A Sculptor in Rockstar's Clothing - Razer Basilisk V3 Pro Review

It's been a good seven years since I last upgraded my mouse and I finally decided it was time to try something a bit different. Enter the Razer Basilisk V3 Pro, Razer's most feature packed - and unintentionally productivity geared mouse to date. Is it worth the staggeringly high premium? Let's find out.

Circa 2017.

It's no secret that I really like the Razer Mamba. I've used two editions of it as my daily driver mouse for the past twelve years and I can't say I've needed much more from it than what my current 2015 edition has offered. It's wireless with a low lag 1000 Hz polling rate, the ergonomic shape and size is great for my medium sized hands, and I like the adjustable click force of it's primary buttons.

But lately, my needs and preferences have shifted and I've gotten a bit spoiled by the feel of some of the newer mice on the market. I do a lot more actual work on the side of occasional gaming and I wanted a mouse that was a bit more versatile for productivity and comfortable for long term use. 

Source: Logitech

The mouse that set this search off was the Logitech MX Master, and I just loved the chunky, ergo focused shape of this mouse. It's shape was perfectly suited to my palm style grip, and I liked how the high arch and thumb rest kept my fingertips from dragging along the mousepad or table. It also had Logitech's signature unlockable scroll wheel, which is a feature I've always liked but never had on my mice.

However, the problem with any version of the MX Master for my use cases is it's low 125 Hz polling rate. For strict productivity users that's fine - that's who the mouse is really geared for after all, but for gamers; it's a no go. I've been spoiled by the smoothness of the Mamba's 1000 Hz polling rate and anything less than that feels noticeably more choppy to me. Unfortunately, this was the deal breaker that drove me to looking for similar, more powerful options; of which there are relatively few.

But fear not: they do exist!

The G502 has arguably been the most popular mouse of this style.
Source: Logitech

My search ultimately came down to three mice, the Logitech G502 Lightspeed, it's successor: the G502 X Plus, and the Razer Basilisk V3 Pro. All three mice sport a similar, ergonomic focused shape akin to the MX Master, along with a slew of reprogrammable buttons and an unlockable scroll wheel. However, these mice also offer high performance sensors and switches geared more towards gaming.

Ultimately, I went for the Basilisk V3 Pro. The feel wasn't dramatically different compared to the Logitech mice, but I've been in Razer's mouse ecosystem for years and generally trust their hardware. Also considering my longstanding attachment to the wireless Mamba, the optional dock just completed the whole package for me.

The Basilisk is primarily marketed as an FPS geared mouse with it's token feature being a thumb controlled "DPI clutch" that allows you to temporarily drop the speed of the sensor so you can pop off a particularly difficult headshot or whatever. But even compared to Razer's own productivity focused Pro Click mouse, the V3 Pro just looks and feels like a more powerful MX Master: a sculptor in rockstar's clothing.

I'll also die on this hill and say the Basilisk looks more tasteful than the G502 and G502 X. It's still a pretty loud, in-your face design, but the accents are more subtle opposed to the edgier, more angular looks of the Logitech mice. The RGB is done better too, with relatively sparse lighting up top and a really nice looking underglow strip that wraps almost completely around the base of the mouse. Safe to say you'd be proud to have this thing atop your desk.

Like the G502, the shape of Basilisk leans more towards a palm style of grip, though it's more forgiving than the MX Master towards claw grip users and everyone in between; like myself. Compared to the largely DeathAdder derived Mamba, the Basilisk has a more rearward set arch with far less of a leftward offset to it. This gives the mouse a more pronounced, rounded palm rest rather than the sloping tail of the Mamba. Despite the mice being very close to the same size, the overall width of the Basilisk's body is also slightly slimmer, while the nose dips down at more aggressive angle.

Other differences include more finely textured side grips that appear to be made of a less pliable rubber than the Mamba, and a more coarse texture on the ABS body of the mouse. All of this should hopefully translate into a less hard wearing finish as the mouse ages, but alas it's probably only prolonging the inevitable. Can Razer figure out how to make mice out of PBT?

While entirely subjective - because nobody's hands are the same, the shape of the Basilisk definitely contours my hand better and feels more natural than the Mamba. Not that the Mamba served my grip poorly - I did use it for over a decade after all, the Basilisk feels better geared for it. It's actually a surprisingly svelte feeling mouse in the hand, despite it's large and imposing appearance. 

Underneath the mouse is pretty standard fare. There's five PTFE feet which allows the mouse to glide nicely, a three position switch to alternate between 2.4 GHz wireless or Bluetooth modes, a button to switch between onboard profiles, and a round cover plate for storing the USB wireless adaptor which also doubles as the connection point for the mouse's optional wireless charging puck.

Not being able to remove that "sniper button" is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people.

Button placement on the mouse feels generally good. The side buttons are out the way but are easily within reach, and the DPI clutch sits just under the tip of my thumb when I hold the mouse normally, so I seldom ever touch it or trigger it by accident. Of course, that's not applicable for everyone and for some reason, Razer removed the ability to remove the DPI clutch button like on this mouse's predecessor; the Basilisk Ultimate. I mean... why?

That said, the buttons actuate nicely and Razer's use of optical switches should mean this mouse is going to work more reliably in the long term than mice using mechanical switches. The click force for the main buttons on the mouse are somewhat on the heavier side, which I do like since it helps prevent accidental clicks. The buttons all feel snappy and precise, with satisfying audible and tactile feedback.

But the real star of the show here is Razer's new scroll wheel that takes a page out of Logitech's playbook while adding a whole new party trick of it's own. The result is a beefy, side clicking scroll wheel with unlockable free spin much like the G502 or MX Master. Except instead of using a mechanical disconnect, it's electronically actuated when the unlock button is pressed. You can actually see the mechanism working if you peer into the right side of the scroll wheel.

While this does seem a bit pointless and it does beg the question about how reliable this motorized disconnect is versus Logitech's tried and true system, you can actually remap the scroll mode toggle to a different button which is pretty neat on it's own, but that's not all. Razer also used it to introduce a novel feature called "smart-reel". Essentially, the mouse senses your scrolling speed, keeping the detent in place at slower speeds, but automatically enabling free spin when you scroll faster.

It's a bit finicky and takes some effort to get used to, but I find it handy for browsing and work versus manually switching between scroll modes. I could see this being kind of an annoying feature for gaming though, especially if you have something like weapon switching set to the scroll wheel and have a tendency to aggressively flick it to do so. This is one feature that I wouldn't want to leave on by accident for this case.

I think one of the key complaints of the Basilisk is undoubtedly going to be it's weight, though to be totally honest, I don't really get the sudden obsession with lightweight mice. We went from having mice with removable weights to skeletonized monstrosities in the time I've really started getting into PC gaming. Maybe there's merit to it - reduced inertia equals better precision and whatnot, but one thing is for sure; the few lightweight mice I've sampled at the store feel chintzy as all hell in my hands. I don't like them.

Granted, I'm not really the target audience for lightweight mice, and having been a user of wireless mice for the past twenty years, I'm well accustomed to my mice weighing more than most. My Razer Mamba weighs an eye watering 131 grams, so the Basilisk actually managing to weigh a decent chunk less than that at 114 grams (119 grams with the wireless charging puck), whilst packing in significantly more performance and features isn't something to scoff at - for myself at least.

The mouse is fitted with Razer's Focus Pro optical sensor, developed jointly with Pixart. This sensor is rated up to a whopping 30000 DPI, which is nearly double that of the Mamba's 16000 DPI 5G sensor. It is also capable of tracking on glass at least 4mm thick, which as the owner of a glass desk for the past several years, is a pretty big deal. For years I've used a Microsoft Arc Mouse alongside my Surface Book with a glass tracking capable sensor, and even though it works, it was never very precise. Just messing around with the Basilisk on glass for a while, I can confirm that it indeed does appear to track about as well on glass as it does on an opaque surface.

Apart from that little niche, and in actual practice the 30K DPI sensor feels wholly unnecessary. To me, it doesn't feel noticeably smoother than the Mamba's 16K sensor running at the same 1000 Hz polling rate and with Windows mouse acceleration turned on. On my 3440x1440, 144 Hz display, I normally use my mice around 1600 - 1800 DPI for day to day use, and I don't really bother dropping the DPI much, if at all for gaming. A 16K capable sensor felt overkill for that and 30K is just plain ludicrous. I can't really say who would even get a benefit out of running anywhere even near those numbers, even on an extremely high resolution display setup.

Similarly questionable is the mouse's optional hyperpolling, which allows you to drive the polling rate as high as 8000 Hz, which in theory would eliminate any and all noticeable input lag between you and the cursor. Coming from 1000 Hz, I did find a noticeable increase in responsiveness at 2000 Hz, but anything above that has diminishing returns. Even then, 1000 Hz still feels plenty smooth and I think most users need shouldn't sleep over not having hyperpolling by default.

But the mouse is a joy to use regardless. It glides like ice on the hard textured side of my Razer Vespula V2 mat and I don't feel any sort of fatigue after long sessions with it. It feels great in the hand without any sort of flimsiness and the scroll wheel is the icing on the cake. I have plenty of buttons to map out to navigation controls for image, video editing and 3D CAD work - quite the boon for Inventor's somewhat wonky defaults, and I particularly like having the DPI clutch button mapped for model rotation.

Like all Razer peripherals, customization for the Basilisk is handled through Synapse, allowing you to remap the buttons, adjust the sensor performance, change the lighting, and create macros. The new interface is more visually clean and more intuitive to navigate than prior versions and the mouse supports up to five onboard profiles, which is handy if you anticipate using it on different computers without Synapse installed. You can also pair profiles to individual games or software, and it will automatically switch between them when you launch, or even just toggle between them in Windows.

This still sucks!

Unfortunately I found much of Synapse's functionality still lacking in ways that I've experienced for the past decade plus - and in some ways worse. They even got rid of the overlay that appears when you cycle through DPI settings for some inexplicable reason, full customization of the Chroma RGB lighting zones is still gated behind a separate installation and the macro builder is STILL lacking in some basic features that people have been asking for Razer to implement for years. 

For example, I cannot set a simple "Shift + Scroll Click" macro to just terminate when the held button is released or just bind similar key combos to individual buttons without having to set up an entire macro with timings and key behavior. I find that it's easier to rebind these functions within the software to different individual keys to bypass the fuckery of trying to make any of this work with the macro editor. Are they ever going to fix it? I have no god-damned clue at this point.

*Sebastian Maniscalco voice* What are you doooooooooo-ing???

The worst is that Synapse is now also a significant resource hog. On the latest beta for the new Synapse off Razer's website that supposedly improves performance over the prior Synapse 3 by 30%, I counted SIXTEEN processes and calculated roughly 651 MB of RAM in use while the program runs in the background. For comparison, Synapse 2.0; which offers a similar suite of features for the Mamba, uses 63 MB of RAM and runs just one background process. This amount of resource usage is just unacceptable. On the bright side, you no longer need to create an account to use the software, but unless you absolutely need any of Synapse's features, I would just set your onboard profiles and uninstall it.

Battery life is advertised at 90 hours at 1000 Hz polling rate and with RGB off. While I haven't tested that metric specifically, I was able to get a little over two days of sporadic use from a full charge with the brightness set to 30 percent: probably around the 25-30 hour mark. It really doesn't feel much better than the Mamba in that regard, which is a bit of a letdown especially since it lacks the convenience of a dock by default. Turning on hyperpolling will reduce the battery life down even further, depending on how high you crank the frequency.  

I ended up biting the bullet on the dock barely a week into ownership of the mouse in large part to this. I had already planned on getting it eventually, but my muscle memory and distaste for wired mice won out. I've long made a habit of docking the Mamba whenever I'm not at my computer thanks to it's paltry battery life, and I come back to it topped off and good to go for however many hours I may need it. Getting stuck with the USB cable for a while instead of the dock admittedly pissed me off a bit, as stupid as it sounds - which it honestly is. Obviously you can use the mouse while it charges with a cable, but as religiously as I've used the dock in the past, this has never been an issue for me.

As such, I was not initially fond of Razer's decision to package the mouse dock, wireless charging and hyperpolling capability of the mouse as separate purchases instead of just including it with the mouse by default like they've done with the former for the bulk of their premium wireless offerings in the past. The dock and puck are $70 on top of the mouse's already eye-watering $160 MSRP with no discounts for bundling, making this a $230 mouse before tax and shipping. Since the mouse uses the Qi standard, you could also just buy the puck and use whatever wireless charger you have lying around and achieve largely the same effect, minus the maybe superfluous hyperpolling feature.

"Puck you. Pay me."

But I suppose in some ways, this ends up being fair. It keeps the base price of the mouse down for those who don't care about those features, but opens up a future, unified avenue for upgrades that ends up not being much more expensive than what Razer used to charge for their premium offerings. Even though the Mamba 2015 included it's dock and cost just $150 back in the day, it still hashes out to being nearly a $200 mouse adjusted for inflation. I guess the inclusion of hyperpolling somewhat justifies the $30 bump on top of that, as that's what the individual adaptor costs, but after testing, I really don't see why you'd want to go beyond 2000 Hz at the expense of more precious battery life.

Regardless, this mouse still feels like a shit value prospect at it's MSRP. It's complete spec overkill, and unless you absolutely must have the wireless capability, the standard wired Basilisk V3 is nearly identical, sacrificing a little bit of sensor performance and sporting a prior generation of optical switches. I seriously doubt you'd notice much of a difference, and for $70, it's practically a steal versus the wireless Pro model. 

Within Razer's ecosystem for that same $70 price, there's also the Basilisk V3 X Hyperspeed which is also wireless; utilizing a double AA battery for power, and much longer lasting at that. But it's also nowhere near as fancy as it's stablemates with no adjustable scroll wheel, a less powerful sensor, and mechanical instead of optical switches. 

If that doesn't quite scratch the itch, you're honestly be better off finding a new-old-stock Basilisk Ultimate for around the same price, many of which include the charging dock. It has more comparable specs and features to the Basilisk V3 Pro and you could easily mistake them for the same mouse at a glance.

As for other comparable mice, obviously the G502 X variants immediately come into the conversation, almost to the point where I had to make my choice between them purely on look and feel. Other than the lack of a smart scroll wheel and two more buttons versus the Basilisk, they're extremely close in terms of features and performance. The old G502 fares well in this comparison too, but that common switch failure is really kind of a deal breaker in my book, and you should just buy the G502 X instead.

There's also Corsair's Dark Core and M65 mice. Both are comparable to the Basilisk V3 Pro and G502 in terms of features, but lack unlockable scroll wheels and lose out on pure performance numbers - assuming that even matters in your case. I did really did like the feel of the Dark Core though. It was the only mouse I could find akin to the Basilisk and G502 that had an actual rest for your ring finger and pinkie, and the palm grip feel is just chunky and excellent. I'd buy one if it had a comparable scroll wheel.

All that said, I do genuinely really like the Basilisk V3 Pro. It takes all the features I loved about the Mamba and packs it, and much more into a more exotic looking, versatile and higher quality package. It's definitely not a mouse meant to please the ultralight competitive gaming crowd, but it's still a more than capable headshot machine, all while being completely wireless. The area where I think this mouse really excels though, is where productivity focused mice like the Logitech MX Master fall short. If you need one mouse to work and game with, this is a damn good choice.

However, I feel like there isn't much else about the mouse that really justifies it's exuberant price tag. It has the numbers to back it up, but I didn't see a single scenario where I utilized more than a fraction of this mouse's performance and you'd have to really, REALLY want the wireless functionality in order to stomach the $160 ($230 if you opt for the dock) entry fee. The software experience is also totally unfitting of the premium you're paying.

Hell, if mine wasn't steeply discounted, I'd want to hang myself with it's USB cable, because despite all the bells and whistles the Basilisk has going for it, the nearly decade old Mamba 2015 still feels very competitive against it. When you just consider just how well they perform and feel in actual use - these mice are not all that dramatically different, and I said almost the same exact same thing when I reviewed that mouse alongside it's predecessor. This again, feels like more for the sake of sake of being able to say that you have more.

So despite how much I like using it, I just can't recommend this mouse at anywhere near it's MSRP, and certainly not if you already own a mouse that can match even just a third of it's capabilities. If you find that it's wireless capability truly is of benefit to you, I'd say the Basilisk V3 Pro is a good buy at no more than $100. Otherwise, just go for the wired version.

What's Good

• Virtually lag-free wireless performance.
• Powerful and precise new sensor that even tracks on glass.
• High quality unlockable scroll wheel, and smart-reel is awesome.
• Neat underglow RGB lighting.

What's Crap

• DPI toggle button is non-removable for some reason.
• Optional dock, wireless charging, and hyperpolling feels like a cash grab.
• Synapse is still complete and utter bloatware.
• Battery life is just okay.

Verdict

Easily Razer's most versatile and feature packed mouse offering to date, but the Pro model feels overkill and too expensive compared to it's stablemates.