The ‘z’ makes it that much cooler

The Ratpadz XT doesn’t come in any kind of packaging and obviously isn’t destined for the shelves of a shop; instead mail-order/e-shop sales.

The pad is touted as ‘huge’ which I feel is a little bit misleading, take a look at the picture below. The last pad is a SteelPad QcK heavy, then the NOID pad, then a SteelPad 5L, then a SteelPad S&S and finally – the smallest – the XT. Huge applies to a Corepad Deskpad or a XTracPads Ripper XXL, possibly the SteelPad QcK heavy but definitely not the Ratpadz XT.

The edges of the XT are rounded/bevelled to provide a more comfortable place for your wrists to rest against. However, these edges have obviously been milled from one large sheet of plastic and you can quite easily see these machine marks. In one place there is a visible ridge where the milling has jumped. Running your finger around the edge of this pad isn’t smooth and you can quite easily feel where the cutting bit has made the smoothed edge.

At the bottom of the pad is a semi-circular concave part which is designed to accommodate the gamers wrist. It also allows the pad to be used sideways at the end of your keyboard according to the Ratpadz website, although that sounds like marketing spiel.

On the back of the pad you find 9 self-adhesive rubber feet which stop the pad from sliding around when you’re doing your fraggin'. These are easily removed which isn’t a good thing as you could easily lose one if your not careful. Ratpadz know this and if you give them your order number they’ll send you some more feet if you need them.

Also on the back is a milled text label telling you that you are indeed using a Ratpadz product and that it was made in the USA. However, it looks like this has been done by a human and it’s a little shoddy. This combined with the uneven bevel bring down the overall feel of quality of the XT.

The surface is the standard hard pad style 3D bumpy pattern which allows your optical mouse to differentiate between two points and accurately recreate the movement of your mouse on-screen. However – as I have gone into many times before – this means that the surface can never be as smooth as a cloth pad and you will get noise when you move the mouse over the pad.

The XT surface is good for a hard pad, it almost feels like its been rubbed with oil. It feels slimy (in a good way) even though this is definitely not the case.

Compared to the SteelPad S&S the surface pattern is larger and hence the troughs and peaks are further apart. This means that it can’t be as smooth as the S&S. However, as the pattern is larger it should allow compatibility with older mice which don’t have ridiculously high DPI settings.

As the Ratpadz XT is a solid lump of plastic, there is no chance that you are going to break it. In fact, this pad had been tested for 5 years without breaking. The pad is apparently indestructible if you use just your hands. I bet the worlds strongest mad would beg to differ…