Our review of the XPG Alpha wasn't very positive. Unfortunately, the Alpha Wireless doesn't manage to improve on the Alpha.

Much like the Alpha, the Alpha Wireless aims at a budget-minded audience. Accordingly, nothing more than the bare minimum is found in the box: mouse, charging cable, and the wireless dongle. The most sorely missed item is a wireless extender, for various reasons. First of all, most systems these days lack USB 2.0 ports entirely, or only have a pair of them on the back panel. USB 3.x ports are the standard these days, which can be an issue for 2.4 GHz wireless devices that lack an extender, since USB 3.x ports may introduce interference adversely affecting wireless transmission if the dongle is plugged directly into the port. The second reason is specific to the Alpha Wireless. When I started testing the Alpha Wireless, I was quite surprised to see very large outliers in plots, even with the dongle plugged into a USB 2.0 port. Upon further investigation, I found these outliers correlating with huge polling outliers. Since none of these showed up in wired mode, one has assume that these outliers are due to dropped polls in wireless operation only. And sure enough, when trying the mouse in-game, I've experienced several moments where tracking ceased entirely. Essentially, the mouse simply stopped reporting, and only after a quarter of a second or so had passed, tracking resumed normally. The frequency of these dropouts only increased when plugging the dongle into a USB 3.x port. However, with the dongle plugged into a third-party wireless extender which was placed within 20 cm of the mouse, the issues all but disappeared, aside from very infrequent hiccups. Basically, the shorter the distance between mouse and dongle, the fewer issues there are.

Of course, I have informed XPG of my findings, but XPG has only been able to reproduce this behavior on a select few pre-production samples. Given that a second (mass production) sample likewise showed the same issues on my system, the issues thus may be host-related, though I have no way of knowing. In addition, XPG has conducted a wireless signal analysis, which showed results well within the norm. Furthermore, XPG hasn't received any user reports or service escalations regarding this issue, which may further point towards this only occurring under very specific yet undetermined conditions. In any case, XPG has confirmed to me that in the event that a user should experience any such issue, a wireless extender would be provided free of charge, and an additional fix that is supposed to address this potential issue on the firmware level is also in the works. Hence, while the issues I experienced were severe, I do think that this may indeed be an isolated case and therefore not representative of the typical user experience.

Aside from this, performance on the Alpha Wireless isn't half bad. When everything is working correctly, wireless motion delay sits at around 1 ms, which is highly competitive, polling is stable outside of the aforementioned outliers, and after a recent firmware update, CPI deviation is under control, too. Click latency in 2.4 GHz wireless operation is 2.4 ms when using the lowest debounce time setting, which likewise is very competitive, though slam-clicking will be a common occurence when using that setting, which is why opting for the 3 ms setting may be preferable, which in turn has click latency be 4.4 ms. The wireless experience, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired: The Alpha Wireless comes with a massive 900 mAh battery, bringing the weight up to a whopping 101 g, which has the Alpha Wireless feeling really heavy. Charging is reasonably fast, which is important for a battery of this capacity, but the charging cable is the same as the cable of the wired Alpha and just as stiff, which makes playing while charging a less than pleasant experience. On paper, battery life at least is serviceable, as XPG cites 60 hours with illumination and 120 hours without illumination in 2.4 GHz wireless operation. Unfortunately, I cannot confirm or deny this, since the battery charge indicator found in XPG Prime isn't granular enough. Speaking of XPG Prime: Once again, resource usage is very high, albeit not as excessively as it used to be.

Much like the wired Alpha, the Alpha Wireless is also using snappy yet light Omron switches for the main buttons, but unlike on my sample of the Alpha, the buttons don't wobble around under one's fingers when pressed. The side buttons, despite outfitted with switches from Kailh, yet again are subpar, but this time around it's the forward button suffering from ludicrous pre-travel. Considering that the PCB had been inserted correctly, we have to assume that the design itself is simply flawed, or the tolerances for the fitting are too high. The back button also emits a springy noise upon release. The scroll wheel is once again utilizing an encoder from Kailh, which is quite noisy and not particularly tactile. The feet are the same, too, and still are decent at best.

All in all, and even if we assume that the issues with wireless transmission are isolated to my specific system and thus may not be experienced by everyone, making a case for the Alpha Wireless is difficult: high weight, a stiff charging cable, and resource-heavy software aren't exactly selling points, and everything else is mostly just decent. Furthermore, when looking at other wireless mice priced the same such as the Fantech Helios XD3 V2 or Helios Go XD5, the Alpha Wireless simply cannot compete. Hence, unless one is interested in this specific shape, the Alpha Wireless wouldn't be my first pick.