'It's not just a gimmick': Noctua is working with Pulsar on a gaming mouse that has a fan in it to cool your sweaty palm

There's something to be said for a company that knows its lane, stays in it, and seriously dominates it. That describes Noctua in the fan lane: Big fans, small fans, quiet fans, brown fans, cream fans, more brown fans, you name it. So it both is and isn't a surprise that Noctua is working on a mouse with a fan inside—a surprise because it's a mouse with a fan inside, and not a surprise because if anyone would do such a thing, it's Noctua.

Noctua isn't working on this on its own, of course. The company tells us that Pulsar approached it to ask "if we would be interested in supplying a fan to integrate into their flagship-level gaming mouse." Noctua said yes.

And admittedly, the concept of a mouse with a fan inside isn't new—check out the Zephyr Pro—but it's done so little that it's basically new, and if anyone can do it really well, my money would be on Noctua.

That "flagship-level gaming mouse" that's housing the fan is the Pulsar Feinmann, an incredibly holey and also very expensive gaming mouse that Pulsar calls the "perfect tool for elite gamers." We've not got our hands on the Feinmann for extended testing, so we can't give our take on that, but we can say it makes a reasonable choice for a Noctua fan given the amount of the shell that's, well, missing—more scaffolding than honeycomb, if you ask me.

It shares many of the specs and benefits of the Feinmann mouse itself, such as 32,000 DPI, 8 kHz polling, and an included USB-C charging dock. It's just that, in addition, a Noctua NF-A4x10 fan is crammed inside.

Anyway, the big idea with the new Noctua version is to have a mouse that cools your sweaty palms, something that Noctua assures us is "not just a gimmick." Our Jacob Ridley got his own sweaty palm on it on the Computex show floor and told me the cool air on the palm is "surprisingly nice", so there might be something to that claim from Noctua, though of course we can't say anything for certain yet.

I can see something like this making sense for competitive gamers who want to reduce the chance of sweat getting in the way of the perfect headshot during that 6-hour CS2 binge. This would make sense of the Pulsar mouse being the choice here, too, given its light weight and competitive target market.

This is very much a prototype, and we can't put a marker on any specs for a final product, but right now it weighs in at just 65 g. Noctua says that although this is "preliminary," battery life "should be around 10 to 11 hours" with this prototype. Of course, that's nothing compared to the 100+ hours we get with wireless gaming mice these days, but for such a new and different kind of product, it's not too bad—that's about what you get from some earphones, for example, after all.

Noctua's been busy all-round lately, it seems. From its first liquid cooler penned for a 2026 release to a gorgeous RTX 5080 collab, there's plenty to keep our eyes on—and presumably our palms, too.