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VPNs for ad-blocking While the results aren’t as impressive as the costlier Logitech G502, the more affordable Rival 5 has an admirable crack at offering genre versatility care of a design that splices shooter trimmings with a few extra buttons. There’s a catch, though: two of those buttons are tricky to use, which isn’t such an issue for slower-paced games where you have the time to feel for them, while the other more easily accessible button will frustrate palm-grip people with longer fingers. The real shining star of this latest SteelSeries mouse is the price, especially if you can find one for closer to $100. In my experience, I needed that button every time I started or restarted Windows because the Rival 5 would frustratingly reset its DPI to the lowest setting. Thankfully, a firmware update towards the end of my testing addressed this issue. To tweak the DPI button (or any other button for that matter), you’ll want to download SteelSeries GG, which is the new version of the SteelSeries Engine. At first glance, SteelSeries GG is a marketing tool with a home page that’s flush with SteelSeries articles to read, competitions to enter and products to buy. Click a little deeper, though, and you’ll find a neat new Moments feature for capturing in-game footage as well as the familiar SteelSeries Engine software. That’s some extra clicking to SteelEngine, though. In terms of mouse tweaks, you can manually adjust the sensitivity hops, jumps or leaps between DPI-button clicks in 100-level increments, picking which five you fancy most, even if there’s already a good spread of options by default. For gamers, the polling rate should absolutely be left on 1000 while both acceleration and deceleration sliders should be jammed as far left as possible. Here’s also where you can also tweak the nine buttons and scroll-wheels, as well as change the illumination settings if that’s your thing. Even with default click options, the Rival 5 is a great everyday mouse companion, reliable enough to work accurately across my three-monitor configuration and with enough buttons to rethink how to best streamline everyday tasks. If I adjust my palm grip by pushing my hand forward on the mouse, the thumb button becomes accessible, pressed by a slight forward roll of the thumb. Still, while I’m gaming, my fingertip grip renders this button impractically unreachable, and it’s a similar story for the dual-function thumb paddle above mouse buttons four and five. Mouse buttons four and five are an upwards roll away from being used, which makes them as practical as they always are on SteelSeries gaming mice. But reaching the paddle to activate button six (up) and button seven (down), involves lifting my thumb, which weakens my mouse grip. Though a clever design, it also makes button six easier to function than button seven because you have to lift or roll your thumb up just to pull the paddle down. In fairness, I’m of two minds about this. These paddle buttons are out of the way for shooter fans where they’re less important. That said, not having easy access to the three selling-point buttons (if you include the thumb one) lowers the overall value proposition for the Rival 5 depending on your mouse grip. In saying that, for less-twitchy games like Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition and Red Dead Redemption 2, having extra buttons is a gaming godsend. When it comes to shooters, what’s more important to me than a bevvy of easily accessible buttons is overall performance, and the Rival 5 only falls slightly short with a stiffer-than-usual USB cable. Tame that in a mouse bungee and that’s less of a concern because, outside of that, the Rival 5 never skipped a beat. I love how effortlessly SteelSeries mice glide across a mousepad and I never once felt like the Rival 5 let me down on the accuracy front during my tests in Warzone and Hell Let Loose. Speaking of buttons, both SteelSeries mice have a thumb button that I find tricky to reach with my gaming grip, though the Rival 5 offers a significantly bigger target. As detailed above, the Rival 5 also has the button paddle for two extra input options. The Rival 5 is also noticeably lighter (85g vs 121g), but that’s more personal preference than anything else (I prefer a heavier mouse, for instance). Both mice max out at 1000Hz polling rate, which is industry standard but lags behind the 8000Hz on offer from the Razer Viper 8KHz, and despite sensor differences (TrueMove Air vs TrueMove 3+), I can’t separate the two SteelSeries mice in terms of in-hand performance. The bigger pro for anyone looking to invest in a mouse for life is the Rival 5 is rated for 80 million clicks compared to the Rival 650’s 60 million. Naturally, the big difference between the two is that the Rival 650 can be used in wired or wireless mode. These days, wireless gaming mice are as accurate as wired ones, and while there’s an $80 difference between these two SteelSeries mice, I’d recommend the 650 Wireless over the Rival 5 unless you’re keen for the extra buttons.
