On paper, the Clutch GM51 Lightweight Wireless is a compelling offering: On top of a mouse capable of both 2.4 GHz wireless and Bluetooth operation, you even get a dedicated charging dock for $99.99 in total, whereas Razer charges $129.99 for the DeathAdder V2 Pro alone, and the charging dock would come on top with another $49.99. That said, once we look beyond pricing, the GM51 Wireless loses most of its appeal.

Being equipped with PixArt's latest PAW3395 sensor and a Nordic nRF52833 MCU, the GM51 should perform well in theory. Unfortunately, this isn't really the case. The single biggest issue is motion delay. The software includes a setting called "Speed Shift," which allows one to choose between three different "gears," which modify the framerate scaling curve. The default setting is called "Gear 1" and has the slowest scaling, whereas higher settings result in sensor framerate ramping up more rapidly when moving from a standstill, though this does result in a higher power draw and therefore lower battery life. Even fully ramped-up, Gear 1 fails to be anything but delayed, and thus should be avoided altogether. The highest setting, which is called "Gear 3," performs slightly better, but most of the time, significant motion delay is present nonetheless. Once smoothing enters the picture, which is at and above 9000 CPI, things collapse entirely, and at 26,000 CPI, motion delay approaches 30 ms, which is unusably laggy even on the desktop. Overall, the GM51 just feels terribly unresponsive during use, regardless of whether it is used wired or wireless. On the launch firmware, polling stability used to be terrible as well, but thankfully, this has been addressed in a firmware update. Likewise, elevated SPI timing jitter used to be present, but on the latest firmware, MotionSync is forcefully enabled regardless of the setting within the software, which takes care of that jitter. Lastly, click latency on the launch firmware also used to be ridiculously high, but the latest firmware has corrected this, and wireless click latency now sits at a perfectly decent 5.5 ms.

Performance issues aside, the wireless experience on the GM51 Wireless is pleasing. As already mentioned, a dedicated charging dock is included, which also doubles as a wireless extender in conjunction with the wireless dongle, and which allows for convenient yet somewhat sluggish charging at around 0.160 A. When time is of the essence, using the charging cable plugged into a USB 3.x port is recommended, which pushes the charging speed in excess of 0.5 A at times. Given this highly impressive showing, the cable not being particularly flexible isn't much of an issue in my book, as charging won't take long anyway. The battery has a capacity of 550 mAh, which, according to MSI, should permit battery life of up to 150 hours without illumination. Unfortunately, MSI does not indicate whether this applies to 2.4 GHz or Bluetooth operation. In my testing, with the mouse in 2.4 GHz operation, set to the highest "gear," a polling rate of 1000 Hz, and full illumination, a battery life of roughly 50 hours can be expected, which is highly respectable. As a result of the larger battery, the Clutch GM51 Lightweight Wireless isn't particularly lightweight at 86 g, even though the same could be said about the otherwise very similar ASUS ROG Gladius III Wireless at 89 g. The feet are made of white-dyed pure PTFE and glide well.

For the main buttons, MSI has opted for Omron switches, which score with a snappy yet not overly heavy button response, and the lack of lateral button movement despite a split-button design being used deserves particular praise. Huano switches are used for the side buttons, which too have pleasantly low pre and post-travel, but their design presents an issue. The GM51 Wireless is a very tall mouse, which has the side buttons sit equally high as a result, and those who like to actuate them by rolling their thumb across in particular may find the side buttons entirely out of reach. This is further complicated by their physical design, as the buttons have a triangular shape that has them stick out, which is done for aesthetic reasons alone without any functional purpose. The scroll fares better: Scrolling up in particular is noisy, but the individual steps are quite nicely separated, resulting in good tactility and controlled scrolling. Unlike on my sample of the GM51, the scroll wheel switch doesn't actuate as easily on the GM51 Wireless, which may be by design or simply resultant of unit-to-unit variance.

As one would expect, the GM51 Wireless is compatible with MSI Center, MSI's software suite for all things MSI. Between relatively high resource usage, a whole host of processes running even if MSI Center hasn't even been launched, frequent crashes and a certain fondness for entering infinite loading screens, MSI Center makes for a grating experience. Much like on the wired GM51, CPI adjustment is restricted to increments of 100 despite the PAW3395 sensor allowing for increments of 50, which is an entirely artificial UI limitation. Furthermore, at first, I haven't been able to install the Mystic Light module, which controls RGB lighting, as it simply didn't show up in MSI Center, and no amount of troubleshooting was able to change that. Ultimately, MSI managed to solve this on their end, but it does serve as an example of how buggy MSI Center can be. After a subsequent install, MSI Center also rendered the media buttons on my keyboard broken, which certainly isn't ideal from a user standpoint.

Overall, aside from its pricing and the inclusion of a charging dock, the Clutch GM51 Lightweight Wireless doesn't have a lot going for it. Motion delay is simply too high for a gaming mouse, and issues with the software make it hard to recommend the GM51 Wireless, especially against stiff competition.