A comfortable mouse with easy to click buttons really helps with your gaming scores! This is especially true when the mouse has a fast responsive sensor like the Rival 500 by SteelSeries, which features one of the best mouse sensors currently available, the 3360 optical sensor!
Two buttons are found next to the left click button, while the DPI button is behind the tilt click scroll wheel button.
The other buttons are all located on the left side of the mouse and are designed to be operated via a thumb joint action, so the tip of your thumb controls the front buttons and flick down switches while the joint of the thumb controls the other buttons. The flick down switches can be locked via the switch underneath the mouse and use as a thumb rest.
Aside from the ton of buttons, the SteelSeries Rival 500 comes with a high dpi (16,000) and vibration/tactile alert feature that is very useful for ingame alerts like low ammo and health status. As far as the optical sensor, the SteelSeries Rival 500 features a PixArt PMW3360 optical sensor, which has a slightly more responsive movement than the 3310 optical sensor thanks to less smoothing/lag, making the Rival 500 perfect for tracking movement.
The surface of the Rival 500 mouse is made of different materials with plastic on the buttons, rubberized coating on the back of the mouse and rubber grip on both sides of the mouse. The teflon feet pads at the bottom make the Rival 500 mouse glide smoothly on both soft and hard mousepads.
The Rival 500 is designed as a right-handed, medium-size mouse with large grip width (7cm) and a steep button slope perfect for palm grip, claw grip and fingertip grip. The hump of the mouse is designed toward the middle back, and the total base length of the mouse is 11cm while the height is 4cm.
To make the most of the Rival 500 MMO mouse, you want to download the SteelSeries Engine 3 software which allows you to change RGB led colour patterns and set up your own color gradients, as well as programme buttons and adjust the mouse DPI sensitivity.
When recording macros, it detects buttons clicks as well as keyboard commands. You can set the CPI from 100 to 16000 in increments of 100. Check out the review of the Sensei Ten mouse.