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There is something about opening a fine bottle of wine.  The sweet aroma swirls around your nasal cavity, letting you know about the quality of the wine.  Then there is the vivid color of the wine as it is poured into a slender glass.  Finally, there is that sense of satisfaction as the sweet nectar from the vine crosses your taste buds, finishing off the entire experience.  It sounds great doesn’t it?  Now imagine someone spitting into your wineglass right before you drink that perfect wine, and you have my experience with the Mionix NAOS 5000 mouse.  The NAOS is a high quality mouse that feels moves and plays with style, but a horrible issue deflated what could have been a flawless experience.

Right from the start, I was very impressed with the quality that Mionix packed into their product.  It started right up front with the packaging for the mouse.  It was not a simple cardboard box or blister pack, but a fold out, sleek black box with the mouse swaddled inside packed in with a case of mouse weights.  Quickly taking the new product out of the box, I was also very happy with the feel of the NAOS 5000 in my hand.  This is a mouse that is designed and contoured for a righted handed person.  Your fingers easily slot into the molded curves, and it just feels very comfortable.

That comfort extended to my gaming sessions as I found myself playing all sorts of titles, from simple adventure games, to click intensive strategy titles, and never once did I feel fatigue in my hand that I sometimes get with standard ambidextrous mice that I have normally come to use in my day to day gaming.

The NAOS 5000 features several buttons, including two on the side, two on time, a clickable scroll wheel, and two buttons right below the scroll wheel.  While all the buttons are configurable and slotted for comfort, the two on the top became very important in my gaming.  See, these two buttons allow for quick adjustments for the DPI of the mouse.  In the default position, the NAOS is running at a normal DPI setting, with one light on side.  Click the up arrow on the top and the mouse kicks up the DPI to around 3000 DPI.  Hit the button once more, and you have unleashed the full 5040 DPI of the NAOS.  I found myself switching mid-game, going from the high setting during run and gun segments of Metro 2033, but dropping down to the base level when I entered into sniper mode.

The NAOS comes with several little extra touches that just add more class to an already impressive and full featured package.  The NAOS is fitted with memory onboard, which allows for the gamer to store up to five different mouse settings on the mouse.    There are two compartments on the bottom of the mouse where you can put any number of the eight included weights to counterbalance the mouse to your hand.  And while purely in the aesthetics column, the mouse illumination can be changed with the software to one of 24 different colors, allowing for your mood to show on the mouse.  Sure, it is not a huge feature, but it is a nice touch for extra player individuality.

So with all this praise, you are probably glancing back at my opening paragraph and are looking for that spit in the cup.  Well, the biggest issue that I ran into with the Mionix NAOS 5000 is a base incompatibility with my motherboard.  See, whenever I had the NAOS hooked up to my PC, it would hard lock at the POST screen.  It appears that through some troubleshooting with both Mionix and Gigabyte is that due to the memory on the mouse, it is being detected by my BIOS as a bootable storage device.  Mionix told me to disable the device from the boot menu, but that was impossible, as the computer does not respond while the device is hooked up to the PC.  They also suggested that I turn off legacy storage devices, but this did not help either.  Gigabyte on the other hand stated that I should be able to switch off the memory on the mouse via the mouse, which is not the case.  So, the only way to use this mouse on my machine is by disconnecting it before powering the machine on, and then hooking it back up when I get to the login screen.  This irritated me something fierce, as I love everything about the Mionix NAOS 5000, but the error is killing a lot of the benefit I receive from the mouse.

So, as you can read, the Mionix NAOS 5000 is a fantastic mouse.  With optical handled by a laser, up to 5000 DPI resolution, and a comfort I have rarely felt in any other mouse on the market.  I would be willing to sing praises from on high, but the terrible boot issue takes a fair amount away from all of its positives.  I am sure that this might be a limited issue, but you might want to hold on to your receipt, just in case.  The Mionix NAOS 5000 gets 3.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out the Mionix NAOS 5000 and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.