Skip to main content

Cougar’s 450-series PC gaming peripherals set to pounce this winter

Cougar, a gaming peripheral company, announced the 450M gaming mouse and the 450K gaming keyboard today, which will presumably fall somewhere between their existing 400 and 500 lines in terms of features and pricing.

Cougar claims the 450K offers “hybrid mechanical switches,” which is a compromise between the tactile response of a mechanical keyboard without the durability problems those sometimes have. It’s hard to say how that feels without trying the keyboard out.

There’s 6-key rollover and anti-ghosting support, and extensive remapping capabilities. There’s even storage in the keyboard itself for storing your profiles. The custom color lighting can change as your toggle between modes so you’ll know which one you’re using. Splash-proof design that makes it spill-proof and easy to clean, so you won’t end up crying over spilt Dew.

The 450M, meanwhile, is a 5000 DIP optical gaming mouse with a 1000Hz polling rate, so precision won’t be a problem.

There are 8 programmable buttons on the mouse, which you can configure to do just about anything – there’s 512 kilobytes of on-board storage, so you can save three different configurations to the mouse itself using the included Cougar UIX. Again, you can set the multicolor backlight system to show a different color depending on which profile you’ve got set up, meaning you can always know at a glance which settings you’re using.

Both devices will be available in the UK and Germany in December; Americans will have to wait until the first quarter of 2016. Prices have not been announced, but if the product numbers correspond to price-point they’ll probably both be in the $45-$60 range.

Editors' Recommendations

Justin Pot
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Justin's always had a passion for trying out new software, asking questions, and explaining things – tech journalism is the…
Playing PC games on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop made me a believer
A reference Snapdragon X Elite Laptop running Steam

There's a lot of promise with the upcoming wave of laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip. I've already seen plenty of benchmarks that prove Qualcomm is onto something huge, with the GPU and NPU performance of the chip being quite powerful. Benchmarks have even shown that it can be double as fast as Intel's latest Arc graphics in the Core Ultra chips.

But those are just benchmarks in simulated scenarios. I really wanted to see it to believe it, and recently, at an event in New York, I did just that. I spent some hands-on time with reference laptops running the Snapdragon X Elite.

Read more
This upcoming PC game brings Lego building to the real-time strategy genre
cataclismo preview 4

When asked about his inspiration for Cataclismo, Game Director Vicent Ramirez has a simple reply: "Legos."

Digital Sun, a studio based in Spain, is best known for its work on action games Moonlighter and The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story. The studio had been working on multiple projects for a while now, including Cataclismo. The upcoming indie mimics gameplay seen in classic real-time strategy games that built the genre, like Starcraft, but it also features a brick-by-brick building mechanic that really looks to define the game.

Read more
Dragon’s Dogma 2 PC performance: best settings, crashing, stuttering
An archer fires an arrow at an enemy in Dragon's Dogma 2.

I had high hopes for Dragon's Dogma 2. Capcom has hit a few stumbles on PC over its last several releases, but the resilient RE Engine that's behind its slate of titles has always shined through. The highly scalable engine is what allows Street Fighter 6 and Resident Evil 4 to run on everything from an RTX 4090 down to a Steam Deck, and it's what squeezes playable frame rates out of Monster Hunter Rise on hardware as weak as the Nintendo Switch.

The RE Engine looks terrible in Dragon's Dogma 2, however. I can verify that the game does indeed slam your CPU hard, bringing even the most powerful PC hardware to its knees with no recourse in the graphics options. Over the past several years, the RE Engine has cemented itself as one of the most stable, scalable game engines around, but Dragon's Dogma 2 challenges that narrative in a big way.
Even the best settings for Dragon's Dogma 2 struggle

Read more