// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
Do you need a mouse with an 8K polling rate?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
For years, the standard polling rate for gaming peripherals — mice, keyboards, etc. — has been 1,000 Hz, which equates to a delay, or latency, of 1 millisecond. This is significantly higher than the standard polling rate for non-gaming peripherals, by the way, which is 125 Hz (8ms latency) — in fact, it's eight times as fast.
Well, over the last couple of years, gaming companies have been asking: What if we made the polling rate even faster than 1,000 Hz? What if we made it eight times as fast?
And now just about every single ultra-lightweight, esports-oriented gaming mouse that comes out has up to an 8,000 Hz polling rate. And, of course, this raises the question every time: Do you actually need a mouse with an 8,000 Hz polling rate?
Polling rate is, simply put, how often your mouse communicates with your PC. That is, how often it reports mouse movement and clicks to your CPU. At a standard gaming mouse polling rate of 1,000 Hz, your mouse is communicating with your PC 1,000 times per second — or, once every millisecond. Hence, a 1,000 Hz polling rate means 1ms latency. At a standard non-gaming mouse polling rate of 125 Hz, your mouse is only communicating with your PC once every eight milliseconds — or an 8 ms latency. At a polling rate of 8,000 Hz, your mouse is communicating with your PC once every 0.125 milliseconds — a 0.125 ms latency.
Polling rate affects both mouse movement (if the polling rate is low enough, mouse movement might be jerky) and, more importantly, click latency — you want your mouse clicks to translate instantly.
But it's important to keep this in perspective, because higher polling rates yield increasingly diminishing returns. Going from 125 Hz to 1,000 Hz is definitely noticeable — it cuts your latency from eight milliseconds to just one. But while going from 1,000 Hz to 8,000 Hz cuts your latency by the same factor, we're now talking about fractions of a millisecond. The average gamer can tell if their mouse is lagging by several milliseconds, but can they tell if their mouse is lagging by less than one millisecond?
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Well, inability to distinguish whether your mouse is lagging by 0.875 milliseconds aside, there are some potential downsides to ultra-high polling rates. The main one being that your system may not be able to handle it. A higher polling rate means that the mouse is communicating with your PC more frequently, so this can affect CPU performance — if you don't have a pretty solid gaming CPU, you may see more of a performance hit than is worth the infinitesimal lower latency (which may not even end up being lower if performance issues cause latency). And if you don't have a gaming monitor with a high refresh rate (at least 240 Hz, if not higher), any perceived smoother mouse movement will be just that — perceived. (Of course, with a higher refresh rate you'll need an even better system to keep up with that and the 8,000 Hz polling rate, and... well, you get the point).
Another downside to an 8,000 Hz polling rate is battery life, because it drops significantly on wireless gaming mice. The battery life of the Corsair Sabre v2 Pro Wireless is a pretty impressive 120 hours at 1,000 Hz, but this drops to just 21 hours at 8,000 Hz. The Razer Basilisk V3 Pro 35K gets up to 150 hours at 1,000 Hz, and just 28 hours at 8,000 Hz. The Turtle Beach Burst II Pro does a little better, going from 150 hours at 1,000 Hz to 40 hours at 8,000 Hz, but it's still a significant drop.