Roughly two years ago, XPG released the PRIMER, which wasn't very good. While the Alpha is a better effort, it still falls a bit short of the competition.

For the Alpha, PixArt's PAW3335 sensor is used, which is primarily intended for wireless applications but can work well for wired mice if implemented properly. For the most part, this is the case on the Alpha, but there are a couple of caveats. Due to there not being any smoothing, motion delay is low across the board, and polling is stable for the most part. Roughly half of the available RGB lighting effects do introduce instability, however, and thus should be avoided. Originally, the Alpha also suffered from massive CPI deviation, but this has been rectified in a recent firmware update, and most steps are decently accurate now. As for click latency, the Alpha sits at 4.7 ms at the default and 1.5 ms at the lowest debounce time setting. The latter does introduce slam-clicking, which is why opting for the 3 ms setting may be preferred, which nets a click latency of 3.7 ms.

The buttons are of generally decent quality on the Alpha. Instead of the ubiquitous Kailh GM 8.0 switches, XPG opted for trusty Omron switches on the Alpha, which provide snappy yet light actuation. The button design itself, however, is less than optimal, which has the buttons move under the fingers when pressed. This could either be due to a flawed design or poor QC on my unit, but wobbly buttons like these certainly aren't ideal either way. For the side buttons, switches from Kailh are used, which is a better than expected choice at this price point. While the switches themselves are fine, the side-button construction isn't. On my sample, the back button in particular had significant pre-travel. Upon disassembling the mouse, I found myself quite surprised to see the side-button PCB not inserted correctly into the top shell. Fixing this, however, resulted in pre-travel being even more significant, which points towards the design being flawed altogether. Only a single screw is used to fixate the side-button PCB, which is needlessly large due to sharing tooling with the Alpha Wireless, where the side-button PCB also has the battery attached to it. Speaking of needlessly large PCBs, the same applies to the main PCB of the Alpha as well. A more efficient PCB design may have allowed the Alpha to get down to the 70 g weight range instead of the current 80 g. On the bright side, the scroll wheel encoder likewise comes from Kailh and scores with appreciably low noise levels and decently tactile scrolling.

On the Alpha, the cable is detachable. The shell has two notches slotting into the connector for stabilization, but this does more bad than good. Coupled with the mouse USB port being recessed into the shell, finding a replacement USB Type-C to Type-A cable that actually fits may prove difficult, which largely defeats the entire point of a detachable cable. This is doubly problematic considering that the cable is supremely stiff, so you'd definitely want to replace it for a more flexible one if possible. A better design choice would have been to place the notches on the cable connector itself, as then pretty much any random Type-C cable would fit. The feet are of the standard black-dyed variation, and while glide isn't bad, it's not particularly good, either, and a set of replacement feet is nowhere to be found.

As for the software, XPG Prime is a real nuisance. Not only does the installer not allow specifying an installation directory, the user is also prompted to create an account every single time Prime is opened. In addition to that, RAM usage is high, and CPU usage goes up whenever the preview for an RGB lighting effect is active. That said, CPU usage has been lowered to less egregious levels in the most recent version of Prime. On-board memory is present at least, allowing one to somewhat circumvent the entire ordeal.

Around the $40 mark, there aren't many mice with this type of shape, and the Alpha would be a decent offering if it weren't for the absurdly stiff cable. Basically, the cable is stiff to where getting a replacement is pretty much a necessity, and this quickly brings the price into a territory where one is better off buying a mouse that doesn't require purchasing substitute components to begin with. Hence, I'd only take the Alpha into consideration if cable stiffness is no concern at all.