Testing the CHEAPEST Gaming Mouse On Amazon!

This is the cheapest gaming mouse I could find on Amazon, delivered by Prime anyway – at just £8.47 this isn’t exactly a ‘premium’ device, in fact, it’s very far from it. But I still want to see what the mouse thousands of people are buying, what the cheapest gaming mouse on Amazon has to offer. Let’s get into it and find out! First, semantics. There are cheaper mice on Amazon, £8.47 seems like luxury compare to them, but I wanted a ‘gaming mouse’. Something that says that in the title, that has at least some gaming related prowess, and this Lycander Gaming Mouse ticks all those boxes. This lists up to 6400 DPI, 7 buttons, a 1.5 metre cable, and an optical sensor. All good signs, right? Well…

Right out the box it’s obvious this thing is cheap. I mean hell, the box itself only lists three main selling points, “DPI 6400”, “Optical Sensor” and “GAMING Precision”. Yikes. The plastics here are that kind of cheap kids toy plastic with a soft touch coating you know will disintegrate into a black gluey mess with a month of use, and it’s… It’s weirdly heavy. Like, way too heavy for this kind of plastic and construction, yet it feels hollow and empty. Dropping it on my rather accurate scales reveals a pretty hefty 100.21 grams – that’s a lot for a gaming mouse. 

Looking on the bottom where you’d usually find some specs or branding, you get nothing. The sensor itself looks fine at first glance, although plugging it in reveals a red LED shining. For those that don’t know, modern, high quality, mouse sensors use infrared LEDs built into the sensor package, meaning you can’t see any light coming from the sensor. These are much more accurate and have less interference from external light sources, so to see red light means this is the absolute bottom of the barrel decade-old sensor tech I guess you’d expect for a mouse that cost less than a tenner. We’ll come back to the sensor in a moment, for now I want to mention those PTFE skates. See, right out the box they glide terribly. Notchy, crunch, whatever you want to call it, it’s dreadful. I thought that was just the mouse, until I started taking them off to take a look inside this thing, and I realised THEY HAVE A FILM OVER TOP. YOU NEED TO REMOVE THE FILM IF YOU BUY THIS MOUSE! That is the single biggest – actually no second biggest – improvement you can do to this thing to make it as close to manageable as possible. Please, remove the film.

We should talk about the shape. It’s a pretty large mouse. I’ve got fairly large hands and it’s comfortable for me. I mean, it isn’t the most comfortable I’ve used or anything, but it’s fine. It’s pretty long and not super tall – although isn’t totally flat either. You’ll likely want to palm or claw grip it, fingertip is technically possible but not super comfortable. The sides have these strakes, although aren’t overly grippy. At least there’s a decent amount of space to hold onto. There are two side buttons that amazingly aren’t the worst. They’re a little mushy, but good enough. Of course there’s the left and right clicks which feel fine enough, the scroll wheel which feels pretty dreadful, and two buttons behind that. You might think they are DPI up and down, but actually only the front of the two cycles through the non-adjustable DPI steps. The back one changes the pointless RGB lighting mode. Again it just cycles through a few options. 

Taking a peek inside is very revealing. For some reason these cheap mice all seem to think more weight means it’s more premium, so they jam a roughly cut block of aluminium or steel in there – and this one is no different. There it is, screwed into the top side of the shell. If you want to dramatically improve this thing, the second best thing you can do is remove this stupid thing. Looking at the circuit board, amazingly they actually use HUANO switches here, which aren’t complete trash, but my god the sensor is. This is a SPCP-199, which depending on where you look seems to limited to 125Hz, 10 inches per second tracking and 20G of acceleration. For context, a good sensor today is something like 650 inches per second and 50G acceleration. The most important figure there is the tracking speed – at just 10 inches per second it’s actually really easy to overwhelm this sensor, something I found while gaming with it. Any fast movement is enough to get the mouse to stop tracking, which can be an infuriating experience – imagine seeing an enemy, moving the mouse to click on their head, and nothing happens. You don’t move. You’re done. That’s rough.

That’s kind of the experience gaming with this. Oh, and as if that isn’t bad enough, the 125Hz polling rate is truly awful. If you have a 144Hz monitor, your monitor updates more frequently than your damn mouse. That’s really, really bad. That means even moving around on the desktop is a jittery mess, let alone in game. This isn’t a good experience. The click latency is genuinely awful too, taking 24 millisecond on average to report a click. For context, that is nearly TWO AND A HALF TIMES SLOWER than the slowest mouse I’ve tested so far, and that one itself was an outlier. Any respectable gaming mouse is basically an order of magnitude faster. This thing loses you fights. 

Overall I think it’s pretty clear I have a dim view of this thing. Sure, it’s cheap, but that’s about all it has going for it. It isn’t comfortable to play with especially with that stupid weight inside it, the sensor wasn’t good a decade ago and hasn’t aged like wine, and the click latency is enough to put anyone off on its own. This is not a good gaming mouse – hell it isn’t even a good mouse in general. The only recommendation I can give for this thing is to steer clear – do not buy this. Logitech’s G203 can be had for under £20 regularly and is way, way better. It’s an actually usable gaming mouse with a decent sensor, reasonable latency and no stupid weights screwed inside. While that is over twice what this thing costs, trust me when I say it is well, well worth it.