Corsair Harpoon v2 Wireless Review – Small Wireless Gaming Mouse

This little guy is Corsair’s latest entry in the small wireless mouse game, with this being the Harpoon v2 Wireless. This little thing has the same high end MARKSMAN sensor you’ll find in Corsair’s highest end gaming mice, and yet it’s small, fairly light, and not horrendously expensive either. This feels very much like an evolution of the original Harpoon, so if you liked that, you’ll like this one plenty too. Let’s take a look at this thing, test it out, test it for latency, and see how it holds up. 

The box itself is all paper/cardboard, the mouse comes in a cloth bag, and besides two little plastic covers on the included rather nice braided USB cable, this is plastic-free packaging, which I actually really like. Great job Corsair. The mouse itself houses the USB dongle under the large rear PTFE skate – that’s just held on with magnets and comes off pretty easily – and the dongle is the usual micro-dongle style. There isn’t an A to C adapter in the box that’d let you have the dongle up on your desk and let you have easy access to the cable, so you’ll have to make do with the dongle a little further away and the USB C cable just hanging out on your desk until you need to charge it – something Corsair says you won’t need to do often with a claimed 140 hours of battery life (assumedly with the RGB lighting disabled).

The mouse itself is a pretty cute little thing. It’s short yet fairly tall, has loads of space on both sides for your fingers, two side buttons, a DPI button up top, a USB C port on the front, and an RGB light on the back. On the bottom you have three PTFE skates, the large removable one at the back, a ring around the sensor, and a smaller one at the front. You do also have the power switch for 2.4GHz, wired (off) or Bluetooth, and of course that sensor. The sensor is Corsair’s Marksman 26K, a semi-custom PixArt sensor likely based on the 3395 or 3399, so a pretty decent bit of kit. Shape wise, thanks to this being so short yet tall, it’s actually really easy to hold this in any grip you want. It’s perhaps a little small to palm grip for my large hands, but claw and fingertip absolutely work well, and I’d imagine this can be a great fit for most hand sizes, big or small. The textured sides also make it pretty easy to grip, remarkably comfortable, and a nice in-hand feel. Weight wise Corsair says 80 grams – my scales say 78.9 grams, so slightly less than claimed which is always nice. That isn’t exactly feather-weight these days, but it’s far from heavy. For a regular mouse, this is more than fine.

As for the latency, that was remarkably disappointing. Corsair’s web configurator claims this is fully up to date, and that this had the debounce-after-click feature enabled, but this is I think fully the slowest mouse I’ve tested taking 12 milliseconds to register a click wirelessly, or 11.3 milliseconds when wired. The near decade old Logitech G305 takes less than HALF that time! If you were wondering if there was an issue with my test system, my open source latency testing tool (available at OSRTT.com by the way, link the description if you want to test stuff like this yourself), I tested AKKO’s TAN8 Master on the same system on the same day and that took just 2.6 milliseconds. This is just a damn slow mouse. This is close to deal-breaking levels of latency honestly. You’re essentially talking a handful of frames on a high refresh rate monitor of delay, and that’s a competitive edge I’d be somewhat unwilling to give up.

In games I had to give it another try after doing the latency testing, because my first impression was, “meh, it’s alright”. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised it did feel a bit sluggish. A bit slow-on-the-draw. So I tried again, and yeah, this feels slow. Obviously ten milliseconds isn’t super obvious – it’s not like you click and then start counting – it’s more like you can just feel like there’s a delay between clicking and shooting, and for a gaming mouse that’s kind of a big deal. To be clear, I’d call this ‘serviceable’, but I wouldn’t call it good, and I’d struggle to recommend something with this sort of latency. I’m hopeful that with a firmware update this can be improved, and I’d love to re-test it in the future if that happens, but as it stands it’s kind of a rough gaming experience. I mean physically it’s fine – nice, even – it feels well built, pretty comfortable even for its small size, and does track pretty nicely, but that click latency is pretty rough.

At £65, or $70, this would be a reasonable enough value if this style of smaller gaming mouse is for you. It is the same price as the 20+ gram lighter carbon fibre 8000 hertz polling rate AKKO Echo TAN8 Master, but that’s a bit of a different proposition generally. If it weren’t for the click latency I’d consider this a perfectly decent little gaming mouse and wouldn’t begrudge anyone for buying one, but as it stands? It’s a little difficult to recommend something that has an active competitive disadvantage. Sure, this isn’t trying to be a pro-esports gaming mouse, but when Logitech’s near decade old gaming mouse takes less than half the time to report a click, you know something is up. I really hope Corsair can improve this post-launch, because I’d love to love this.