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Overview

• Sensor: ATG-4090 (PMW3325)

• Main clicks: Huano 50M (Blue shell, blue dot) but DareU branded

  • Side buttons: Huano red dot

  • DPI button: Huano red dot

  • Middle click: Huano red dot

• Scroll wheel encoder: TTC Black Core 12mm

• Weight: 92 grams

  • Without cable: 88 grams

• Dimensions: 120.5mm x 39mm x 64.5mm

  • Grip width: 58mm

  • Button width: around 28mm

  • Button height:

    • Right mouse button: 16.5mm at the front, 25.5mm at the scroll wheel

    • Left mouse button: 17.5mm at the front, 27mm at the scroll wheel

  • Base length: 111mm

Taste the rainbow!

First Look

At a glance the Dare-U EM908 is an asymmetrical mouse on the smaller side of medium with a quite distinctive, non-safe, shape.

Dare-U is a brand that you don’t often hear in the Western market but the company behind it, DongGuan Togran Electronic Co., Ltd. has done OEM mice for more well-known western brands like Sharkoon and Trust.

For some reason Togran seems to have a propensity towards strange sensors, this mouse features the ATG-4090 (more on it later) and another mouse they OEM (Speedlink Ledos) uses the even weirder ProSens W8305S (which is just an A3050). (Togran Website)

I bought the mouse off AliExpress (like all good mice) and paid a grand total of 13 EUR for it, shipped.

Build & weight

The mouse itself is not that well built, there is no creaking but there is some flexing in the sides near the RGB diffuser, squeezing doesn’t actuate the side buttons however, there is also some rattle when shaking the mouse, but unlike is common it doesn’t originate from the scroll wheel but from the main buttons that have some vertical play in them, there is no major horizontal play in the buttons however.

The weight of the mouse is quite heavy for its size, sitting at 92 grams, the weight sits mostly in the top shell but the mouse is not back or front heavy. The weight isn’t great but a comparable mouse from a comparable time, the Kone Pure Owl-Eye weighs 89 grams which was light at the time, for a mouse designed in 2018 it’s not heavy or light, but these days, it’s on the heavier side for sure.

Quite far from Ultralight

Shape

The shape of the mouse is quite weird, the most noticeable thing for me was the fact that the widest point is shared between the back and front, both of them being about the same width, causing the mouse to feel quite narrow as there is no “ass” at the back of the mouse to sit your fingers against, just the indents in the sides of the mouse. The indents on the side of the mouse are also relatively shallow, especially for an ergo/asymmetrical mouse, although they are more pronounced than the base might make them seem because the mouse narrows towards the top and back.

Base view

This contrasts the taller height of the mouse (at least to me), as you’d expect something with less aggressive sides to be targeted towards grips that might be suited by a lower hump, add to this the fact that the hump is also centered and not backwards facing (which is more traditionally associated with claw grips), so the question is, what grip is this for? Maybe a small hand palm, however I personally opted for a Pincer Claw (as pretty much always) but this time with higher contact, especially with my fingers, while placing my fingers further towards the front of the mouse instead of curled back. This gives me more stability but less precise control.

Side view

Back view

I’ve quite often seen the shape compared to a smaller G403 (moreso the newer DareU A960, which as far as I can tell has the same shape), I don’t really feel like this is fair as the mouse doesn’t feel anything like the G403 in hand (to me), the right side is the biggest discrepancy but the hump placement and slope is also much different.

Clicks & scroll

The main clicks use DareU branded Huano 50M switches (blue shell, blue dot) which tend to be on the stiffer side with high tactility, this doesn’t entirely ring true for the EM908 as it sits more so in the middle stiffness wise in my personal collection of mice (around the Endgame Gear XM1 v1 for comparison) but it does have the high tactility associated with the switches, the clicks are very nice in my opinion, low pre-travel and very low post-travel for a mouse without separated clicks. In my experience Huano switches are really dependent on shell design to get a decent click feel, and with this mouse they did a pretty good job, the main problem the clicks have is as I stated before, the vertical movement, it’s a bit worse on my right click which causes my right click to feel a bit loose or flimsy but when you click you don’t notice this at all.

Main clicks and middle mouse button click

The side buttons are not so nice, they both have a lot of pre-travel and vertical movement, especially the front side button has a lot of vertical movement. The DPI button is better, still has pre-travel but is less loose and has very low post-travel. The middle mouse button is relatively light and uses a full size switch (instead of a tactile one), which is a plus in my book because it allows more repairability and choice in click feel than tactile switches.

Extra button switches (All Huano Red)

The scroll wheel uses a TTC Black Core (12mm), I’m not a fan of this encoder in most mice as it lacks tactility and scrolls quite light (both things I don’t like), this is the same on this mouse, there is quite some play between the steps as well, which causes the whole experience of scrolling to be not so great.

Good old TTC Black Core

Cable & skates

The mouse uses a rubber cable which is almost extraordinarily thick, to the point that it doesn’t fit properly in my Camade bungee (it does fit on the top piece but not the bottom), the cable is not very flexible but not stiff either, it’s more common to see a braided cable at this price point because companies will use that as a selling point so I was pleasantly surprised to see a rubber cable that is more flexible than most braided cables used here.

The skates are your standard black low-purity PTFE skates, they are relatively thick but unrounded with an adhesive that decided to stay behind on the mouse with the first opening, even when heating the skates, so I had to replace the skates almost immediately, glide was okay though.

Internals

The mouse is quite simple to open, having 3 screws in total, 1 under the back skate and 1 under each front skate. Once inside the side button PCB is connected with a single 4 pin cable in a 5 pin JST connector.

Full PCB view

The mouse uses an EVision VS09M19A (no spec sheet or anything available) which is a chip in a family of chips mostly used in cheaper mice and which tends to have issues and bad software/firmware associated with it (more on that later).

EVision VS09M19A MCU

The sensor is marked ATG-4090 and has the same package as other 332x line sensors.

The ATG-4090

Performance & software

This is where things really get interesting; the performance & software of this mouse are a total mess. The main problem is that the mouse seemingly cannot do any polling rate except 1000hz, if you choose a lower polling rate in the software it will do something that I’ve never seen before where instead of sending 1 poll every 8ms (on 125hz as an example) it will send 1 normal poll and then 7 polls of the mouse not moving, 250hz is 1 normal poll and then 3 empty ones etc.

“125hz” as seen in MouseTester

500hz in mousetester

The software itself is also a mess, the polling rate selector is broken, all the options are shifted by one so to speak, so 125hz is the 1000hz setting and so on, on top of this the mouse doesn’t actually save the RGB settings onboard, so everytime you close the software the RGB resets to default (static rainbow ring + purple logo).

The sensor claims a max speed of 150 IPS, from my testing this seems accurate as it spins out at around 4 m/s (155-160 IPS), I observed no change in this with different DPI settings.

Max speed

Click latency is also bad, something that is quite common occurs here too, where click latency and debouncing are directly related, so to have any semblance of a decent amount of debouncing click latency suffers, because of the fact that this mouse uses an EVision chip you can’t test click latency properly (by hooking it up to another mouse directly) but bump testing puts click latency at around 17ms to the Ikari Optical (around 18.5ms to real time when comparing to Nvidia Reflex), and debouncing is around 17ms as well but so inconsistent it’s hard to give a good number.

Conclusion

Physically the mouse is quite solid especially for the low price tag, but it has some of the strangest sensor performance I’ve personally seen and a pretty high click latency, the only reason I’d buy this mouse would be to try the shape before buying the newer (and lighter) DareU A960.

Full album of pics: (includes individual weights of parts) Imgur: The magic of the Internet