Two weeks into testing this mouse my elbow caught a half-full can of LaCroix, the can went over, and roughly a quarter of it landed on the right side of my desk, including across the back half of the Aerox 5. I made a noise. I picked the mouse up and shook it. The water beaded and ran off through the perforated shell. I dried it with a paper towel and kept playing. The mouse still works. The mouse, six months later, still works.
That is the genuinely unusual feature. IP54 dust and splash resistance is something you basically never see on an ultralight, because the perforated shells that get the weight down also let liquid in. The Aerox line solved this with sealed switch housings and a coating on the PCB, and the result is the only sub-75-gram mouse I can think of that I would actually trust at a desk with drinks on it. If you eat at your desk, this is a real value proposition that the spec sheet undersells.
The other unusual thing is the button count. A 5-button thumb cluster on a 74-gram mouse is rare to the point of being the whole reason to buy this. The Naga V2 Pro is heavier and bulkier; the Basilisk V3 Pro is heavier still. If you play hybrid genres — a Diablo evening, a Marvel Rivals match, a Final Fantasy XIV raid, a workday of Slack and code — the Aerox 5 is the rare device that can cover all of them in one shape. Mapping the thumb buttons in SteelSeries GG takes ten minutes and changes how you play three different games.
The shape itself is a slim symmetric ergonomic with a noticeable right-hand bias. Claw and fingertip grip are comfortable; palm grip rides off the back the way it does on every other ultralight. The TrueMove Air sensor at 18,000 DPI is fine for everything I've thrown at it, and the Golden Micro switches are crisp without being heavy. After six months of daily use I have had zero stuck or double-clicking inputs, which is what an 80-million-click rating is supposed to mean and rarely does.
Battery on 2.4GHz is 80 hours, which is plenty, and the Bluetooth fallback at 180 hours is the kind of headline number I never test because I never use Bluetooth for play. Wired charging over USB-C is fast enough that a 10-minute plug-in during a coffee break gets me through the evening. There's no wireless charging dock support, which at this price feels like a small miss.
The complaints are the kind you only see when you compare specs. The sensor is a half-generation behind Razer's Focus Pro 30K and Logitech's Hero 2 — small differences that competitive players will care about and nobody else will notice. Polling is capped at 1000Hz, with no 4K or 8K option, which makes this a non-starter for the high-refresh-monitor esports crowd. There's no free-spin scroll wheel and no horizontal tilt, both of which I miss when the mouse is on workday duty. And the perforated shell, while pretty, will bother anyone who doesn't like the feel of holes against their fingertips.
The price is the hard part. $140 for a 1000Hz mouse with a 2023-era sensor is real money in a category where the flagships sell at the same number. The Aerox 5 is asking you to value the buttons and the splash resistance over the raw performance specs.
Verdict: Buy this if you play across FPS, MMO, and ARPG on the same machine and want one mouse that handles all of them without weighing 100 grams.