Best gaming mice: Find your perfect match

Choosing a PC-gaming mouse requires special considerations. You’re not simply navigating around webpages and Office docs. As a gamer, your mouse is critical to tasks like fragging bots and shooting zombies.

On top of that there are personal preferences at play. Every little detail from the overall shape and size, to the number and placement of buttons, to a mouse’s cable (or lack thereof), and other myriad factors can change your opinion. More than any other peripheral, a mouse is the hardest to recommend, because there is no objectively perfect mouse. Everyone’s hands are different.

That said, we can guide you on your search. Below are our recommendations for gaming mice, built on years of experience first and foremost as gamers, and second as writers here at PCWorld. 

How we evaluate mice

To find our favorites, we put a small herd of gaming mice through their paces. Everything from ultra-budget to ultra-customizable to ultra-small to ultra-packed-with-buttons is in the running here, and then some.

What paces, you ask? First, we assess a mouse’s skills in general use and gaming—from browsing Reddit to video editing to perusing Spotify to playing through Watch Dogs 2 and Battlefield 1.

We also consider the preferred grip. You probably don’t consciously think about how you grip your mouse—it’s like which sock you put on first or whether you hang your toilet paper over or under. But it’s important.

People largely fall into three different grip types: palm, claw, and fingertip.

Palm grip: This is probably the most common grip, and it’s what most mice are designed for. Your entire hand makes contact with the mouse at the same time, with your arm driving most of the movement. This is the most ergonomically comfortable grip, with the mouse shaped specifically to fill and complement your palm.

Claw grip: Claw grippers arch their fingers more, creating separation between the hand and mouse but keeping the fingertips and rear of the palm in contact. This allows for quicker button pressing and slightly quicker movement, but puts more strain on your wrists.

Fingertip grip: The most agile grip also puts the most strain on your wrists. Fingertip grip, as the name implies, involves guiding the mouse with only your fingertips—no palm contact at all.

Generally, a mouse that works for a claw grip will work for a fingertip grip. The main distinction is between palm and claw grips.

Other factors

Button count: You’ll pretty much never find a three-button gaming mouse. Even the budget-friendly devices we’ve tested have five to 10 buttons. The award for “Most Buttons” still goes to the Roccat Tyon, with 14.

Sensor: Dots per inch, or dpi, is a measure of how many pixels the mouse moves on-screen per each inch of desk you move it across. Some people prefer to make large, sweeping motions with a lot of precision, necessitating a low dpi. Others want fast, jerky motions that start and stop on a dime—high dpi. The latter group will want to pay particular attention to each mouse’s limit.

At this point, the dpi arms race has become largely meaningless. Manufacturers push numbers that are so high as to be impractical for most people’s day-to-day use. Is that 16,000-dpi mouse actually more useful to you than the 12,000-dpi mouse? Probably not.

Shape: There are three main categories here, too: right-handed, left-handed, and ambidextrous.

We’ve looked at right-handed and ambidextrous mice because our testers here are right-handed. Some right-handed mice (such as the DeathAdder) have left-handed variants, but these are a rarity. Most southpaws will probably end up with an ambidextrous mouse, like the G-Skill Ripjaw MX780 or the Razer Diamondback.