ASUS ROG Strix Impact II

Two years is already a long time in the real word, but in the world of gaming mice, it's an eternity. When it released in 2020, the Strix Impact II was a genuinely good budget option that even offered premium features, such as hot-swappable main button switches. In particular, the Strix Impact II shined with its excellent main buttons, dependable sensor, and solid yet reasonably lightweight build. The main criticisms were the stiff cable and high click latency. Naturally, one would expect that these two items would be addressed for a new color variant SKU released two years later, but sadly, that is not the case. These days, people expect a soft, braided cable, along with a click latency well below 10 ms, both of which the Strix Impact II Moonlight White is unable to provide. Click latency being untouched in particular is difficult to understand as lowering it would not require a hardware change whatsoever, but instead simply adjusting a few values within the firmware. Now, that would be less of an issue if the Moonlight White would be offered at an accordingly lower price, but that is not the case, either. ASUS still charges $49.99 for an essentially two-year-old mouse, which isn't even close to being competitive when looking at the countless offerings with better cables, better sensors, and lower click latency around this price point these days.

There’s a lot of cool features on this mouse, such as the slightly transparent body, the individually sprung LMB/RMB, hot-swappable switches, and so on. It all adds up to a really balanced and very nice mouse. It looks great, it feels great and the performance was flawless, what’s not to love about that!?

The mechanical switches used for the main left and right clicks are one of the first parts that usually fail in a mouse. While it's possible to open a mouse and solder in new switches, most customers opt to simply get a new one instead. Doing so is a waste of resources, however, and ASUS' approach surely is a better one. Thanks to their push-socket design, the ROG Strix Impact II allows for putting in new switches without requiring any soldering. Even the mouse feet are left intact due to a customer-friendly design (exposed screws). While hot-swappable main switches have been present on ASUS mice for years, it still remains an exclusive feature and is therefore deserving of an Innovation award.