SteelSeries has launched a wireless gaming mouse with a massive 4,000Hz polling rate. The new Aerox 3 Wireless Gen 2 also boasts dual wireless connections and a promise of sturdy build quality. According to SteelSeries, this new model builds upon the strengths of its predecessors, bringing crisper clicks, more comfortable side buttons, and a more tactile scroll wheel.
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of SteelSeries, the Aerox 3 Wireless Gen 2 comes equipped with high-end hardware that should ensure exceptional performance and good battery life. For starters, that 4,000Hz polling rate and 1.2ms click response time look lightning-fast. In other words, the new Aerox 3 feeds your system with positioning data four times faster than traditional 1,000Hz mice, with his occurring every 0.25ms instead of 1ms. Not every game needs this level of responsiveness, and faster polling means a shorter battery life, but the option is there if you want it.
Speaking of battery life, SteelSeries claims the Aerox 3 Wireless Gen 2 can operate for up to 120 hours on 2.4GHz (depending on polling rate, lighting, and power settings) or up to 200 hours over Bluetooth. This gives you the flexibility to choose speed or battery life, although the 1,000Hz wireless configuration looks like an acceptable compromise between speed and battery life that should keep you going for more than a week. If you want the fastest configuration, you can expect up to 35 hours at 4K polling, which should be enough for five hours of daily play for a week. For comparison, SteelSeries says the Gen 2 offers 50% more battery life than its predecessor. While the company didn’t share the exact charging speed, it indicated that the mouse’s USB-C port supports fast charging.
Inside the Aerox 3 Wireless Gen 2, you’ll find a high‑performance TrueMove 26K optical sensor with true one‑to‑one tracking, mechanical switches rated for 80 million clicks, plus three-zone RGB illumination that makes the translucent shell shine in your colour of choice. All of this is wrapped in a durable and water‑resistant coating that protects the mouse against dust, sweat, and spills. SteelSeries’s press material even shows the mouse surviving a passage into the dishwasher, and while we wouldn’t recommend doing this, an IP54 rating for a honeycomb-shell mouse is pretty neat.
Going back to the sensor, we find 26,000 DPI sensitivity, 400 IPS tracking speed, and 40G acceleration, ensuring tighter aim, smoother control, and fewer skips during faster flicks. Like DPI, the lift-off distance can also be adjusted to your liking, minimising disruptions during mouse relocation. As for those who use a high DPI with a large mouse pad, the 100% PTFE skates should deliver a consistent and smooth glide. The Aerox 3 Wireless Gen 2 does all of this while tipping the scales at just 68g, showing that durable mice can be light.
On the software side, you will be able to customise pretty much all aspects of the mouse, including sensor parameters such as DPI, RGB lighting, and each of the six programmable buttons. These settings can then be saved into one of the mouse’s five onboard profiles. You can also enable features such as Bluetooth Smoothing, which, as its name implies, smooths the mouse cursor movement when connected via Bluetooth. There is also an anti-interference setting, which SteelSeries says will mitigate interference in heavily congested wireless environments.
The SteelSeries Aerox 3 Wireless Gen 2 gaming mouse is available in Shadow, Ghost, or Magenta Haze colourways at $109.99 / €109.99 / £99.99. This puts it against the Corsair Sabre v2 Pro Ultralight Wireless in terms of competition.
