In this article. I give you my quick review of the Steelseries Rival 3 mouse. Steelseries makes some of the best mice in the industry and most of them cost like 40 plus USD but this mouse is a little bit special because it’s a pretty budget for Steelseries standards.
This mouse actually feels really good and it doesn’t feel like some cheap wobbly-janky mouse.
This thing feels really premium at the budget price mark.
First impression
When receiving the package of this mouse what’s included is the mouse, of course, which connects via USB-a and a user’s guide manual that will show you some of the basics on how to use the mouse.
First impressions when I actually took this mouse out of the box was that there was no wobbles or rattles, as I mentioned earlier.
This thing is constructed perfectly, to the little microscopic thing. This thing is so well put together it just feels so nice, refined, and polished.
And then the click test. I’ve done a little click test in slow and high speed and it just clicks so perfectly and I’m not hyping this thing up just for the sake of hyping it up, I really mean it. This thing feels good, feels premium.
Build quality and materials
Now a little bit about the material of the mouse. This thing is made fully of a polymorph material.
It’s covered with a matte black finish and it looks really sleek, really clean, and you don’t have that glossy light reflecting off of it. It is not a fingerprint magnet so I really like that about this mouse.
The buttons also are made of the polymer material the top button here and the two side buttons which we’ll be covering a little later the only thing that’s not a polymer finish is the scroll wheel and the scroll wheel is made of a rubber material and this thing does not rattle wiggle or anything when you click on the middle mouse button so really good job by Steelseries on creating that super polished product. Especially at a budget price mark that’s just amazing.
Now, if we take a look under the mouse, you’re going to see three sliders that the mouse is held together on which is going to slide really nicely on your mouse pad while you’re using it.
And then, the other thing you’re going to notice is the sensor. This is their true move-core sensor which has a 100 to 8500 cpi rate (and cpi is count per inch). It is going to give you a lot of accuracies, speed, and consistency when using the mouse.
None of those flickers or your mouse randomly blinking like half an inch the other direction of your screen. So, you shouldn’t be getting that with this high cpi rate. And the cpi can be configured in the software so you can really adjust this thing to make it work exactly how you want it to work.
If we look on the side of the mouse here you can see that it has this cool little RGB light that goes from the front towards the back.
And on the back, you have the Steelseries logo that illuminates and all of these lights can be configured in the software and you can make this thing glow a few different patterns. One thing to note about the lights is that there are three lighting options, even though it’s glowing one color you have a front light, a center light, and then a backlight.
So, if you want you can configure all three of them to glow like a different color, or if you want it one color kind of like with a gradient look, you can totally do that. This isn’t just one light, it’s a lot of three different lights that are pulling this effect off.
Next, let’s cover the comfort as well as what type of palm grip this is. In terms of the size of this mouse, this thing I would say is more on the medium slim side. It’s not a tiny mouse where you need little hands to grip it. This thing is pretty average size so I think most people will be happy with this mouse.
So, this thing is more optimized for people who are doing palm grips, which is a grip where you lay your hand flat on the mouse and your hand just rests on it. For the top of your hand, it’s going to be pretty comfortable and it’s going to be really good for long periods of use.
And the other grip style is finger grip style. This style is basically where your fingers kind of grip the mouse from the two sides and then on the top and your palm isn’t touching the back of the mouse at all.
This is pretty good for this mouse too. Some people might find it to be a little more accurate with the finger grip style. But, it’s really personal preference so you can do palm grip or finger grip.
Next, one more thing to note, this is a righties only mouse. This is not an ambidextrous mouse. So you’re not going to be able to use this thing as a lefty. I mean you can but you’re not going to get access to the side of the buttons.
So now that we covered the physical aspects of this mouse, let’s talk a little bit about the software and some of the functionality with this mouse.
The first thing to note is that this thing has on-board memory and what that means is if you tweak some of the settings in the software they’re gonna get saved onto the mouse and not to your computer. Because some people like to travel with their mouse and it’s really annoying if you have to reinstall the software on a different computer so it all gets saved on the mouse. Really cool stuff there.
And then, it also has six programmable buttons which are the two side buttons, and then the right click, left click, the dpi button (which by default switches the speed of your mouse), and then you also have the scroll wheel (which is when you click the scroll wheel you can configure whatever key goes off).
You can add macros to it, which are a sequence of keys, or you can just change the clicks to do anything you want. So, for example, you can have your side click do click the button z and that could be useful maybe in some games or you know whatever it is that you need to do.
So really customizable in the software if you want to do any of that and I’m not going to be going into depth with the software here. In my other article about the Steelseries keyboard, I did a software review and a lot of the things are the same on the keyboard as they are on the mouse.
And speaking of keyboards, if you’re interested in pairing this mouse up with a pretty cool keyboard, I reviewed a budget keyboard, the Apex 3 and that thing is really cool. It’s a high-quality premium keyboard by Steelseries and it feels just as good as the premiums.
So I think they’d make a pretty good combo paired up together. I’ve put a link down to that as well. So, if you’re interested in picking up a quality gaming mouse for a budget price, I highly recommend this thing. And if you’re just looking to get a gift for someone, they will not be disappointed with this thing either.
So, I definitely recommend this thing I’m going to leave a link down in the description below. I review a lot of the latest stuff out there like a mouse, keyboards, headsets, and a variety of other new tech that comes out.