Many of you have sent me PMs and e-mails asking how this compares to the original. Well, you are in luck because I was able to directly compare the two over the last few weeks. The main differences I have already pointed out. It should be noted that during its original manufacturing process, the IME 3.0 went through several revisions. For those of you who followed these revisions, I am comparing the newly updated IME 3.0 to an IME 3.0 X08 revision. I have no idea what this means as I am not sure of the revision history, but I thought it should be noted. The side buttons on this update are very similar if not slightly stiffer than the original I compared it to. They are easily pressed, but not so much that it could happen accidentally. Placement and resistance is key in this department and I believe that both were more than adequate. In addition, the plastic used for this update seems to be of a higher quality. When directly comparing, the build quality on the update seems much higher.

Lastly, the drivers packaged with the mouse are Microsoft's IntelliPoint 6.0. With these brand new drivers come a few features that were't a part of the original drivers. Among these new features are Precision Boost, button customization, Gaming Toggle, and Instant Viewer. Precision Boost is a tool you can assign to one button that will slow your mouse to a percentage of the normal pointer speed. This percentage is set when you enable the feature in the driver menu. This will allow you to reduce your pointer speed at the touch of a button while using a long range weapon versus close range weapons.Intellipoint provides the ability to customize the buttons by allowing you to bind them to windows commands, macros, keystrokes, start programs, or any of the aforementioned features. Also, while not a gaming features, the Instant Viewer is very cool. With the touch of a button, you can view all open windows in a table layout with a screenshot of each window and then click on one to proceed. Think of it as an advanced Alt-Tab function. As usual, the drivers are well developed and feature rich.