Razer Mamba Wireless
Lightweight and untethered.
TheRazer Mamba Wireless ($100) keeps everything that made the original Mamba work — the flawless wireless performance, the comfortable textured grips, the gorgeous RGB lighting — but streamlines and refines it.
The needless LED strip is gone, as is the bulky dock. The battery lasts much longer, and Razer’s installed a more precise sensor. In short: The Razer Mamba Wireless has kept pace with the times. Although the mouse isn’t quite as good as wireless gaming peripherals get, it’s still near the very top of the pack.
If you ever got some hands-on time with the previous Razer Mamba, the new model’s refreshed design will look and feel familiar. The mouse is fairly large and it’s ergonomically designed for right-handed players. There are textured grips on both sides that look (bear with me here) a little like the striations on a whale’s jaw. They’re comfortable and help keep your hand where it’s supposed to be. The Mamba Wireless supports both palm and claw grips.
The Mamba Wireless has seven buttons: a right button, a left button, a clickable scroll wheel, two dotsper-inch (DPI) sensitivity buttons and two thumb buttons. It’s a similar layout to Razer’s other high-end mice, and everything is where it needs to be.
Razer estimates that the Mamba Wireless’ mechanical switches can endure 50 million clicks apiece. That’s about 15 years of clicking. Naturally, we couldn’t test that, but the buttons are all comfortable and have a pleasant spring to them.
The Synapse 3 software is fairly straightforward. There are separate tabs to manage button assignment, calibration, lighting and so forth. You can change the colors of LEDs in the scroll wheel and the Razer logo on the palm rest. You can customize profiles to automatically apply when you launch games. You can sync the Mamba Wireless with other Razer gear.
When it comes to in-game performance, the Mamba Wireless’ performance was never in doubt. Thanks to its Razer 5G Advanced Optical Sensor, the peripheral tracks accurately and precisely.
I put the device through its paces with Overwatch, StarCraft: Remastered, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and World of Warcraft. In every game, the Mamba Wireless interpreted my commands instantaneously and correctly, whether I was raising D.Va’s shields to defend teammates in Overwatch or preparing a force of hydralisks to sweep through a Terran base in StarCraft.
The Mamba Wireless is exactly what a product update should look like. Razer kept everything that worked, ditched everything that didn’t, and dropped $50 from the price in the process. The Mamba Wireless is not the absolute best wireless mouse on the market - theLogitech G900 Chaos Spectrum still has that mantle - but it’s not very far off.
Thanks to its Razer 5G Advanced Optical Sensor, the peripheral tracks accurately and precisely.