The Dark Matter Hyper-K Ultralight Gaming Mouse is a competent but basic budget ultralight gaming mouse. It is worth its price but is not a long-term solution for the serious gamer.
The Dark Matter Hyper-K Ultralight Mouse is the latest budget mouse from Monoprice. This thing retails at $39.99, making it a pretty affordable gaming mouse. For comparison, many comparably featured mice retail at $60+ USD. While I think that more expensive mice offer a significantly better user experience, the Dark Matter Hyper-K Ultralight mouse still manages to offer a lot of features for a very low price.
First Impressions of the Dark Matter Hyper-K Ultralight Mouse
The biggest selling point of the Dark Matter Hyper-K Ultralight Gaming Mouse is its Ultralight form factor. Monoprice used the increasingly popular symmetrical honeycomb palm structure to minimize the weight of this mouse. As a result, it ends up weighing in at only 60 grams, making it one of the lightest gaming mice on the market.
This mouse really does feel weightless, which is great for gamers who value a lightweight mouse. My biggest fear with the honeycomb structure is that dust, debris, and moisture can get inside your mouse via the slats in the honeycomb. So keep your desk clean. Overall though, the Hyper-K’s shape, size, and weight felt good to me.
While the size, shape, and weight felt good, the ABS material that makes up the shell of this mouse isn’t the best. The shell is made of a slippery plastic material that feels somewhat cheap to the touch, especially during long play sessions. I prefer mice that have a higher quality matte finish. However, these are the sacrifices you make when you buy a budget product.
The Omron switches that come with this mouse are competent on paper, but something about them didn’t feel right to me. The Hyper-K click actuation doesn’t feel crisp on the right or left-click and the two switches make different noises, which is odd. Additionally, the side buttons and DPI shifter feel mushy when pressed. I was also not a fan of the scroll wheel which feels soft and imprecise. So all these Hyper-K buttons could use some improvement.
The Hyper-K comes with the Pixart PMW 3389 sensor, which is on the lower end but still works well. It can go up to 16,000 DPI, has polling rates up to 1000Hz, and is capable of a 400 IPS track speed. I have no real complaints about this sensor after testing this mouse. It seemed to work fine.
This mouse comes with a 6-foot soft paracord USB-A plug. I like the paracord material since it didn’t really catch on anything the way some cords can.
Let’s talk about the lighting on this mouse. There are two main zones of RGB, a light on the inside of the mouse and a small strip along the back edge. By default, the back edge shows a repeating rainbow pattern while the inside RGB light corresponds to your DPI setting. You can customize both RGB sources using the Dark Matter software. This software offers a standard array of options like breathing or wave effects and all the RGB colors you could ask for.
Final Thoughts on Dark Matter Hyper-K Ultralight Gaming Mouse
There aren’t many ultralight gaming mice coming in at below $40, so this mouse definitely has a place in the market. I mostly had a positive experience with it during my rigorous testing. However, it is difficult for me to overlook the cheap, wobbly switches and buttons and low-quality finish. If you have the money, I would spring for a more expensive mouse from SteelSeries, Razer, or Logitech, where all the switches and buttons are more satisfying to use. That said, I still recommend this mouse as a starter mouse for anyone looking to get into gaming without dropping $60+ USD on their mouse.
