The best gaming mouse in 2024 Buying Guide

If you regularly play games on a PC, a good mouse will give you greater control over your cursor, add a few more buttons you can customize to your liking and generally make your downtime more comfortable. In competitive games, the best gaming mouse won’t magically make you unstoppable, but the faster response time and extra inputs should make for a more pleasurable and responsive experience.

The best gaming mouse for you will ultimately be a matter of preference — how well its shape fits your hand and how well its feature set suits your particular gaming needs. Over the past several months, though, we set out to find a few options for PC gaming that might fit the bill, be they for FPSes, MMOs or anything in between. After researching dozens of mice, testing around 20, and playing countless hours of Overwatch, CS: GO, Halo Infinite and Final Fantasy XIV (among others), here’s what we’ve found, with some general buying advice on top.

What to look for in a gaming mouse

Wired vs. wireless

Buying a wireless gaming mouse used to mean sacrificing a certain level of responsiveness, but thankfully, that’s no longer the case. Over the last few years, wireless connectivity has improved to the point where the difference in latency between a good wireless model and a tried-and-true wired gaming mouse is barely perceptible.

Note, however, that we’re strictly talking about mice that use a 2.4GHz connection (over a USB dongle), not Bluetooth. Many of the best wireless gaming mouse models support both connection options, which is great for travel, but Bluetooth’s latency is generally too high to be reliable for gaming.

Going wireless still has other trade-offs, too. Battery life is improving all the time, but with their higher performance demands and RGB lighting, most wireless gaming mice usually don’t last as long as “normal” wireless models. You shouldn’t expect more than a few days of power from a rechargeable gaming mouse you use regularly. Some gaming mice offer wireless charging too, which makes things a bit easier. Good wireless gaming mice usually come at a much higher cost than their wired counterparts as well.

That’s not to say the premium is never worth it: Who wants yet another cable on their desk? You may need a wireless model if you hate the feel of “cable drag” or if your gaming PC is located in an awkward spot. Many wireless gaming mice come with a cable you can hook up in a pinch as well. But if price is any sort of concern, a good wired mouse is usually a better value.

Comfort and grip types

Everyone’s hands are different, so at the end of the day, calling one mouse “more comfortable” than another is mostly subjective. Ensuring your comfort is the most essential step when buying any mouse, though, so we’ve done our best to consider how each device we tested works with smaller, average-sized and larger hands alike.

We also considered how each device accommodates the three grip styles most people use while holding a mouse: palm, fingertip and claw. As a refresher, a palm grip is when your whole hand rests on the mouse, with your fingers resting flat on the main buttons. A fingertip grip is when you steer the mouse solely with the tips of your fingers, with your palm not in contact with the device at all. A claw grip is when your palm only touches the back edge of the mouse, with your fingers arched in a claw-like shape toward the buttons.

In general, most people use a palm grip, which tends to offer the greatest sense of control — though, depending on the size of your hand, you may need your mouse to be a specific length to use it comfortably. A fingertip grip can allow for more rapid movements, while a claw grip is something of a balance between the two. Switch and Click has a good breakdown if you’d like a bit more detail, but we’ll note below if a mouse isn’t well-suited for a particular grip style. For what it’s worth, yours truly is a claw gripper most of the time.

Build quality and design

A good gaming mouse feels sturdy and won’t flex or creak when used strenuously. We valued mice without any overly sharp angles or grooves that could be awkward for most people to hold. And while most gaming mice have plastic exteriors, not all plastic is created equal, so we looked for finishes that were smooth, not too slick and capable of withstanding the sweaty palms that often come with competitive gaming sessions.

The gaming mouse market is mostly split between two design styles: ergonomic and ambidextrous. Ergonomic mice are almost always made with right-handed users in mind and often feature dedicated thumb rests. Ambidextrous mice are more symmetrical and designed to be used with either hand (though they may not have extra buttons on both sides). Whether an ergonomic or ambidextrous gaming mouse works best for you is largely a matter of personal preference.

A gaming mouse’s feet, meanwhile, should provide a consistent glide and reduce the friction between your mouse and mouse pad beneath it as much as possible. For the best performance, look for feet made from PTFE (aka Teflon). All feet will eventually wear down, but many mice come with spares, and most manufacturers sell replacements if needed.

As for flashy RGB lighting, it’s a nice bonus, but little more than that. Still, if you’ve already kitted out your setup with RGB, having a mouse with adjustable lighting effects can add to the gaming experience (and more consumer tech could stand to do things for pleasure’s sake). More practically, some mice let you assign custom lighting settings to separate profiles, which can make it easier to see which one you’re currently using.

Weight

Gaming mice have gotten lighter and lighter in recent years, with some models we tested weighing as little as 45 grams. Your mouse doesn’t need to be that light — anything under 80g is still fairly low, and it’s not like a 100g mouse feels like an anchor. Regardless, a lightweight mouse makes it easier to pull off repeated fast movements, with less inertia. That said, some players still enjoy a little bit of bulk in their gaming mouse (relatively speaking), especially with games that aren’t as reliant on twitchy reactions.

To reach those lightest weights, some manufacturers have released gaming mice with “honeycomb”-style designs, which come with several cutouts in the outer shell. These mice can still perform great, but having a bunch of holes that expose the internal circuit board to possible sweat, dust and detritus isn’t the best for long-term durability. We generally avoid recommending models with this design as a result.

Switches, buttons and scroll wheel

A growing number of gaming mice use optical switches instead of mechanical ones. Since these involve fewer bits making physical contact, they should generally be more durable and less prone to unwanted “double-clicks” over time. Mice with mechanical switches still have plenty of merit, but they carry a little more long-term risk in a vacuum.

Since most people will use their gaming mouse as their mouse-mouse, we valued models whose main buttons have a softer feel when pressed, with enough travel to make inadvertent actuations less frequent. But even this is a matter of preference: You may want lighter buttons if you play games that call for constant clicking. Also, we looked to testing from sites like Rtings to ensure each mouse we recommend has a sufficiently low click latency, meaning your clicks will register with minimal lag.

Beyond the standard click panels, a good gaming mouse should also have programmable buttons for quick macros or shortcuts. For most games, shoot for at least two extra buttons on the thumb side panel that are easy to reach and difficult to press by accident. Lots of mice have more buttons, which can be a plus, but not if they force you to contort your fingers to avoid hitting them. For MMO mice, having at least 12 side buttons is preferable in order to access as many hotbar commands as possible.

As for the scroll wheel, it should have distinct, ratcheted “steps” that aren’t too resistant but make it clear when you’ve actually scrolled. Its texture should be grippy, and it shouldn’t make a distracting amount of noise when used. The wheel should also be clickable, giving you another input to customize for certain games (e.g., to control the zoom on a sniper rifle).

Sensors and performance

Some are more proficient than others, but generally speaking, the optical sensors built into most modern gaming mice are more than fast and accurate enough for most people’s needs.

While shopping for gaming mice, you’ll see a number of terms related to sensor performance. To be clear, a gaming mouse’s responsiveness doesn’t come down to just one spec. But for clarity’s sake, here’s a rundown of the more noteworthy jargon:

• DPI, or dots per inch, is a measure of a mouse’s sensitivity. The higher the DPI setting, the more your cursor will move with every inch you move the mouse itself. Many of the best gaming mice advertise extremely high DPIs that top out above 20,000 or 30,000, but that’s largely marketing fluff: Few people play above 3,000, with 800 a common sweet spot. This concept is also referred to as CPI (counts per inch), which is probably the more accurate term, though DPI is used more often.
• IPS, or inches per second, refers to the maximum velocity a mouse sensor supports. The higher the IPS, the faster you can move the mouse before it becomes incapable of tracking motions correctly.
• Acceleration goes with IPS. In this context, it refers to how many Gs a mouse can withstand before it starts to track inaccurately.
• Polling rate is a measure of how often a mouse tells a computer where it is. In general, the more frequently your mouse reports information to your PC, the more predictable its response time should be. Anything at 500Hz or above is fine for gaming. The current standard, and likely the sweet spot for most, is 1,000Hz. Many newer mice can go well beyond that, but the returns start to diminish unless you play on a monitor with a particularly high refresh rate.
• Lift-off distance is the height at which a mouse’s sensor stops tracking the surface below it. Many competitive players like this to be as low as possible in order to avoid unintended cursor movements while repositioning their mouse.

Software and onboard memory

It doesn’t take long to find horror stories about bugs and other niggling issues caused by gaming mouse software, so the ideal app is one that doesn’t force you to use it all the time. It should let you adjust as many of the aspects above as possible, ideally to several distinct profiles. Preferably, you can save your settings directly to the mouse itself, letting you pick your customizations back up on another device without having to redownload any software. All this is most important on Windows, but Mac compatibility is always good to have, too.

Warranty and customer support

Most major gaming mice brands offer warranties between one and three years. The longer and more extensive a manufacturer’s program is, the better. This is the case with most consumer tech, but we note it here because the gaming mouse market is particularly flush with products from less-than-household names, many of which you may see hyped up on YouTube, Reddit or elsewhere around the web. A bunch of these more obscure mice are genuinely great, but if you ever buy from a more niche brand, it’s worth checking that some level of customer support is in place. We’ve made sure our picks for the best gaming mice aren’t riddled with an abnormal amount of poor user reviews.