Thank you be quiet! for sending us both the Dark Perk Ergo and Sym mice to review!

As someone who has been gaming on PCs for around three decades, I've seen PC mice go from just, well, mice with little balls inside to optical (and laser, then back to optical again) gaming mice of many shapes and sizes over the years. The performance boost over just a simple office mouse is significant and substantive. Nowadays, mice have taken a new turn in their evolution, with ever improving sensors, an increase in polling rate, and especially with a modern focus on lighter weight. Even still, mouse shape still matters enough that be quiet! made two models in this new Dark Perk line of wireless gaming mice.

The be quiet! Dark Perk series has two models: Ergo and Sym. These are the ergonomic and symmetrical models, respectively, of what is otherwise essentially the same mouse. The Ergo model's shape has a rise on the left side, giving your thumb more room, and tilting your hand up so it gives your hand and arm less strain. The Sym model's shape is flatter with a larger surface on top for your fingers, with a nice concave dip for them to rest in. Which I prefer is a secret I'll keep until later in this review, but know that it's a close call. Whatever the case, most of what I'm presenting here applies to both models equally.

Thankfully, one of the best parts of the Dark Perk is that whichever form you get, know that the mice themselves feel really sturdy and rigid, with high-quality plastic that still feels premium despite weighing so little. I've reviewed several lightweight wireless gaming mice by now, including Turtle Beach and Corsair models. From what I've seen, many lighter mice sacrifice either plastic feel and rigidity by going with thinner plastic, or they use thicker plastic with holes to reduce weight. These do a tasteful combination of the two; it doesn't give up any of the solid feel you might expect on the top, but there are some open holes on the bottom to drop some critical grams from the shell, bringing these mice to 55 grams, which is a very respectably light weight. Only two wireless mice I have reviewed are lighter, and each sacrifices something when compared to these Dark Perk mice.

For example, the Turtle Beach wireless mice I reviewed are also really great, and are either a bit lighter like the Burst II Air, which has a soft-touch plastic that doesn't feel as nice and worse battery life, or perhaps the slightly heavier Burst II Pro , which is better in a lot of ways, but again the plastic isn't as premium. The dramatically lighter Corsair Sabre v2 Pro Ultralight is great, but you do sacrifice plastic feel once again. I'll get more into feature comparisons later, but whatever the case, the build quality on the Dark Perk is most certainly a strong aspect of these mice. On the other mice I mentioned, you need to use the included grip tape in order to make them feel solid in your hand. Not so with the Dark Perk - though no grip tape is included.

What is included is perhaps the nicest mouse cable and transmitter adapter I've seen to date. While it's certainly fair to say that most of the time you won't use wireless mice plugged in, the battery does drain, so having a high-quality cable can still be really important. The be quiet! includes an attractive cloth-wrapped cable in their signature orange color, with nice ends and integrated strain relief. What really makes the cable so unique, though, is that on the end that normally connects to the mouse, the USB-C connector, the strain relief is angled up to keep the wire off of the table or mouse pad. This acts as a kind of mouse bungee of sorts, making the mouse while connected feel more like the drag-free experience you get when it's used wirelessly. I absolutely love this, and this mouse currently tops my 'favorite included wireless mouse cable' list.

Some mice (like from Turtle Beach) that have small wireless USB transmitters also include a USB-C to USB-A adapter (both ends female) so that the same cable used to charge the mouse can also host the wireless transmitter. The Turtle Beach ones are great and made of simple plastic, but that's about it. This be quiet! Dark Perk also includes such an adapter, but this one is made of a higher-quality plastic, and it has nice non-slip rubber on the bottom, rather than sticky tape like the Turtle Beach models do. Just like the mouse and cable, it also gives off an air of high quality, something that honestly goes a long way when considering whether something is a great value for the money.

The high-quality build continues to other areas of the mouse as well. Being a be quiet! product, it doesn't feature shouty RGB lighting or anything like that. Instead, it offers a sharp-looking all black exterior, with large and very smooth PTFE (a type of plastic) feet that glide very nicely on most surfaces. There is one tiny LED light on the top that's so small it's easy to miss. On the bottom there is a power switch and a DPI (dots per inch) switcher button. If you turn it on, you will see the LED glow momentarily before shutting off. The same goes for changing the DPI levels. If you do, the color of the LED changes to represent the one of up to five DPI levels you can set. It does a simple circular rotation between whatever options you have in place. I always appreciate it when gaming mice offer a simple way to switch DPI levels on the fly. The LED will also blink when your mouse's battery gets to a critically low level.

Speaking of battery life, the Dark Perk is quite excellent. It's not the longest battery life I've used, but it's quite competitive, especially with this mouse weight. Larger batteries weigh more, so to get an impressive 110 hours of battery life is nothing short of fantastic. The only lighter mouse that does better that I've tested is the Turtle Beach Burst II Pro, though it's also a slightly heavier mouse and uses thinner plastic.

One thing I wish they had done, though, is that some mice know that they will be used on the go, so they offer you a place inside or on the bottom of the mouse to store the wireless dongle. Various models of Turtle Beach and Corsair that I've reviewed have this feature, as well as some Razor wireless mice I've owned. Unfortunately, that isn't the case on these Dark Perk mice. I hope they reconsider that for their next models. Thankfully, in most other areas, like performance, they are extremely competitive.

Most normal office mice use the USB default polling rate of 125Hz, or sampling the mouse position 125 times per second (or to put it another way, every 8ms). In the early days of gaming mice, that polling rate started to go up, and after a short while the gaming mouse world settled on 1,000Hz (or 1kHz) as a fast polling rate that didn't need to change much. Polling every 1ms was quite fast, and really still is. It's only within the last couple of years that have you been able to buy monitors with refresh rates fast enough to be able to challenge that, with the fastest eSports monitors reaching and exceeding 500Hz. A higher polling rate mouse works in conjunction with a high refresh rate monitor to give you the best responsiveness. Having a high polling rate does steal CPU cycles, but modern CPUs have no trouble with that.

Going above 1kHz, it cuts the time between each poll to .5ms (2kHz), .25ms (4kHz), or even the max this mouse supports, .125ms (8kHz). At 8kHz, this can actually lead to a measurable performance impact in some games, so I probably wouldn't use it all the time; even if CPU usage doesn't matter, battery life might.

So, while you may get the best possibly reaction times from higher polling rates like 8kHz, the battery life on this mouse drops, though by exactly how much isn't clear as it isn't listed in the specifications. Whatever the case, if I know I'm going to play a competitive first-person shooter for a few hours, it's totally worth cranking that up. You can choose between the 125Hz, 250Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, 4kHz, and 8kHz settings as you decide on the balance between performance and battery life. The default is 1kHz, and for most normal users this is a fantastic balance. It's also what be quiet! uses as a reference for the rather excellent 110 hours of battery life this series of mice get.

I usually have two sets of mice and keyboards on my desk, because I work from home and have my work laptop set up next to my desktop PC. Because of that, I had both Dark Perk mice sitting next to each other, and I'd use the Ergo and Sym models pretty equally, as I'd use one mouse to work then the other to check personal emails and such. I drained the battery pretty equally between the two, and I started getting low battery warnings on the first one after a about two and a half weeks. (The other one was also in the red, but it didn't flash the dummy light before I charged it.) If I was using one of them full time perhaps I'd see a bit less than the two+ weeks, but most people aren't at their desks as much as I am, either. Whatever the case, I find the battery life on the Dark Perk mice to be exceptional given the tradeoffs that light mice require.

Like with most high-performance mice, the sensor is excellent. The optical mouse sensor is listed as the PixArt PAW3950. It has a 32K max DPI, and a 50g (as in the unit of gravitational force) tracking speed. This is in line with many other higher-end mice, and I had no complaints in use.

To make customizations to the DPI levels or polling rate, you either require be quiet!'s IO Center software on Windows, or you can use the IO Center Web app available on be quiet!'s website. What I love about IO Center Web is that it has explicit Linux support. They even offer you a way to run a script to configure your udev rules properly for Ubuntu-based distros. I found that with my Arch Linux install, I had to change their udev rule slightly to use a different user group. While it's not plug and play, at least they get you most of the way there with a little bit of legwork.

The software is basic but works well. The IO Center Web app requires a Chrome compatible web browser, including on macOS and Linux, and my preferred Brave browser also works great, even for firmware updates. I did a substantial portion of my testing of this mouse on Linux, and it worked flawlessly.

In IO Center, you can set 'Key Binding', 'DPI', and 'Product Settings'. 'Key Binding' allows you to replace the action of any button except for Left Click to something else, though the bottom DPI button seems to be hard coded. The options you can choose for the buttons is quite extensive; you can map mouse functions, keyboard keys, multimedia keys, and a few other things. You can also map macros and have buttons run applications, but that requires the desktop software, not the web app. The same applies to creating mouse profiles.

Setting the DPI stages, which you can use between one and five, is something many gamers who use gaming mice are likely familiar with. The default is five steps of 400, 800, 1200, and 2000, with the final step being the rather insane 30000. I personally find the first four quite fine, but I dropped the insane 30k DPI down to a more reasonable 3200. That way it will work for most gaming and work use cases. The ability to switch the DPI with a dedicated button is a really great feature, though you can't really do it mid-game since it's on the bottom of the mouse. I do appreciate being able to switch it up live when playing some first-person shooters, but rarely change it otherwise.

The Product Settings page shows other optional settings like the mouse and dongle firmware update, and this is also where you set the polling rate. There are some settings, like 'Power Saving Mode', that are not really clear on what they do other than limiting some settings to save battery life. You can also configure lift-off distance and set angle snapping, which I would discourage anyone from doing. I would also discourage using Ripple Control, since it filters your inputs and adds some delay. Motion Sync may be worth enabling though, as it's supposed to sync the mouse internal report rate with the USB polling rate. It does add a tiny bit of latency (equal to one poll, or 1ms if using 1kHz) but being synchronized, there should be less 'jumping' when there is careful mouse movement. This Product Settings page also lets you adjust button response times and sleep timeouts to optimize wake-up time and battery life.

One thing I wish was better in IO Center Web is that the indicator for battery life at the top is very tiny and just an icon. I would greatly prefer an actual percentage to know how full it is. It's not like we don't know when it's dying with the flashing red LED, but I would prefer a more granular breakdown of battery life.

While in many ways this mouse is great, it's not without some flaws. I already mentioned that there is nowhere to put the USB transmitter, so you'll need to carry it and perhaps the cable separately if you like to use this mouse on a laptop. Desktop users aren't likely to find this an issue.

Another bummer is there is no Bluetooth support at all, so you can't use this mouse for multiple machines with the flip of a switch. If you don't have a USB port free, you'll have to free one up and plug in or otherwise move over the dongle. (Wired works, too, but that's still a USB port.) That's not terrible, but considering the solid build, I'd probably like to use this mouse for other uses outside of just gaming.

When it comes to the physical design, I have something I dislike on each model. For the Sym model, I really like how planted it feels. However, the inside swoop on each side of the mouse, especially that under the forward and backwards buttons, is caved in a bit. What this means is that when holding it, the thumb is tucked in a bit and almost under your pointer fingers. Since I've been mousing as long as I have, I have strain wrist pain in places, and this mouse unfortunately flares up my wrist pain more than other symmetrical mice. On the other hand, the wider front makes the fingers feel really planted, and for first-person games with a lot of right or middle mouse button action, it feels great to use.

The Ergo model has the opposite problem. The ergo palm swoop feels great, and the extra tilt because of the larger left area under the thumb is also really helpful on my arm. However, the front part of the mouse is much skinnier, leaving much less area for your fingers to rest and find the buttons. So it's not as sure of a hold, making the mouse feel smaller, almost like an ultra-portable mouse. It's such a shame; I would have gladly accepted a couple of grams of weight so that the front of the mouse could keep that wider stance that the Sym model offers.

Because the Sym model causes me a bit of discomfort, I probably prefer the Ergo model. However, if you play a lot of first-person shooter games and have younger hands or have less concerns about ergonomics, then the Sym model might suit you better as it feels more planted in place.

The be quiet! Dark Perk Ergo and Sym models are excellent mice. Placing these next to their immediate competition that I've reviewed, each has something that's best about them. The Corsair Sabre v2 Ultralight is the lightest mouse I've ever used, and it's a whole 20 grams lighter than these, so I don't consider them direct competitors. The Turtle Beach Burst II Pro is a closer competitor though, with added Bluetooth and 40 more hours of battery life. When deciding between these and those, it really comes down to what matters most to you. The Dark Perk line has the best build quality of all of the mice I compared them to, and certainly the nicest charging cable and USB dongle adapter. While it's hardly an inexpensive mouse, it's actually quite price competitive when compared to other lightweight mice with an 8kHz polling rate. When playing games with it, it performed as well as I expected. I will probably keep the Ergo at my desk going forward. It's a really great mouse that gets a lot right. While I wish it was a clear slam-dunk best mouse, it's certainly a strong contender. If you are looking for a light mouse with thick and strong materials leading to a classy, high-end feel, then these Dark Perk mice get a strong recommendation.