Razer’s Viper V3 Pro mouse puts its dongle where it belongs

Does your gaming mouse track its own position 8,000 times per second? If you’re the kind of person who cares, I suspect you might also want that mouse to track that fast out of the box — instead of having to buy an extra dongle for that feature.

That’s the most obvious difference Razer is announcing today with its flagship Viper V3 Pro mouse for esports pros and those who aspire to be one. For $160, the new Viper V3 Pro includes the $30 Razer HyperPolling Wireless Dongle, where the $150 Viper V2 Pro did not.

Mind you, the 58-gram Viper V2 Pro was already an impressive piece of kit, taking the crown for the lightest wireless gaming mouse at its debut, and the V3 Pro now sheds an extra four grams to hit 54 grams and firmly cement itself among the lightest battery-powered mice you can buy.

It also now has a second-gen 35,000 DPI “Focus Pro” optical sensor, which can be adjusted in increments of 1 DPI, larger mouse feet, a “more tactile” scroll wheel with a “more reliable” scroll click, and a whole lot of small ergonomic adjustments you can see here:

You also get up to 16 extra hours of battery life at 4000Hz and nearly double the battery life (62 hours) at 2000Hz, though battery life at 8000Hz stays the same.

And Razer’s introducing a “Sensitivity Matcher” in its app that lets you press a button and move your old mouse and your new mouse at the same time, after which it’ll automatically copy the DPI setting you’re accustomed to over to the new rodent. It still features the same third-gen optical switches as the prior model, which claim to last up to 90 million clicks.

Last but not least, Razer’s changing the outer feel of the mouse in a way that raised some alarm bells for me at first — it’s migrating to a smooth-touch finish instead of the eggshell texture of its previous mouse. But when I asked whether we’re returning to the delightful at first but eventually tacky mess of yesteryear’s soft-touch rubber-covered mice, third-party spokesperson Alyssa Benson assured me that there’s no rubber involved here.

The Viper V3 Pro is available today in both black and white; the white model weighs an extra gram.