Software

The AX5 Pro Max comes with its own lightweight software, which does not require installation. All options are accessible through five different tabs. The first page has miscellaneous settings such as profile management, polling rate adjustment (125, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, or 8000 Hz), sleep time (0–30 minutes), debounce time (0–15 ms), and lift-off distance (1/2 mm). In addition, angle snapping (on/off), MotionSync (on/off), and ripple control (on/off) are present. MotionSync synchronizes SPI reads with USB polls at the cost of a motion delay penalty of up to an entire polling interval, whereas ripple control introduces smoothing at higher CPI steps to lessen jitter, increasing motion delay in the process. The second page allows for button remapping to mouse, keyboard, media, and macro functions. The third page has a macro editor. The fourth page houses CPI adjustment settings for up to six color-coded levels, ranging from 50 to 26,000 CPI in increments of 50. Values can be put in directly by double-clicking the value instead of using the slider, but when doing so, any non-native values are not truncated to native ones. The fifth page allows setting a lighting effect for the battery charge LED.

All settings changes are saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 2 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the system tray.

Battery Life

MCHOSE cites a battery life of 100 hours when using 2.4 GHz wireless at presumably 1000 Hz and 130 hours when using Bluetooth. Even though the software does include a segmented battery charge indicator, it lacks the granularity required to gauge expected battery life.

Sleep mode is entered after 60 seconds of inactivity by default, but can be adjusted within the software.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I measured the charging speed during the constant current stage, which sits at 0.288 A when lifted and 0.271 A when not lifted. The battery has a capacity of 500 mAh and utilizes a 3-pin JST connector.