Testing

To test this mousing surface out I ran through our usual benchmarking games and tested the mat with different mice. The mice that I used for this were:

Ideazon Reaper - 1600DPI
Razer Krait - 1600DPI
Logitech Generic - 800DPI

The games that I tested the mat on were as follows:

Starhip Troopers, BF2142, 9Dragons and Company of Heroes. These games are used to test the mouse mat in different genres which require different kinds of mouse movements, E.G. Starship Troopers for frantic mouse movements and Company of Heroes for more precise and accurate testing. I also performed some simple Windows based activities for several hours to get a feel of prolonged usage and how it performs when simple tasks are being carried out.

The first tests I performed were the windows based ones. With all mice this mat performed very well giving me no problems with skipping or mat movement. However, after a few hours my wrist did feel a little clammy on the surface and I also felt it didn't support my wrist as much as a thick cloth mat would.

When moving onto the gaming tests the Frag Mat showed its true colours. In Starship Troopers and Battlefield the mat gave me all the speed I needed to get every bug in my way, and all the accuracy I needed to fire that Anti-Tank rifle round straight to the heart of the Tanks; making swift work of both.

Next I used 9Dragons for a bit more of a relaxed gaming experience and found the Frag Mat to be almost perfectly suited to the task. However, during long gaming sessions, as with the windows based tasks, it was not as comfortable as thicker clock mats and because of its surface, did make my wrist clammy which was not the most comfortable of sensations; causing me to occasionally need to wipe my wrist.

Company of Heroes suffered from the same comfort issues, but performance wise I was able to execute the commands to my units accurately and quickly.

As I said before I used several different mice testing this mat and did find that the gaming mice performed better than the generic one. This was mainly due to their increased sensitivity meaning because of the "average" size of the mat I never strayed near the edge. With the generic mouse I did find that I occasionally bumped over the edge of the pad so I would not recommend those with 400DPI mice to use this pad, as for long sweeping movements it simply isn't big enough.

Cost

I found this particular mat for about £8 in several online Etailors, though currently it would seem many of them are out of stock.