Ultra Lightweight Gaming Mouse – MCHOSE L7 Pro 39g 8,000 Hz

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the lightest weight mouse I have ever used. It weighs an astonishing 39 grams. Seriously, this whole wireless gaming mouse weighs 38 percent less than a G Pro X Superlight. This isn’t feather-weight, it’s phantom-weight. It may as well not exist! And yet, it does, so let’s take a look at this thing and see just what you get for your 39 grams – spoiler, it’s both quite a lot, and nothing at all. 

This little thing has quite a flat profile, making it great for palm or claw gripping, and larger hands can fingertip grip it if you’d prefer. I’d say this is a good fit for most hand sizes, with a slight preference towards medium to small, at least for palm grip. Despite its diminutive size, I found it pretty comfortable. It’s no ergo mouse, nor does it have all that much space for your ring and pinky fingers, but the nice soft finish on the plastic shell makes it actually pretty easy to keep a hold off – well that and the fact it weighs practically nothing. I found my fairly large hands to be a little too big to comfortably palm grip it, although my usual claw style worked just fine. You of course get two buttons on the side, which considering just how minimalist this thing is, they are remarkably well supported. They don’t feel amazing, but they are placed well and easy enough to hit, plus are mechanical switches making for at least a good click. 

The main switches are OMRON optical switches, which should make for excellent latency – especially coupled with the 8,000 hertz polling rate – although we’ll come back to that shortly. The clicks actually have a bit of a unique sound, likely thanks to the incredibly thin shell, and depending on how you hold it feels more like a silent switch than anything. Speaking of that shell, you might be wondering just how fragile a 39 gram mouse actually is, and surprisingly the answer is… not that fragile. The bottom plate – where you’ll find both the power switch for toggling between off, 2.4GHz and Bluetooth, and the DPI button and indicator, feels like it’ll cave in with a slight breeze, but the main shell is remarkably solid. There really isn’t much give when squeezing the sides, and even pushing down from the top it doesn’t feel like it wasn’t to pancake, so yeah it’s remarkably sturdy. 

Coming back to that point about latency, naturally since I developed the open source latency testing tool, I used that to see just how fast this thing is, and much to my surprised running both wirelessly AND wired, both at 8,000 hertz, this was the slowest mouse I’ve ever tested at around 10 milliseconds. The Glorious mice I’ve tested recently are near-on 2 milliseconds, and even the new DeathAdder V3 Hyperspeed – without it’s 8KHZ dongle – is under 3 milliseconds on average, so for this to be basically bang on 10 milliseconds, I thought there was something I was missing. The L7 does come with configuration software, complete with a couple of interesting options. The most suspicious is “game safe mode”, which apparently helps the mouse not show up as a ‘suspicious device’ to games. Interesting… The other one though is “E-sports mode”. I’ve had that on for my testing here, as you’d have to imagine enabling it gives you the best results, right? Well I thought it was worth testing without that – and separately without the game safe mode on either. I even tested at 1,000 hertz just in case, and unfortunately it was all for naught. With the esports mode off latency shot up to 15 milliseconds, game safe seems to add a millisecond, and strangely enough the wired 1KHz test result was actually the fastest at 9.5 milliseconds, and a very tight grouping. So, as best as I can tell, this mouse is between three and five times slower than the other similar mice I’ve tested recently. Luckily the sensor isn’t affected by this, as my new mouse move test shows just 3 milliseconds of latency between starting to move the mouse and the cursor moving. That’s decent. 

Speaking of the sensor, that is the trusty PixArt PAW3395 with 26,000 DPI maximum, 50Gs of acceleration and 650 inches per second for tracking. If you’ve used any mouse with this sensor fitted, you’ll know it’s great. It tracks well even with fast motion, so that’s solid. The mouse itself glides well too – the fairly large PTFE pads front, back, and surrounding the sensor make sure of that. For actually gaming with it, unsurprisingly it feels great. I’m nowhere near talented enough to notice the difference between 2 and 10 milliseconds of click latency, and honestly if I had to guess there might be something in where you actually press the switch too, so to me it feels perfectly fine. I even tried comparing it to the Glorious Series 2 which was also running wirelessly at 8Khz, and I can’t say I could notice a difference. I knew what I was looking for so maybe I could convince myself I could feel the slightest difference, but I think that’s just confirmation bias. For a normie like me this felt fine. The sensor tracks well even with fast flicks, and at low DPI. 

The biggest selling point though is likely its price tag. This is retailing for just £40.74, or $52. That is incredibly cheap compared to all the other light weight high polling rate mice on the market. They are normally £80 to £120, so for this to be literally half the price, well unless you are an actual esports pro I think the latency results shouldn’t stop you from picking this thing up. Hell, for £3 more you can get the L7 Ultra with the newer PixArt PAW3950 sensor in – and even in a very nice sky blue colour too. Seriously, for this price tag I’m finding it hard to argue anything other than this seems like a great value, even if it isn’t the best lightweight gaming mouse on the market. It might be one of the lightest though, and certainly feature-rich despite the lacking weight.