Ultra Light Wireless Gaming Mouse – Glorious Model D- Wireless Review
If you are after an ultra light gaming mouse, that’s also wireless, your options are generally pretty limited – those two features don’t often go hand in hand as adding a wireless module, battery and charging circuitry all add weight over just using a cable. But, conversely, they actually go really well together as the mix of a lightweight mouse you can flick around like mad, and a wire-free one that won’t ever get caught or tangled while you flickshot like a pro, it’s a great time.
So, is this, the Glorious Model D- Wireless the answer? Well yes, but also no. Let me explain. First, the specs. This thing weighs in at just 67g, features a custom “BAMF” sensor that Glorious made in conjunction with PixArt, custom mouse switches, 1000Hz wireless connectivity, and up to 71 hours of battery life. That’s pretty crazy, although does depend on the RGB lighting brightness and usage.
As we’ve come to expect from many ultra-light mice, the Model D- is absolutely full of holes – hexagons specifically – which help reduce the weight, although remarkably it still feels pretty well constructed. It doesn’t feel like it wants to crumble in my hands, and can take a fair bit of force before showing any signs of give. I do have a couple of problems with it though. The first isn’t too big of a deal, it’s just the two side buttons which aren’t quite perfectly supported so if you tend to mash these buttons mid-game you might find they squish in a little more than you’d like.
The other issue is a bit more fundamental, and that’s with the material choice. It’s a nice high quality plastic – which is great – but it’s also smooth and incredibly slippy. I’ve dropped this thing more times than I’ve dropped all of the other products I’ve reviewed, combined, just while testing and filming this video. It even slipped out of my hand once or twice while playing which is incredibly frustrating. I know they didn’t go with rubber grips or anything to save weight – that’s fine – but if they made at least the lower sections a rougher more textured pattern it’d be much easier to keep a good grip.
Part of that might also come from the fact this is the D-, the smaller version which is suited for small to medium hands, and I’m fairly certain I’m more in the large category. I could claw-grip this reasonably well, but palm-gripping is verging on uncomfortable. My ring and pinkie fingers don’t have much space to rest (or grip), and it definitely feels small in my hand. Of course this is easily remedied – don’t buy the D- if you have larger hands, buy the standard Model D instead.
Beyond the immediate size issues for me, the profile feels pretty good. It’s shaped well to be well suited to pretty much any grip style you like, and the two side buttons are positioned nicely so they are out of the way of your regular grip position but still close enough to easily hit them mid-firefight, and easy to know which you are pressing too.
As for that sensor and it’s gaming performance, I had a pretty great time with it. I generally used it with lower DPI settings and it tracked very well even with really fast sweeps and lots of lift-off. I felt pretty confident with it, and it’s low weight made it more feasible for me to leave it on a lower DPI and move it more which aids in accuracy as you effectively have a larger margin for error in your hand movement. That lighter weight should also help make longer gaming sessions less tiring, or at very least let you maintain a good level of performance for longer.
When it comes to the customizability, through the Glorious Core desktop app, you can configure the usual RGB settings, button mappings and a few mouse-specific things like the four DPI options, the liftoff distance and the polling rate. The DPI options are nice and easy on a slider, and you can even customise what colour the RGB LED on the bottom turns to show which mode you are on. Liftoff distance can either be set to 1 mm or 2 mm, with 1 mm being default, and the polling rate can be changed between the usual 125 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz and 1000 Hz.
You also get an interesting setting called “Debounce Delay” – debouncing is the process where the controller basically ignores any inputs until the switch has reached a steady-state (either on or off). Normally this delay is hard-coded, so it’s interesting to see it available to control like this. By default it is set to 10ms, although you can set it to 0 if you’d prefer, and interestingly their tool-tip wording implies they are doing it the same way Corsair now does by registering the first signal the control receives then ignores any further pulses for however long you set here, rather than wait the prescribed time then register the input. That should aid in lowering input latency, although using optical switches like Razer would remove that issue entirely.
One little note, if you go to the settings page you’ll find the option to turn the RGB lighting off after some amount of inactivity – by default that seems to be switched off, personally if you aren’t going to disable the lighting outright to conserve battery life I would suggest setting this to something like two minutes. Also, to check if your mouse needs a firmware update you have to click the “Retry firmware update” text, rather than have something pop up to say it needs one. Minor detail but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Since I mentioned battery life I should note that while the claimed rating is “up to 71 hours”, I would think with the rgb lights on, plus standby time, I would expect a bit less than that although still a good few days to a week of gaming before it needs charging and thanks to the comb on the included soft almost string like braided cable you can just plug it in and keep using it if you want. You even get a little extender block for the USB receiver which the same cable clips into so you can keep the cable handy and the dongle in line of sight of the mouse.
So, it sounds like a great option, but what’s the catch? We’ll, not too much really. The price might be a sticking point for some, selling for £90 at the time of filming (although the larger Model D is £82 instead), but if you compare that to logitech’s G Pro x superlight, that seems to go for around £110 right now, and even the regular G Pro Wireless is in the £85 – 100 range, and weighs 80g instead of 67g. Personally I would definitely go for the larger, although identically weighted, Model D rather than the D-, but I do really like it. The freedom of no cables mixed with lightweight makes for an excellent gaming experience, especially for fast paced, rapid motion games. This definitely gets a decent recommendation from me, especially if you were already considering the G Pro Wireless or superlight.
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TechteamGB Score
