Steelseries Rival 700 Gaming Mouse Review

Performance

This mouse is packed full of features and to get the most out of it, you’re going to want to install the SteelSeries Engine 3 software. It’s a great bit of software for those who use multiple SteelSeries products too, as you can control all of them from a single software suite.

The mouse has extensive customisation options, allowing you to fully reprogram all buttons with new commands, shortcuts, launchers, macros, timers and more.

The macro engine is very powerful, allowing for multiple triggers and timers, which is going to be especially handy for MOBA and MMORPG gaming.

The sensor can be tweaked too, with two DPI levels you can toggle between, adjustable acceleration and deceleration, angle snapping and polling rate. Most users won’t need those extra settings, but they’re certainly welcome additions.

One of the coolest features what you can do with the OLED display. We took the eTeknix logo and imported it into the software.

We had to use the built-in editing tool to tweak a few of the pixels, and we flipped the contrast to make it look right, but the end result is really cool. What’s cooler is that you can program countdown timers, DPI level readout, dank meme gifs and more to this OLED display and set them to multiple profiles on the mouse, giving you all the customisation you could dream of at your fingertips. The ergonomic shape of the mouse is quite unique, and while it does work well for palm rest, it feels just that little more in-tune for fingertip and claw grip play styles, at least it does to me. There’s RGB lighting built right into the scroll wheel, as well as the SteelSeries logo at the back of the mouse too, so you’ve got even more customisation options to play around with there should you need them.

The click response on the Rival 700 is really nice, with a snappy and fast action that’s stunning to use for fast-paced gameplay. When you’re spamming commands in LoL, you want to be on point every single time and the 700 didn’t let us down once. However, the most interesting aspect is the vibration feedback on the mouse, it uses a motor that’s mounted sideways, so you only get vibration on a vertical axis, so not to cause wobbles in the sensor readout. If you set it to something like a low-health warning or low-ammo, a little “buzz” from the mouse lets you know it’s time to heal or reload and it’s a real game changer, it becomes more like a sixth sense compared to reading the information on screen.

The sensor on this mouse is simply brilliant, from low DPI right up to the extreme end of the scale, there is absolutely no jitter, no unwanted acceleration or angle snapping, although you can apply the last two if you wanted. When you’re tracking at frantic speeds, you don’t want the sensor to skip a beat and it really won’t, easily one of the best sensors we’ve ever tested, and that’s saying something given we’ve tested so many!