There are few gaming mice today with as long a history as the Razer DeathAdder. The original V1 came out in 2006, and the nameplate has been under constant production since.

In that time, the DeathAdder has maintained its shape and ergonomics, but nearly everything else has changed. The mouse’s weight has halved, its polling rate has increased eightfold, and the maximum dots per inch (dpi) has increased by 25 times. To add to that, the new DeathAdder V4 Pro packs all of this into a wireless design. It’s a great example of how far mouse technology has come over the past two decades.

Performance vs. Personality

Over the years, I’ve watched mice progress in every way. With higher-performance sensors, improved switches, higher polling rates, and lower weights, it’s hard to argue that a mouse from 2006 is still competitive. At the same time, not all of those specs matter much to the average user.

Sure, there’s a difference between 1,000- and 8,000-Hz polling, or 0.1 and 0.2 milliseconds of latency, but it’s marginal compared to a new switch that feels better to press, a body that’s sturdy during use, or a design that saves 10 grams of weight. Time and time again, I find that the physical aspects of a mouse will have a much more direct and tangible impact on the user experience than any high-end internals.

That’s what the DeathAdder V4 Pro gets right: It feels good to use. The buttons are snappy with a short travel distance but provide just enough resistance that resting your hand on them doesn’t risk a mis-input. The mouse wheel feels tight and notchy, with short ratchets that easily snap into place as you scroll. The overall shape is slightly sculpted, with a subtle ergonomic curve on either side. The mouse feels agile and responsive—it fits into your hand, but isn’t so sculpted that your hand sinks into it. (Logitech’s MX Master line does the inverse perfectly, which makes it specialized for productivity, but not ideal for high-intensity gaming.)

The mouse’s texture is a soft, matte plastic that allows for a good amount of grip without feeling abrasive. It appears to be the actual texture of the plastic rather than a soft-touch coating. The only downside was that, over time, oils from my hands would build up on it more than on other mice I’ve tested. It could easily be wiped off semi-regularly and didn’t leave any trace on the black unit I tested—I can’t say anything about the white or green versions, but I imagine the plastics on them are similar.

With the DeathAdder V4 Pro, all of the specs are great. The sensor never feels jittery or off, and the mouse buttons have the same absurdly low latency that has become standard in the competitive space. The optical mouse wheel feels precise and responsive, but again, the difference is marginal compared to a standard mouse. The largest benefit of the wheel is how crisp the internal mechanisms feel.

You aren’t going to be instantly wowed by the sensor capable of 45,000 dots-per-inch, or a mouse button with a latency faster than your own reaction speed. Instead, realistically, you shouldn’t notice these things. When a mouse has an unfathomably high polling rate or optical switches operating at the speed of light, it simply gets rid of a barrier that would normally exist between you and the game.

These features are typically limited by the mouse itself: Ergonomics, button placement, and tactile experience can all have a larger impact on your game experience than any of these specs. But when these details all fall into place, the top-end specs mean that nothing will hold you back—instead, your inputs will be as close to perfectly accurate as they can be.

Competitive and Convenient

Alongside performance-oriented features, the DeathAdder V4 Pro also has a few quality-of-life improvements. The most significant is the USB-C dongle. Larger dongles have become standard for any high-end gaming mouse that operates above 1,000-Hz polling. For higher polling rates, having a larger antenna placed closer to the mouse with less restriction is the best way to ensure connection quality. I can understand why they exist, but I’ve always felt that the larger dongle was an inconvenience for both on-the-go gaming and optimizing desk space/cable management compared to the smaller USB-A dongles common on devices with lower polling rates.

Instead of the boxy Hyperpolling dongle included with the Viper V3 Pro, the DeathAdder V4’s dongle is semi-spherical with the Razer logo on top and three RGB lights at the front. Each of these can be programmed to show one of four options: Connection quality, battery level, polling rate, and selected dpi stage (or the lights can be disabled entirely). Since the LEDs are fairly small, I didn’t find them distracting. Having this information at a glance is incredibly helpful, and it makes the dongle feel more purposeful as it sits on your desk, turning what was once an annoying necessity into something functional and beneficial.

The largest downside of the V4 Pro is its limited battery life. While this wasn’t a huge problem in day-to-day use (it lasts multiple days per charge when at 1,000-Hz polling), the battery went down shockingly fast when set to the maximum 8,000-Hz polling rate. I have to agree with Razer’s recommendation of only using the full 8,000-Hz rate when you genuinely need it. Having the battery level indicator on the dongle also made it much easier to monitor and plug the mouse in before running out of power in the middle of a game.

I did run into one bug. For some reason, the mouse would start flashing the “low battery” alert at random points, even when the battery was well above 80 percent. Turning the mouse off and on again would stop this, but it was definitely odd.

Alongside the dongle, Razer’s Synapse software has customization options. Alongside standard adjustments like dpi, button remapping, and adjusting polling rate, the app can be used to change the dongle’s LED indicators and adjust multiple aspects of the mouse’s performance. This includes settings to adjust the rotation angle of the mouse for different grips, change the lift-off and landing distance separately, and create dynamic sensitivity curves.

While most of those are incredibly specific settings, they all help to configure a mouse that behaves exactly how you prefer instead of you having to adapt how you play to fit your mouse. The best part of these features is how they are presented. Instead of bombarding the user with countless arbitrary dials with limited explanation, Synapse keeps all of these settings disabled at first, provides explanations of each setting’s function, and has default starting values that can be used as a baseline for any changes.

Going Inside

Taking apart this mouse is not easy. It has five screws underneath the mouse skates and uses both clips and pins to hold the two halves together. In trying to rip the two halves apart, I ended up jamming my finger against the case hard enough to break skin and cause some bleeding. The entire time, I was concerned that the disassembly process would break the plastic clips, but that luckily didn’t seem to happen. Instead, the only casualty was a small crack in the bottom shell next to one of the clips—something I can confidently attribute to user error.

The internal assembly of this mouse is shockingly complex compared to other Razer models. Instead of a singular printed circuit board (PCB) housing the sensor, buttons, and everything else, the DeathAdder V4 Pro opts for three. One is at the bottom of the mouse, with the sensor, battery, and a singular micro-switch for the mouse button. A second PCB is located in the top housing, held in by a bracket, with the scroll wheel and two main micro-switches for the left and right clicks. A third PCB, held in by the same bracket, is positioned sideways with two micro-switches for the two side buttons.

Removing the bracket is fairly straightforward, but it involves bending either the housing or the bracket (both of which are made from thin, ultra-lightweight plastic) to get them apart. It’s not terribly difficult, but it could cause issues if done improperly. The main benefit of this design is that there is less space between the mouse buttons and the micro-switches. To save money or reduce the number of parts, lots of mice will instead put all of the internals onto one PCB and use small hinged linkages to connect the buttons and switches. While this can result in a simpler design, it creates more failure points and can negatively impact the feel of pressing a button.

While there is a slight risk for failure with the connections between the PCBs, it’s unlikely. All three components are static inside the mouse housing, and the two halves are connected by a ribbon cable that doesn’t experience any stress during use. While repairability and disassembly aren’t going to be easy on a complex mouse like this, none of the internals seem likely to experience random or premature failures. All of the sensors are rated for massive amounts of actuations by Razer, and none of them are connected in ways that are overly complicated. The battery looks standard and can be unplugged easily without any soldering. It is attached to the bottom of the mouse with an adhesive, and while this adhesive likely won’t survive removal, it should be fairly easy to stick a new battery to the shell.

The DeathAdder V4 Pro is a great example of everything coming together on a mouse. It has both fantastic on-paper specs and a solid build that backs it up. Beyond that, Razer Synapse allows for nearly every aspect of the mouse’s performance to be customized to the user’s specific preferences—a way to close the final gap between the device’s performance and the user’s expectations. It’s a great mouse not only for competitive gamers, but for anyone who wants to customize their mouse to their exact needs. And in the age of ultra-adjustable Hall effect keyboards, having a mouse with equal levels of adjustment seems like the natural next step.