Build Quality

Overall build quality is very solid. There is no rattle when shaking the mouse. When applying lateral pressure, no creaking or flexing of the shell can be observed. Lastly, accidental clicks when slamming down the mouse do not occur.

Buttons

Main buttons on the Strix Impact III are good. Pre-travel is moderate to high, but post-travel low, resulting in a somewhat mushy and muted button response. While the buttons are visually separated from the shell, lateral button movement is minimal and needs to be provoked. Button stiffness is medium. ROG Micro Switches (70 M) switches are installed by default, but can be replaced with suitable 3-pin mechanical switches. Changing the switch is as simple as pulling the old one out and putting the new one in.


Side buttons are good. Post-travel is low on either button, but the back button in particular suffers from moderate pre-travel and uneven actuation, and both buttons sound weirdly sharp and unpleasant. Button size and placement are good as actuation is possible rather easily by rolling one's thumb over these. A set of surface-mounted switches from Kailh (yellow plunger) is used for these.

At the bottom of the mouse is a button for cycling through the set CPI levels, which works just fine. A seemingly unbranded tactile switch is used for this one.

Scroll Wheel

The scroll wheel is good to very good. Noise levels are generally under control, but scrolling up introduces an additional noise of the unidentifiable and rather unpleasant kind. Tactility, on the other hand, is good, with nicely separated steps allowing for controlled scrolling. The encoder comes from Kailh (gray) and has a height of 10 mm. The middle (scroll wheel) click requires medium force for actuation. A seemingly unbranded tactile switch is used here.

Surface

While the sides have a riffle pattern, the main buttons feature a slightly rougher matte surface, whereas the back portion features a smooth matte surface. Grip is fine on either of these surfaces, and neither attracts fingerprints, dirt, or the likes too much, with the exception of the riffle pattern, which does pick up dirt more easily, and removing it can be difficult. All in all, very good materials.

Button Sound Test

Disassembly

Disassembling the Strix Impact III is easy. Above the rear set of feet, a sticker needs to be removed on each side, which exposes two screws. After removing those, the top and bottom shell can be separated, but doing so may require wedging a credit card (or the like) in. Both the screws and their sockets are of high quality, so disassembling the mouse multiple times shouldn't be a problem.

The internal design is fairly straightforward. The side buttons sit on their own PCB connected through a ribbon cable to the main PCB and vertically slotted into a plastic assembly that is part of the bottom shell. An auxiliary PCB next to the scroll wheel provides illumination and is likewise connected through a ribbon cable. All PCBs are fairly thin, and five screws in total are used to affix the main PCB to the bottom shell. The MCU is a rear-mounted STM32L412C8U6, whose datasheet can be found here. Production date for the main PCB is the 26th week of 2022.


As for the soldering and general quality of the PCB, I'm unable to find any noteworthy flaws.