Software

The software for the Makalu Max is called Base Camp and used for other Mountain products as well. By and large, the software works well enough, but it does have an above average appetite for system resources, and several settings, including Button Response Time and lift-off distance adjustment, seemingly are not functional. Furthermore, settings aren't always correctly retained between launches of the software, or switching between wired to wireless.

There are separate pages for profiles, lighting, key binds, macros, and general mouse settings. All buttons can be rebound, either to mouse, keyboard, macro, media, or OS functions. CPI adjustment is possible for up to five levels and at a range of 50–19,000 CPI. According to specifications, the 3370 supports CPI adjustment in increments of 50 until 10,000 CPI and in increments of 100 at and above 10,100 CPI, but on the Makalu Max, manually entered values are often falsely truncated. For instance, 4950 CPI is truncated to 5000 CPI, which makes it impossible to set this step altogether. Button Response Time (i.e., debounce time, which directly affects click latency) can be adjusted from 1–32 ms, in steps of 1. My testing suggests that this setting is not functional. Further settings include polling rate adjustment (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz) and lift-off distance (low/high), the latter of which too appears to not be functional. Lastly, the idle time needed to pass before the mouse enters "soft sleep" (disables only LEDs) and "deep sleep" (disables everything) can be configured individually.

All settings are updated live and saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 303 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 62 MB keep running. Manually stopping BaseCampService will prevent Base Camp from starting, unless that service is manually started again.

Lighting

The Makalu Max has a single physical lighting zone, which is a loop around the scroll wheel. Four pre-defined lighting effects are available: Static, Color Wave, Breathing, and Reactive. In addition, a custom effect may be created. Brightness can be adjusted, and for most effects, the colors are adjustable as well. The lighting effects may be synchronized with other devices, and turning illumination off entirely is also possible.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Below is a short demonstration video in which I go through the Color Wave and Breathing (Rainbow) lighting effects:

Battery Life

Mountain states a maximum battery life of up to 80 hours, though no indication is given which conditions (polling rate, illumination) this value applies to. The software includes a percentage-based battery life indicator with seemingly single-digit accuracy, but its readings tend to change essentially at random. That is, the value could change by up to 5% simply between turning the mouse off and on again, and I even got to see a reading of 139% once. Hence, giving an accurate assessment is virtually impossible. For the record, after 8 hours of continuous use with RGB lighting enabled, the battery indicator stood at 27%, which would suggest a total battery life of slightly more than 10 hours.

The idle time which needs to be pass before the mouse enters a sleep state is user-configurable within the software. Having the software open will prevent the mouse from entering any sleep state.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I measured the charging speed during the constant current stage to be around 0.498 A, which is just short of the USB current limit. The battery has a capacity of 1000 mAh.