Monitor manufacturer AOC is getting into the gaming peripheral business, starting with a line of mice and keyboards. The more expensive and feature-rich of its first two mice, the Agon AGM700 ($39.99), is a classic first-person shooter (FPS) mouse. It has some of the specialty features you’d expect to find on a flagship mouse, such as customizable weight-tuning and a bright red sniper button, for a budget price that’s generally reserved for no-frills esports mice. But though it looks like a diamond in the rough, some notable flaws keep AOC’s debut from shining.
Push-to-Headshot
The Agon AGM700 is a right-handed eight-button mouse. On top are two click panels and a scroll wheel, plus two buttons in the center column: one for cycling through DPI presets, and one for cycling through the three onboard mouse profiles, with RGB lights to indicate your selections.
On the left side, you have the usual Back and Forward buttons and the under-thumb sniper button, the signature feature of FPS mice. By default, pressing and holding the sniper button dramatically decreases your mouse sensitivity to allow for fine precision adjustments on the fly, like lining up your reticle just before a headshot.
Measuring 1.47 by 2.5 by 5 inches (HWD), the Agon AGM700 has a straightforward shape with some subtle weaknesses. The hump guides your fingers into a comfortable grip but fails to properly support your palm, as the base drops off sharply at the very bottom of the mouse, leaving part of your hand hanging and your wrist pointing down.
I’m also not a huge fan of how the mouse looks. It features a smooth black base panel and two silver click panels textured to look like brushed aluminum. The sides have a grippy texture that makes the bright red sniper button look out of place. Some elements—particularly the red button—can be made to feel less out of place with complementary RGB lighting, but overall, the mouse looks like a hodgepodge of parts thrown together without a strong aesthetic direction.
Those issues are only skin deep. Under the surface, the Agon AGM700 has strong components, including a PixArt PWM3389 sensor, which can track at up to 16,000dpi and stays accurate at up to 400 inches per second. It also features Omron mouse switches that are rated to last through 50 million clicks, which is standard for premium gaming mice.
As a final flourish, the AGM700 also features weight-tuning. In a storage compartment on the underside of the mouse, you’ll find five cylindrical 5-gram weights that you can remove and shift around to change the mouse’s heft and balance. Weight-tuning has become a relatively obscure feature in recent years. In the esports era, gamers want their mice to weigh as little as possible, so the notion of adding or removing mass feels moot. The AGM700 weighs 4.41 ounces with the weights in; versus most gaming mice, that’s extremely heavy. Unless you really like a mouse with heft, you’ll probably just take the weights out, bringing the mouse’s weight down to a more reasonable 3.42 ounces.
Rusty G-Tools
Though AOC is a new player in the mouse game, its Windows-based configuration app, G Tools, looks surprisingly dated. The single-screen app has no frills. It gives you quick, direct access to tools for remapping buttons, creating macros, adjusting DPI presets, and changing RGB lighting, without the flourishes found in the configuration apps such as Razer Synapse and Corsair iCue.
For example, the picture of the mouse in the app isn’t interactive. You change mouse functions with a series of drop-down menus, rather than by clicking on the buttons you’d like to remap. That lack of polish makes some configurations much more challenging—for example, you can’t see proposed adjustments to your RGB lighting pattern onscreen—and the app’s aesthetic just isn’t appealing.
It also has a very limited capacity for making custom mouse profiles. The Agon AGM700 can store three onboard profiles, which is fewer than average but more than you’d expect from a budget mouse. The app itself can only swap among five profiles total. If you want to have more, you’ll need to export them and stash them on your PC until you need them. This is a significant hurdle if you want to make special profiles for many games.
If at First You Don’t Succeed…
AOC could have been conservative with the Agon AGM700, but instead opted to swing hard and fall short. There are plenty of great mice in this price range, including the HyperX Pulsefire Haste and the Glorious Model O, but most are very simple five- or six-button designs without special features, for good reason. There are some good choices in the AGM700, enough to suggest that AOC could become a strong mousemaker in time, but as a whole, it doesn’t quite hang together.
