Announced in early 2012, it has fixed several issues of older Roccat devices, especially the wheel. Feature-wise, it's somewhere between the cheap Roccat Lua and high-end Kone Pure series. Price is usually around €50, which happens to be a bit less than current MSRP of Zowie FK, Logitech G400s, Razer DeathAdder and other popular gaming mice with decent sensors.
Packaging, registration
Apart from the mouse, there's only a brief user guide and a registration card in the box. You have to download the drivers by yourself... yay! no useless CD.
The ID card is worthless AFAIK. If you decide to register your mouse online, you need the mouse's serial number, which is different from the number on that card. However, I don't see any point in using the Roccat World. Its benefits sound like a bunch of gimmicks to me. Discounts on gaming hosting? Exclusive interviews with sponsored pro gamers? Brand-specific wallpapers? I don't care. I won't give away my address just for that. Supposedly, you should be able to access Roccat's official store with replacement skate pads and stuff like that, but the website was broken when I tried to access it, and they're said to ship only to Germany and Austria anyway.
pictures
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Long story short, Savu is designed for claw/fingertip grip. The thumb is supposed to go into the pit above the thumb rest. The mouse is wide enough to fit three fingers on top. One finger can rest on the wider part of the right side.
Middle part of the body is rubberized, but I think it's not the kind of rubber that gets sticky and fugly easily. Sides aren't though. They have a rough, sandpaper-like texture. Some OCN members claim that this texture eventually comes off, although I guess you have to have very aggressive sweat to get to that point.
Considering that Savu weighs only 90 grams, it's surprisingly well built. Nothing squeaks even when pressed violently and plastic parts fit perfectly.
USB cable is just a typical braided cable. I'm not a big fan of that, but I don't expect any problems, because I don't travel with the mouse and use a mouse bungee (Roccat Apuri) most of the time.
Apart from the wheel, there are two primary buttons and two thumb buttons. All of them have nice tactility and feel even. Stiffness is just right, neither as stiff as Huano switches, nor very light, which would be a love/hate thing. I love position of the thumb buttons, they're right above my thumb. The wheel is relatively wide and has about the same stiffness as the other buttons, that's too stiff for me though, due to my malformed middle finger. Its steps are quite clearly defined... might be okay for gaming, but not so much for fast scrolling through longer documents/websites. It's a bit loud as well, when scrolling up.
One thing I dislike about Savu is size of the skates (same as on Roccat Lua BTW). They're somewhat big and you need to remove them to open the mouse. For example, Zowie MiCO is much better in this regard.
pictures (Roccat Savu)
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Roccat Savu features an optical Avago 3090 sensor with a 4000 dpi ROM. One of its killer features is no angle snapping or acceleration out of the box. I'm not too concerned about precision, so just two things to point out:
- 4000 dpi is hard to control and might be a bit jittery, and
- LOD is huge (3+ CDs), unless you apply the tape fix or use a light-colored mousepad; it's a pity, because the mouse is very easy to pick up.
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Now the best thing about Roccat mice. They have an on-board memory to store nearly all settings. Moreover, there are unofficial, but actively maintained and more or less complete open-source drivers for GNU/Linux, developed by Stefan Achatz. You can either download them from SourceForge, or use regularly updated binaries for mainstream distros, such as Fedora or Ubuntu. There are always two packages:
- optional, but recommended kernel module that brings support to older kernels back to 2.6.28; and
- `roccat-tools`, the configuration software itself, with some more or rather less useful extras, such as firmware updater.
- light settings;
- sensor resolution, sensitivity and polling rate configuration;
- actions binded to buttons.
One feature of official drivers that isn't present at all, is the "achievements" gimmick. Why the heck should mouse drivers make mouse use stats (such as the distance you've scrolled)?
Lights
In theory, the light at the back of the mouse is supposed to be able to produce any True Color color. In practice, it's better to stick to the obvious options: light turned off, one of the few preset colors or glowing rotation of preset colors. That's because of somewhat buggy color picker in the drivers and especially poor calibration on the hardware side.
Button actions
You can bind any of the five buttons and two wheel scrolling directions to
- any of the nine standard mouse actions (primary three "clicks", scrolling in four directions, extra two buttons interpreted as back/forward by default) and "double click";
- standard "multimedia" actions (volume or audio player controls);
- the Mod4/Windows key;
- any shortcut (combination of Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Windows and a keyboard key);
- a hardware modifier, timer, macro or an application launcher.
The other two special modifiers are EasyAim and EasyWheel. The former changes sensor resolution while you hold it. The latter is associated with wheel scrolling; you can change profiles/sensitivity/volume this way.
I don't get what the point of timers is. Basically, if you press the button assigned to a timer, it triggers a timer and after given time sends an event to the host system, which reacts by playing a sound or showing a system notification (OSD). BTW the mouse can do the same when switching profiles.
Macros are probably more useful, although I never use them either. You can not only record a sequence of keyboard key presses (and optionally length of each key press), but paste a sequence of key presses necessary to type the text in the clipboard too, which sounds quite interesting.
pictures
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I really like Roccat Savu. It's a decent no-bullshit mouse with a very nice price tag compared to e.g. Zowie FK, Logitech G400s or Razer DeathAdder. It fits my fingertip grip quite well, but I recommend to try before you buy though. The killer feature, that truly separates it from the competition, is the on-board memory (with EasyShift) and GNU/Linux support.
Now I only wish Roccat will remake the ambidextrous Kova to have all this new stuff like wheel and materials ASAP.
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The one I bought was a defective one which I found on ebay, I replaced the microswitches and it was like new! I must say that the sensor on my IE3 feels kind of better but I have no idea why?
