Mountain Makalu 67 Gaming Mouse

 One-Minute Review 

Completing the range of products on offer from Mountain - besides the Mountain Everest Max and Everest 60 gaming keyboards - is Makalu 67 gaming mouse ($60). Going with the theme of naming products after mountain tops (which of course makes sense for a company that calls itself ‘Mountain’), Makalu is the fifth highest mountain in the world. However, for its gaming mouse, they aren’t aiming to be the fifth. Far from it.

The Mountain Makalu 67 is by and large an excellent gaming mouse, and it’s feature packed to compete with the other big brands in the market right now. With just 57g of weight, a neat rib cage-like design, an RGB ring around the scroll wheel, Omron switches and Pixart’s PAW 3370 sensor, the Makalu 67 is an excellent mouse for FPS players, and most gamers in general.

It is a bit on the chunkier side, however, with a large bump in the middle and extra width on the sides, so it may not be ideal for smaller hands or those that like to use the fingertip style grip while playing. 

 Design and Features 

The Makalu 67 comes in two colorways: black, and white. We received the white version, which looks quite sleek, and has touches of black from the side and DPI buttons, as well as the scroll wheel. It’s quite a handsome package, however we are not sure if the white coating will catch oils and smudges from your fingers overtime (our daily driver, the Razer Viper V2 Pro certainly did). After around two weeks of use, we didn’t see any damage to the paint but that may not be enough time to know how resistant the coating is.

Speaking of resistance, Mountain has treated the outer shell with water-repellent coating, which as they say, should prevent “happy little accidents” from turning into major disasters. So, if you have a habit of eating at your desk, the Makalu should offer some assistance in reducing the damage. The rib cage-like design also offers enough passages to clean the innards of the mouse with canned air if need be.

The rib cage-style of the outer shell is an interesting design, and much different from the honeycomb styles we have seen on ultra lightweight mice. Mountain has a patent for it, which they claim provides the mould with enough strength without needing a subframe to hold it all together. In practice, the difference is hard to notice from the other designs, of course, but in terms of sturdiness, the mouse feels extremely well built (something we have come to expect from Mountain). The device doesn’t creak or groan under pressure, and there’s very little wobble on the main left and right switches. 

The Makalu 67 is supremely comfortable to use, but its large body caters more towards medium to large-sized hands. The mice measure at 126mm from front to back, 62mm across, and with the posterior jutting out at 70mm. It also has a sizable hump in the middle at 43mm, and slopes towards the primary buttons at 15mm. As such, those with a palm style grip should feel right at home, but any grip style that doesn’t particularly use the palm might feel a bit too uncomfortable. 

The round rectangular cut-outs on the outer shell doesn’t annoy while using the mouse, and Mountain has smartly used the same design pattern (albeit in slightly larger form) to act as grips for the thumb and the ring finger. It’s a clever bit of design, because the plastic body is smooth to touch but the indentations caused by the pattern helps give it a grip that works quite well. We had no issues gripping the mouse in heated (and sweaty) online matches, so you don’t have to necessarily worry about adding third-party grips. 

One aspect about the design that we absolutely love is the placement of the DPI button. Most lightweight mice these days opt to place the DPI button at the back of the mouse, which causes some irritation if you want to switch the DPI settings on-the-fly. Mountain here has stuck to tradition and has placed it right below the scroll wheel, where it truly belongs. Whatsmore, there are also four LEDs above it that indicates which DPI level it is currently at, giving you a clear visual of your settings without having to remember any color codes like other mice. Please keep it this way, Mountain. 

The Makalu 67 also features RGB, but it’s not our favourite implementation we have seen. There is an LED ring around the scroll wheel and the DPI button, which can be customised to any color you desire. It looks a bit odd there, and for us at least, mars the overall look of the device (not to mention that your fingers will probably cover the LEDs anyway). Thankfully, it can be turned off with the bundled software. 

In terms of the specs, the main left and right buttons feature Omron switches, which have a 50 million clicks shelf life. On the back of the mouse, you will find the Pixart PAW 3370 sensor, and two large PTFE skates that help glide the mouse effortlessly. 

Mountain has also paid particular attention towards the cable for the mouse. Besides it being braided and using a soft weave material for maximum flexibility, they have also strived towards reducing cable drag as much as possible. This is achieved by exiting the cable at a 5 degree angle from the mouse, which prevents the cable from touching the desk upto a certain length. This worked much better than we anticipated as we encountered no drag whatsoever even when we made no effort to place the cable properly on our desk. 

 Software and Performance 

Image 1 of 5

Mountain’s BaseCamp software is a required install if you want to configure the mouse in any way. Our complaints when reviewing the Everest keyboards still hold true for the software - it is slow to load and can be quite buggy at times. We encountered a peculiar problem where the Everest Max keyboard stopped responding to any software changes if we had the Makalu 67 plugged in. We were only able to fix the issue after unplugging the mouse, restarting the PC and plugging the mouse into a different USB port. It seems to be working fine since then, but such compatibility issues shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

Regardless, once the BaseCamp software loads, it’s easy going from there on. The UI is well-laid out, and changing settings on the software is quick and responsive. For the Makalu 67, you will be able to set up different profiles, set macros, change key bindings (yes, even the DPI button), and configure the DPI levels (up to 5 steps are available). There are also a bunch of options to change the polling rate, cursor sensitivity, click speed, button response time, angle snapping, as well as lift-off distance.

The mouse uses PixArt’s latest PAW 3370 sensor, which is touted to have lower motion to pixel latency over its previous models. The difference might be hard to notice unless you are really tuned to pick up such differences, but regardless, the PAW 3370 performed exceptionally well in our tests. Playing a few rounds of Halo Infinite and Apex Legends, the sensor had no problems matching our erratic movements and provided excellent accuracy in catching the much elusive headshots. Coming from the Razer Viper V2 Pro, we didn’t feel much difference however (the Razer mouse also features a top-notch sensor) but we didn’t notice we were playing any worse than we did before. 

The large ergonomics of the mouse was also pleasant to use. It provided a far better grip over the Razer mouse, even though it took us some time to get used to the larger dimensions. 

Both the main switches, and the side buttons, were responsive and have very low bounce back time. They also offer a smooth ‘clicky’ tactile feedback, with a soft sound profile (at least when compared to the Viper V2 Pro) which is great as it won’t be annoying for others in the room.

The scroll wheel is of similar nature, and has defined ‘steps’ when scrolling which should aid players that rely on it to manage and select inventory in FPS games.

The pre-installed 100% PTFE feet also felt excellent to use, and Mountain has provided spares once they are in need of replacement. We mostly tested the mouse on the Mountain Nunatak, a soft fabric mouse pad which is also treated with water-repellant coating like the mouse. The mousepad definitely skews towards ‘fast’ response times, so if you are looking for something with a little more grip, the Nunatak may not exactly cut it. We also tried the mouse with various other mousepads from MSI, Asus, and Lenovo, and the Makalu had no problems adjusting to all of them. It also worked relatively well on our polished wooden desk, but had some problems with tracking when used with our jeans (but then again, why would you want to use it like that, anyways?).

Buy this if...

Don't buy this if...