settings you had on your previous mouse, I was well on my way and enjoying the Keris. If you are interested in learning more about mouse sensors, I found the information at sensor.fyi incredibly useful.

All in all, the Keris is a fantastic mouse. Even without the configuration of Armoury Crate handy to me, it’s a simple by the books design with a few hidden niceties to make it subtly stand out. With my biggest issue stemming from the non-detachable albeit fantastic cable, I might recommend picking up its wireless counterpart over the one I reviewed. With the wired model retailing for £57.95 and the wireless model coming in at £89.99, you’re paying a slight premium for the flexibility a wireless mouse offers, as well as the peace of mind a detachable cable brings with it. Wired or not though, the Keris is a great choice.