Aorus get into the peripheral game with an MMO mouse

Gigabyte's new gaming offshoot, Aorus, is branching out from slimline gaming laptops and taking a shot at peripherals. The first is the Thunder M7, an MMO/MOBA mouse with a lovely embossed presentation case and more buttons than you've got fingers.

Aorus is keen to point out that the Thunder M7 is a gaming mouse 'without crazy numerous buttons or dial-pad hotkeys,' but the Thunder M7 does surround your thumb with more chunky buttons than any one digit could possibly cope with. I got my hands on the mouse recently, and while the surprisingly chunky rodent is actually quite comfortable to grip, that array of extra buttons just feels too cramped to be effectively usable in the heat of battle. They feel liable to be more of a hindrance than a help.

The rest of the design seems pretty robust, however, and I quite like the peek-a-boo top and side panels, though the 'eyes' on the front seem a bit much.

In terms of the rest of the spec, the Thunder M7 is right up there with the top-end laser mice of today, and by that I mean it's got the now-standard up-to-8,200dpi sensor. I assume that's going to be the same Pixart/Avago ADNS-9800 that we've seen in a whole bunch of laser mice from the last year or so.

Along with the Thunder M7 I've also been treated to the frankly vast Aorus Thunder P3 Gaming Mouse Pad . Though I think 'pad' has been lost in translation somewhere along the line and become confused with 'duvet'. In the Winter I can see myself sat at my desk, a single chunk of coal in the fireplace and the Thunder P3 wrapped around my shoulders to ward off the cold.

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.