How important is a left click?
Your answer might determine whether you love the Keychron M3 Mini, a wireless lightweight gaming mouse with impressive specs for less than $70. Its pinpoint sensor, fast polling rate, low click latency and marathon battery life match those of more expensive devices, and make me feel like I’m using a pro-level lightweight FPS mouse. But that left click is, under certain conditions, jarring, hollow, tinny, and unpleasant.
I did eventually make it work for me – which I’ll explain later – but it points to niggling build quality issues with an otherwise excellent mouse.
Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way before focusing on the pile of good stuff.
The left and right mouse clicks are absolutely fine, provided you touch the buttons towards the front. They feel relatively clean and crisp, and spammable if needed. No complaints. But if your fingertips stray down the mouse towards the middle of the buttons – which they can easily do in fingertip or claw grips – the clicks are awful. They sound echoey, feel loose and sloppy, and vibrate against your fingers.
With most mice, when you click the bottom of the button, the whole button will move as one. When you press the bottom of the buttons on the M3 Mini, the top doesn’t click in, only the bottom does. It feels almost like those buttons are on a see-saw, with a pivot in the middle, rather than moving as a solid piece.
It’s not the only issue I had with the M3 Mini. The side buttons feel pretty solid but the casing around them doesn’t. If you squeeze the sides of the mouse they’ll start to flex, and if you really squeeze you can actually activate the side click without touching a button.
Both of these problems sound alarming but neither ruined the mouse for me. In reality, you’re never going to squeeze the mouse hard enough to flex the sides, and it felt sturdy and safe in my hand.
The mouse button is the more serious issue, and I had to adapt to get around it, training my hand to stay forward. In claw grip, I just bent my fingers a little less than normal to ensure the tips stayed in the right position. And when I got used to it this mouse was pleasant to use, mostly because of its light weight and comfortable shape.
A Light, Comfortable Shell
At 55g, the M3 Mini is a genuinely lightweight mouse. Lighter doesn’t mean better, of course: the most important thing is how it feels in the hand and how smoothly it glides across your mousepad. The feet on the M3 Mini aren’t the slickest, and have more friction than higher-end mice, but because of the mouse’s weight I never felt like I was having to drag it across my pad. The ride was effortless.
It certainly helps that its hourglass-style shape and curved base fills my hand surprisingly well for a smaller mouse, to the point where I could use it in a full palm grip – where your whole palm grabs the bottom of the mouse – with zero issues. Switching between fingertip, claw, and palm grips felt natural, and my fingers and hand always found a comfortable place to rest.
If you have particularly large hands (mine are slightly larger than average), you might struggle to find a stable position on its slim body, but it’ll work well for everyone else.
The textured patterns on both sides of the mouse helped me grip it securely. If you run your thumb along them it feels scratchy, but when I was actually using the mouse I never felt any movement or irritation. The chalky plastic coating was easy to hold onto for hours at a time.
Fast Sensor and Long Battery Life
There are four variations of the M3 Mini, each with different combos of sensors and max polling rates, which is the number of times the mouse reports its position to your PC. They range in price from $40 to $70, although the top-of-the-range model that I tested is often available cheaper (it’s close to $60 as I write this).
The ones you want to consider are the PixArt 3395 sensors (either 1000Hz or 4000Hz polling rate), or the 3950 sensor 8000Hz variant. Those two sensors are both widely used and will perform well no matter what you throw at them. I tested the 8K variant in a variety of genres– Arc Raiders, Fortnite, CS2, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – and was very happy. Quick flick-shots hit their mark and slower tracking felt smooth, with no noticeable hitches or stuttering.
Whether it’s worth paying more for 4K or 8K polling rate is personal preference. It should make tracking less jittery and more responsive, but to feel a difference above 1000Hz you’ll need a decent CPU-GPU combo and a high refresh-rate monitor – even then, not everyone thinks it’s worth it. I can feel a very slight benefit as I move from 1K to 4K, but I think 8K is overkill.
Base your choice on the price and your budget: personally, I think it’s worth stumping up the extra $20 for the best sensor but if you don’t want to, you’ll still get solid performance.
I like how simple Keychron makes it to switch between polling rates and DPI. Both have a dedicated button on the bottom of the mouse, and both buttons have their own indicator LEDs so that you always know your current setting. As somebody who likes to switch regularly – I generally bump up my polling rate and lower my sensitivity as I move from work to gaming – I appreciated how streamlined it felt. There’s also a switch to toggle between the fast 2.4Ghz wireless connection and Bluetooth.
If you opt for higher polling rates you’ll sacrifice some battery life, but that’s fine here because the M3 Mini lasts for ages. On the top two configurations, you should get 135+ hours at 1000Hz polling rate. Impressive. It runs out faster at higher polling rates, but I tested it on and off for a couple of weeks at various polling rates and only drained a third of the battery.
The battery life on the 1K mouse variant is less impressive: Keychron says it’ll last roughly 70 hours. It’s another reason to pick the meatier specs.
Keychron’s launcher software is browser-based and there’s no offline version, which will rule this mouse out for some people – although, again, you can change polling rate and sensitivity just by clicking the buttons on the bottom. I personally prefer web-based software to installing a new program on my PC for every mouse, and I found Keychron’s intuitive. Tweaking the basics such as polling rate and DPI is simple, and you get the advanced settings you’d hope for, including ripple control, angle snapping, motion sync and adjustable lift-off distance.
Samuel is a freelance reporter and editor specializing in longform journalism and hardware reviews. You can read his work at his website.
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