The Zowie EC shape is easily among the most copied in the history of gaming mice, and for good reason, as one will be hard-pressed to find someone who would be unable to use that shape on some level at least. As such, it comes as no surprise that the VT3Pro Max is closely modeled after the EC, placing itself somewhere in between the EC1 and EC2 in terms of size, not unlike the Pulsar Xlite Wireless. At 63 g, the VT3Pro Max can't quite compete with the similarly-sized Razer DeathAdder V3 Hyperspeed at 53 g, though one also needs to keep in mind that its 800 mAh battery has more than double the size. In terms of build quality, my sample at least is a mixed bag. There is no rattle when shaking, but when applying lateral pressure, creaking becomes immediately noticeable, and the entire left side also flexes a decent bit, to where the side buttons can be made to essentially contract. However, actuating the side buttons by pressing below them isn't possible, and I've found that the creaking largely subsides when giving the mouse a good squeeze, albeit only for a time.

As far as internals go, the VT3Pro Max is basically no different from the VT9 Air. Rapoo has opted for Omron's trusty old D2FC-F-K (60 M) mechanical switches, and owing to the buttons being pre-tensioned, actuation is snappy yet decently light. That said, button response is slightly marred by moderate amounts of pre-travel, though lateral movement is kept to a low level, same as post-travel. The side buttons once again have been outfitted with surface-mounted switches from Kailh, and these score with low pre and post-travel, along with even actuation. The only mildly irritating part is that feedback will turn to a higher pitch when pressing the back button towards the rear. The scroll wheel encoder likewise comes from Kailh (GE 2.0), which suffers from high noise levels, and the individual steps aren't particularly well-separated, either. The feet are standard black-dyed PTFE fare, though glide is good nonetheless. A replacement set is included, coupled with a set of grip tape.

Much like the VT9 Air, the VT3Pro Max utilizes a Realtek RTL8762GKH MCU, but pairs it with PixArt's latest PAW3950 sensor. As far as performance goes, this has basically no effect whatsoever, but it does provide some additional niceties. Aside from native sensor angle adjustment, which is accessible through the software, a specific glass-tracking mode can be enabled, which improves sensor tracking on clear glass surfaces. That said, since this setting effectively forces this mode on, it should only be used when exclusively using clear glass as a tracking surface. Furthermore, CPI adjustment is possible in increments of 10, allowing one to correct any CPI deviation in a more granular fashion compared to the previous PAW3395. By default, deviation is already low, so achieving flawless CPI accuracy can be done with ease. As far as general tracking goes, the VT3Pro Max still has the same quirks and issues the VT9 Air had. Despite ripple control (smoothing) explicitly being turned off in the software, higher CPI steps exhibit increased motion delay compared to lower ones, and this becomes even more pronounced in wireless operation. From what I can tell, smoothing curiously enough indeed isn't actually enabled, and enabling it does add further motion delay. Another issue pertains to the HID descriptor, which is limited to 12-bit in wireless operation only. As such, if a report contains more than 2047 counts, a malfunction ensues. This means that in practice, higher CPI steps (10,000+ CPI) effectively become unusable on the VT3Pro Max, which certainly isn't ideal.

Polling is largely stable on the VT3Pro Max, except for polling rates at and below 1000 Hz in wireless operation, which show elevated levels of noise. In addition, 4000 Hz in wireless operation has an issue where off-period polls show up periodically, albeit only with MotionSync disabled. Clearly, this is a bug, and 4000 Hz appears somewhat broken in general, as motion delay is a decent bit worse compared to 2000 Hz. Other than that, I haven't found any major issues, and the target interval is always hit, even at 8000 Hz wireless. The latter is labeled an experimental setting, which certainly is an apt description, as SPI timing jitter is highly pronounced, and motion delay falls behind 2000 Hz even, presumably due to a larger buffer for retries being used. These issues aside, motion delay is on a good level, and sits at an advantage of 1.0 ms over the Logitech G403 (control subject) in wired operation and 1.1 ms in wireless operation at 1000 and 2000 Hz, as long as MotionSync stays disabled. Enabling MotionSync will increase motion delay to varying degrees, depending on polling rate.

Click latency hasn't changed much compared to the VT9 Air. Debounce time adjustment works now, though there is little reason not to set it to the lowest value of 1 ms, as slam-clicking, which describes inadvertent button actuation upon resetting the mouse, does not occur even at that debounce time setting. In wired mode, click latency averages 3.2 ms, though curiously enough, standard deviation is much higher than on the VT9 Air, for seemingly no good reason. In wireless mode, click latency will be 3.6 ms at 1000 Hz and 3.0 ms at 8000 Hz, with the rest landing between those two values. While these numbers are decent enough, click latency in wired operation falls massively short of other 8000 Hz wired mice such as the Endgame Gear OP1 8K or Razer Viper 8K, which all average 0.1 ms no problem, and even other "hybrid" wired/wireless mice such as the ASUS ROG Keris II Ace or Glorious Model O/D 2 Pro 8K/4Khz Edition typically reside in the 0.3-0.4 ms zone. In wireless operation, the nominally good values are marred by so-called idle delay. That is, if there has not been any button or sensor activity for at least 3 ms, the latency for the next click will be increased by roughly 3 ms. A similar behavior has been observed on mice using the CX52850 MCU, though its extent was less significant than on the VT3Pro Max. Typically, this issue would be encountered in tactical FPS, where not moving the mouse or pressing a button for three seconds is common when holding corners or other sight lines.

Rapoo advertises 200 hours of battery life, though no indication is given at which polling rate. Conceivably, 1000 Hz is the most likely candidate, and given the 800 mAh battery capacity, I consider this value quite plausible. While the software does feature a percentage-based battery life indicator with single-digit accuracy, its accuracy appears to be limited, which is why I'm unable to confirm or deny the figure given by Rapoo. At a bit more than 0.3 A, charging isn't neither particularly slow nor speedy, though the charging cable is the bigger hindrance in this context. Unlike the VT9 Air cable, which was plenty flexible, this one is rather stiff, to where playing while charging may feel restrictive, and of course, this extends to using the VT3Pro Max as a wired mouse, too. Speaking of the software, Rapoo's "GameDev" has all relevant options and more, and apart from a minor bug when manually entering CPI values, I've found it to be stable and functional. That said, at close to 200 MB, it certainly isn't among the most lightweight mouse software, though on the plus side, at least all processes are terminated upon exiting the application.

Overall, the VT3Pro Max is a decent enough mouse, despite being a bit worse than the VT9 Air in several key areas, and not improving on the issues the VT9 Air already had. At the same time, there is no shortage of EC-type shapes on the market whatsoever, and the VT3Pro Max has a hard time differentiating itself from the better offers available, be they from Pulsar, Glorious, or others. That said, for $59.99, there are worse mice than the VT3Pro Max, so for value-minded folks, the VT3Pro Max is at least worth considering.