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Most gaming mice are very small. If you've got large hands, you can either use a claw grip or invest in a many-buttoned MMO mouse — and neither situation is ideal for palm-grip players in other genres.
Enter the Corsair Ironclaw RGB ($60): a huge, full-featured mouse optimized for FPS and MOBA play. While I question whether it confers any tangible benefits on FPS/MOBA players, its physical design is a major boon for the big-handed among us. The Ironclaw RGB is big, sure, but it's also comfortable, well-designed, colorful and functional. From its intelligent DPI tracker to its treaded scroll wheel, the Ironclaw RGB is simply a very good, very big mouse.
Design
The first thing you'll notice about the Ironclaw RGB is that it's much bigger than most other gaming mice. At 5.12 x 3.15 x 1.77 inches, the device kept my hand completely off of the mousepad, even when I laid my whole palm down and extended my fingers as far as they would go. This might not be the case for folks with truly gigantic hands, but it should represent a nice change of pace from gaming mice that feel like toys in Brobdingnagian mitts.
Otherwise, the Ironclaw RGB looks like a lot of other gaming mice, just on a slightly different scale. It has a textured thumb rest, a textured grip for the two outermost fingers, and a textured scroll wheel, all of which help you keep a good grip. There's a left button, a right button, a clickable scroll wheel, two face buttons right beneath that and two programmable thumb buttons. The palm rest lights up with a full RGB spectrum; the scroll wheel is, unfortunately, not lit very visibly.
There's one other set of lights, and these are actually quite useful. There are three bars on the left side of the mouse, which indicate the gadget's dots-per-inch (DPI) sensitivity levels. I'll discuss this more later, but while these bars are not unique to the Ironclaw RGB, this mouse makes better use of them than most of its competitors.
The Ironclaw RGB has an attractive, sensible design that's comfortable to hold for long periods of time.
The Ironclaw RGB may be big, but even discounting its size, it's got an attractive, sensible design that's comfortable to hold for long periods of time.
Features
The Ironclaw RGB works with the Corsair Utility Engine (CUE) software, which is both incredibly robust and just a little obtuse. For example: If you want to craft intricate lighting patterns that vary colors, brightness levels, gradients and durations for every single game that you play, the CUE will help you do it relatively painlessly. On the other hand, simple features, like reprogramming buttons to keyboard commands, require digging down into submenus and a lot of dragging and dropping.
Even more confusing is that every attempt to reprogram a button defaults to a macro menu, when I imagine that most users (particularly of an FPS/MOBA mouse) will want simple commands rather than complex macros. You're not going to spend hours and hours figuring out how to reprogram your mouse, but you could very well take 15 minutes (I did), which is obnoxious when all you want is to tweak a few simple settings.
That aside, I do have to give props to the Ironclaw RGB's extremely simple, sensible approach to DPI management. A lot of mice (including some from Corsair) give you five DPI levels, and no easy way to tell them apart, save for how fast your cursor is moving. The Ironclaw RGB limits you to three. But in exchange, it's crystal-clear which level you're using: one light for the lowest, two for the middle and one for the highest. You can also change the color of the three lights, which makes it easy to customize different profiles for different games.
MORE: Our Favorite Gaming Mice for Every Genre
This may seem like a small thing, but for FPS and MOBA games, where different character classes need the mouse to move at different rates, it's not insignificant. Furthermore, while there's no dedicated sniper button like on the Corsair M65 RGB Elite, you can still program that DPI-slowing functionality into one of the thumb buttons.
Performance
I tried the Ironclaw RGB with a variety of games, but paid special attention to how it handled Destiny 2 and Heroes of the Storm: an FPS and a MOBA, respectively. In both cases, I found that the mouse was responsive, accurate and precise, tracking enemies with ease and attacking them with fast, satisfying clicks. While I missed having the dedicated sniper button of, say, the M65 RGB Elite in Destiny 2, I enjoyed the bigger buttons and easy DPI-switching in Heroes of the Storm.
I found that the mouse was responsive, accurate and precise, tracking enemies with ease and attacking them with fast, satisfying clicks.
For other genres, the Ironclaw RGB works just as well as any other all-purpose gaming mouse. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales and StarCraft: Remastered felt great with the mouse — although, again, if you have small or medium-size hands, there's nothing it does better than a smaller, comparably priced peripheral.
Bottom Line
If you have large hands, the Ironclaw RGB is worth a look; if not, I think Corsair's other mice are a little more comfortable and functional, particularly the M65 RGB Elite ($60) and the Harpoon RGB Wireless ($50).
But if you like your mice large and luxurious, the Ironclaw RGB delivers, and it doesn't cost all that much. That's potentially a big deal for a big mouse.
Credit: Corsair
