STEELSERIES RIVAL 310

A mouse that won’t break the bank, but might help you break gaming records

YOU CAN PAY A LOT for a gaming mouse. Over 200 bucks, in fact. And PC gaming— indeed, PC building, too—is one of those hobbies where, if you’re using cheaper gear, you can feel like you’re being left behind. As though those people who buy the $200 mice, or the really expensive PSUs, or some colossal gold-plated case are having more fun than you are with some mid-range equipment.

This is not the case. Sure, spending that much money on an input device might make you feel good—and mice are important; they’re the indispensable translator of your movements and wishes into the twitch of gunsights or the pixel-perfect swirl of a digital paintbrush—but you can feel good without splashing that kind of cash.

Take the Rival as an example. Logitech and Razer will relieve you of more green folding stuff for their products, but you won’t necessarily get a great deal more for your money. SteelSeries’s pair of revamped rodents (the ambidextrous Sensei, which has almost identical specs just in a different shell, is up to version 310, too) certainly punch above their cost.

Take the new sensor: The TrueMove 3 from PixArt offers one-to-one raw tracking, which sounds like some ludicrous marketing nonsense, until you start thinking about who would actually need it. That person is the owner of a very large, high-resolution monitor, the kind of thing we all aspire to, on which the smallest deviation of mouse movement is magnified into a distinct jink.

The one-to-one tracking means the distance the sensor moves on your desktop is mirrored exactly on the screen, with as little processing involved as possible, and therefore no lag. The Rival can go as high as 12,000 cpi, giving exceptional sensitivity for those who need it, and covering a decent bit of 4K real estate for every inch moved.

Beneath the mouse, this remarkable sensor sits rather plainly—a small hole in the plastic base is all that betrays its presence. We rather like this understated approach to design; where other companies would have picked it out in orange, you’ll never see “12,000 CPI” sprayed across the back of the unit. All we get here is the SteelSeries logo, which looks rather like a sniper drawing a bead on Ronald McDonald (gambling debts to the wrong people, most likely) embossed into the base, and lit up again on the back, right under your palm. Light also leaks out from around the wheel, which is a thick, grippy one, with enough click to it that you’re left in no doubt as to whether it has gone round a notch or not—essential when using it to switch weapons.

Elsewhere, we’re firmly in the land of the matt black plastic people—but, again, SteelSeries has a trick up its sleeve. All the materials have been chosen for their light weight, and the plastic is fiber-reinforced. The shell is fingerprint-resistant, too; handy if you’ve ever been caught by the police after CSIs dusted your mouse. All this gets the weight down to a shade over three ounces.

The gray silicon side grips are certainly grippy, and the main buttons clicky— they’re separate from one another and the rest of the body, and made from the same fingerprint-repelling plastic, which is slightly textured. They’re very pleasant places for your fingertips to hang out, as long as you’re right-handed. Underneath are Omron-designed switches rated for 50 million clicks, and the restrained lighting does all the usual Prism-enabled tricks across your peripherals, the software up to SteelSeries’s usual standards, and the 32-bit CPU onboard showing no signs of slowing anything down.

“From the creators of the #1 gaming mouse,” shouts the box quote from MaximumPC. And with its new sensor and complete failure to put a foot wrong, the new Rival should be snapping at that mouse’s heels. –IAN EVENDEN