Cooler Master MM720 review

Two-minute review

The Cooler Master MM720, which is apparently a new take on the company’s Spawn and Xornet shaped gaming mice, looks a little unusual. 

It’s a squat-looking mouse that seems almost as wide as it is long, giving its left and right buttons the majority of top panel real estate. Whatever’s left serves as the palm rest, riddled with honeycomb-shaped holes to keep its weight down. On the right side is another unusual addition: a ring finger rest.

It’s almost as if this was a mouse designed from the drawings of a child if that child had no preconceived notions of what a mouse is expected to look like. You know what, it works. This mouse is not only ultra-lightweight and supportive because of its wide footprint, but that ring finger rest not only keeps the pressure off that finger but also helps raise the pinky finger so it isn’t overextending itself.

Coming in black or white with either a matte or a glossy finish, this is clearly a mouse that prioritizes ergonomics as much as performance. And, while its small form and honeycomb design might lead you to believe that it isn’t the most durable mouse out there, it feels very solid and could probably take a lot of abuse from gamers – and to an extent, the elements, thanks to its dust and water-resistant coating and an IP58 rating. 

That’s not too shabby for a mouse that’s less than $50/£50. At the time of writing, the Cooler Master MM720 will set you back $39 (£39, AU$50), which puts it in the budget market. Though it does have some stiff competition there, with the likes of the Corsair Katar Pro XT and the Logitech G203 Lightspeed giving it a good run for its money.

Not that it has reason to fear. Its unusual shape might not be the sleekest, but it certainly lends itself to better ergonomics, and therefore, more comfortable gaming. It’s better suited for gamers who have a claw grip, however, and with that ring finger rest, the right-handed. 

It’s incredibly light at 49 grams, so you can move it around without much effort. Add in its very wide PTFE feet for easy gliding and a cable with minimal drag or snag, and handling it almost feels like it’s wireless. There is a cable though, an ultraweave one that does not pull or have any stiffness to restrict movement. It’s not a paracord one, but it does move about freely.

As far as the button layout, it comes with the typical six, all of which are remappable – the left and right buttons, a scroll wheel, two side buttons, and a DPI button. For some reason, likely due to lack of space, the DPI button is placed at the bottom of the mouse, making it inaccessible for on-the-fly adjustments. You can remap the DPI switch function to one of the other buttons, however, if making quick DPI adjustments is vital to your game.

The matte buttons have a nice clicky sound and feel to them so they’re incredibly satisfying to use. There’s a bit more resistance and travel to them, but not enough to affect how quickly the mouse reacts to your presses – thanks to those optical switches. Their inward curve, on the other hand, helps keep your finders in place. Meanwhile, the scroll wheel offers good feedback while keeping things smooth. We only wish it wasn’t rubberized as it annoyingly tracks dust and other particles.

The Cooler Master MM720 also has two RGB LED zones, one on the scroll wheel and the other directly under the palm rest, the honeycomb design allowing them to really shine. There are five RGB presets you can cycle through – static, breathing, color cycle, indicator, and custom – all of which you can personalize further. The customization options are pretty minimal, however. You can only adjust color and/or speed for most of the modes, and you can’t combine modes the way you can on more expensive mice. If you often use the DPI switch function, the indicator mode is a practical choice as the RGB on the scroll wheel changes color based on the current DPI setting.

Bear in mind that the mouse does come with 512kb of onboard memory so you can save, import, and export your customizations, and take them everywhere you go.

The Cooler Master MM720 has a polling rate of up to 1,000Hz – you can set it to 125, 250, and 500 Hz as well as 1,000 – and a 16,000 DPI on tap from that optical sensor. You can also adjust the button response time from 4ms to 32ms.

The sensors and switches are all optical, which means they’re expected to last longer and also function faster than mechanical switches (up to 3 times faster according to Cooler Master). Your average gamers aren’t likely to tell milliseconds difference in performance, presses and movements on the Cooler Master MM720 are immediate. Those optical switches only require a very light touch to deliver fast, accurate responses.

It more than keeps up with games like Doom Eternal, Psychonauts 2, and Cyberpunk 2077, let alone older games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We find it to be speedy and responsive, whether we’re quickly switching weapons or blasting away demon hordes. Even our button reassignments work without a hitch.

To set those and macros up, you’ll need to download Cooler Master’s MasterPlus software, which serves as the hub for any Cooler Master peripherals you use. It’s a fairly easy app to navigate, and its Buttons tab is where you set up all your button or key reassignments and shortcuts, which is just as easy. You can even assign a second set of actions to the left, right, and two side buttons that are triggered when pressed at the same time as the scroll wheel, essentially giving you a second set of controls.

Fair warning: you will hit a snag if the game you’re playing uses Control, Shift, Alt, or the Win key. Unfortunately, MasterPlus recognizes these only as keys to be used in conjunction with something else. As a result, it won’t let you remap any of them to one of your mouse buttons. For example, while it’ll let you remap a button to CTRL+C, you can't remap it to just CTRL. Of course, you can work around this by simply creating a macro.

Besides button reassignments and macros, the app will also let you set up to seven on-the-fly DPI settings, set separate DPIs for horizontal and vertical movements, adjust the polling rate and response time, control your RGB, save up to five profiles, and create your macros. Macro fiends will appreciate their options, considering that this is a budget gaming mouse. The one thing it can’t do is record mouse positioning, but that might be above this mouse’s pay grade.

There are a lot of customizations options on hand for how much the Cooler Master MM720 is asking. Combine those with its performance and ergonomics, and you’ve got a gaming mouse that’s in it to win it.

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…