The Ultimate Li'l Magnum! 15-gram Fingertip Mouse? Using The Corsair Sabre Pro V2 or Dareu A950 Hardware

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I have been patiently waiting for the release of the Corsair Sabre Pro V2. It is high-performance, ultralight gaming mouse at a reasonable price from a major manufacturer. You could probably pick one up off the counter at Best Buy, Target, or Walmart. I am super excited about the idea of being able to snag a donor mouse for your custom 15-gram fingertip mouse build near your home.

Li'l Magnum! with Corsair Sabbre Pro V2 guts

The specs are great: up to 8-KHz polling, and 30,000 DPI sensor, nice mechanical microswitches, and a web configurator that works on Linux. I said that the price is reasonable, and I do believe $100 is a reasonable price for a gaming mouse. The problem I have here is buying a brand new mouse for $100 only to immediately take it apart to stick in a 3-gram 3D-printed shell.

You could spend $60 more on a 20-gram G-Wolves Fenrir Asym. The specs are comparable, but you get an injection-molded shell with side buttons. I don’t think the extra five grams are a deal breaker, and you’re getting something that is ready to go. Though you might have to pay a bit for shipping.

If I were in competition, and I do not feel that I am, I would consider the 20-gram G-Wolves mouse my most direct competitor. Probably because it is the mouse I would try next if I had to buy an off-the-shelf mouse.

You don’t have to buy the mouse from Corsair!

I am excited about supporting a modern Corsair mouse. It is $100 today, but there will be sales, and I expect it will be on the shelves for a few years. Someone will stumble across this blog post in four years, realize they already have an old Corsair Sabre collecting dust in their parts bin, and they might breathe new life into that mouse. That is all good news for the future.

What about today? Someone in our Discord community informed me that the Dareu A950 Air probably uses the exact same PCB and electronics as my Corsair mouse. Not only that, but when I posted my progress on Reddit, someone in the comments pointed out that their Dareu A950 Wing also uses the same PCB.

Li'l Magnum! test prints

The blue parts are partial prints to correctly position the screw holes. The yellow prints are complete test prints that I used to align and set the height of the button plungers.

What’s even better than that? The friendly person on Reddit printed a Li’l Magnum! shell and said that their Dareu A950 Wing’s components are a perfect fit for the Li’l Magnum! shell!

The price tracker says the Dareu A950 Wing is usually $64 with 2-day shipping on Amazon, and it has gone as low as $50 in the past. This brings the price down into the territory of the VXE R1 mice, but you get upgraded to lighter electronics, a better sensor, and faster polling rates.

The Dareu A950 at $63 easily makes for the best value Li’l Magnum! with the best specs so far, at least on paper.

Do you need the lightest mouse we can get?

No. I don’t think anyone should be working ridiculously hard and giving up features or strength to make the absolute lightest mouse possible. I am personally just about as happy with my $23 VXE R1 SE Li’l Magnum! at 25.3 grams as I am with my $100 Corsair Sabre Li’l Magnum! at 15.4 grams.

It is difficult to do a completely blind test at my, because the heavier mouse is extremely obvious every time you recenter your mouse. It isn’t more challenging to life the mouse, it is just easy for your brain to register that one mouse weighs 66% more than the other.

The important thing is that I forget that my mouse got heavier after 15 minutes of gaming. My suspicion is that as long as your mouse isn’t too much heavier than your thumb, going any lighter is going to have extremely diminishing returns.

Can it be fun to chase grams? Absolutely. If you enjoy that sort of thing, go for it.

We don’t have a reliable third-party latency test of the Corsair or Dareu mouse!

I don’t think this is terribly important. The cheapest gaming mice manage to come in at something under 1.5 milliseconds of click latency.

There is a full review with latency testing of the MCHOSE L7 Ultra at rtings. It was tested at 0.9 ms of click latency when wired, or 1.4 ms over the 8-KHz wireless link. This is a mouse supported by the Li’l Magnum!, and it is neat that we have a mouse with actual testing.

In practice, I can’t tell the difference between my Li’l Magnum!s with a MCHOSE L7 Ultra, VXE Mad R, or the Corsair Sabre. They all feel the same. If I lost all my Li’l Magnum! builds in a fire tonight, I would order a Dareu A950 Wing from my hotel. I don’t care that it hasn’t been tested by a reputable third party.

I am grumpy about Omron optical switches

My VXE Mad R and MCHOSE L7 both use Omron switches. Out of those four switches, two felt really crummy out of the box. Someone in our Discord community reported a bummer of a right click switch on their L7 as well.

I’ve replaced my disappointing Omron switches with fresh switches, but even the best Omron switches don’t feel great to me. The worst part is that they aren’t compatible with older 3-pin mechanical switches, so I can’t just grab my favorite switches and solder them onto a Mad R or L7. I just have to hope I can find a pair of nice Omron switches.

Li'l Magnum! with Corsair Sabre screw

Those tiny M1.5 screws that ship with the Corsair mouse don’t have a lot of bite, and the Phillips size is tiny and fragile. You do have to screw it down snug and flat, but take your time and make sure you don’t strip the screws!

I have been waiting patiently for a replacement for my 16.4-gram VXE Mad R. I wanted to be down under 20 grams, keep my 8-KHz polling, but I wanted mechanical switches. The Corsair Sabre is definitely the successor to my own Mad R, and it is even more exciting that the Dareu A950 Wing manages to come in at the same price point while beating the Mad R on weight by more than a gram.

I am not an aficionado of mouse switches. My favorite of my collection of budget gaming mice are probably the blue shell red dot switches in my VXE R1 SE, because they are the heaviest and loudest. The clear shell white dot switches in the Corsair sound and feel like they land somewhere between the blue shell switches and the pink shell white dot switches in the VXE R1 Pro.

I am not unhappy with any of these mechanical switches.

Which Li’l Magnum! should you build?!

The tariffs in the US are really bumming me out. They haven’t ruined budget fingertip mice, but they’ve goofed up the floor. You used to be able to build a 25-gram VXE R1 SE for barely over $20 or a 21-gram VXE R1 Pro for just under $30. Either will cost you over $40 today in the United States, and that puts you inches away from a Dareu A950 Wing, which really is looking like the ultimate Li’l Magnum! now.

First of all, I think you should build with what you have. I have designed Li’l Magnum! shells to fit any of the VXE R1 models, the VXE Mad R, all the MCHOSE L7 models, and even a weird $9.60 mouse from Amazon. The best mouse to build your Li’l Magnum! around might be a mouse that you already have!

If you are outside the United States, you might still be able to snag a VXE R1 SE, R1, or R1 Pro for less than half the price of a Dareu A950 Wing. Those all make delightful fingertip mice with fantastic specs, especially for the price, and especially if you can get the models with the smaller 250-mAh battery.

If you are in the United States, I think you should spend the extra $20 or $30 and build your Li’l Magnum! around the Dareu A950 Wing. That is a small price to pay to upgrade to the best available components for the lightest possible Li’l Magnum! build.

I designed the first Li’l Magnum! shell so I could avoid paying $170 for a Zeromouse shell and the Razer mouse to steal the guts from. I didn’t want to pay that much. I expected that I would wind up using it for a week, hating it, and it would wind up collecting dust in the back of a drawer for the next five years. It also helped that the Zeromouse is never in stock.

That isn’t the case, though. I love my ultralight fingertip mouse. I will never give it up, and I am excited that you now have the ability to make the same discovery as I did. You don’t have to pay $160 for a G-Wolves Fenrir or Zeromouse Blade to do give it a try.

Verion 1.0 was just uploaded!

I wrote a lot of words here the other day, because the version 0.9 upload wasn’t quite ready. It was a serviceable mouse, but I created a problem while fixing another. The Corsair PCB is extremely thin and super easy to accidentally flex, and the microswitch pins were getting hung up on some of the supports when installing the PCB. That made it too easy to break your PCB, so I did my best to move those supports to make some room.

Moving those supports out of the way allowed the PCB to flex too much when pressing the left click, and that made the click feel slightly mushy. Only just barely. I might not have noticed if I didn’t have four other Li’l Magnum! mice near my desk to check it against. It didn’t feel terrible, but it didn’t feel like it should.

I added about 0.1 grams of bracing under the left click, and it is now extremely solid. Version 1.0 is up on Printables and MakerWorld, and it should be available in my Tindie store by the time you are reading this.

Why should I even buy this from your Tindie store?!

I would really prefer that you didn’t. You’re a gamer. You’re a geek. You should own a 3D printer, and the Bambu A1 Mini is only $250. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to pick up an awesome new hobby, this might be it.

Maybe you don’t have room for a printer. Maybe that’s out of your price range. Maybe you just don’t want to fart around with figuring this sort of stuff out. Maybe you don’t have a friend with a 3D printer.

Li'l Magnum!

My prices are a definitely higher than random places on the Internet where you can just have any STL file printed for you. I have dialed-in print settings for the Li’l Magnum!, so I get you the lightest shell possible. I use multimaterial supports, so you get perfect clicks. I also promise that when you order the correct shell for your mouse that it will actually fit your mouse’s PCB, and I will attempt to adjust the model or give you a refund if the shell doesn’t work with your mouse.

You are also funding the development of future Li’l Magnum! models and improvements. I am trying very hard not to become a collector of gaming mice, but I am already up to having seven different Li’l Magnum! mice on hand. I don’t want to spend more of my own money on mice that I will never use, but I do want to make ultralight fingertip mice more accessible to everyone.

Conclusion

I am excited. I’ve been waiting for the right mouse to build my ultimate Li’l Magnum!, and it is here. When looking at the photos of the PCB before the hardware arrived, I expected the Corsair to tick every box except the weight. I figured this would be a gram or two heavier, and I was delighted to learn that this extra thing PCB wound up being the lightest set of guts that I’ve used so far.

I think every FPS enthusiast should have the opportunity to try an ultralight fingertip mouse. I don’t expect everyone to enjoy the experience as much as I do, but I for one can’t imagine going back to a big, heavy mouse ever again.

What do you think? Do you own a different interesting gaming mouse that you feel deserves a Li’l Magnum! model? I bet we could work out a deal that gets you a free Li’l Magnum! shell while also helping me avoid collecting yet another mouse. Are you already using a fingertip mouse? What do you think of the experience? Tell us about it in the comments, or join the Butter, What?! Discord community to chat with me about it!

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