Steelseries Rival 600 Overview

This year, peripheral companies have been unveiling many top-notch gaming mice including Cougar Surpassion, Razer Mamba wireless, HyperX Pulsefire Surge RGB and many. Now Steelseries has announced Rival 600 that has a modified version of PMW3360, ergonomic shape and high-quality buttons. This is Mashhud Hasan from frenzyweb360 and today I'm going to give my thoughts over Steelseries Rival 600.

Rival 600 has a pretty good build quality. It's right side is a bit of ledge which is not that noticeable and from the bottom, the shape kinda looks like ambidextrous, even though this is not an ambidextrous mouse. It's chassis is covered with rubberized texture but they are slightly slippery which might affect you while lift-offing the mouse. The shape is more narrow at the lofty areas than lower areas and that's the reason this mouse has a chance to gradually get slipped off of hands during lift-off. It's hump is located somewhere at the middle of the mouse that's why it's shape is mostly preferable for claw grippers and only for those palm grippers that have long fingers. But the shape isn't good for fingertip gripping because of it's palm-rest isn't wide shaped. Both of the sides of this mouse are detachable and you can add maximum 8 weight-bars (4 grams each) inside of the slot. There are two RGB light-lines streamed across the hump. There are no thumb-rest but the left side is slightly curved and has a bit of ledge on it which may work well as a pinkie-rest.

This mouse has a total of 7 buttons including left & right buttons, a scroll wheel, a DPI changing button and 3 side buttons. They've added a dedicating programmable button along with traditional side buttons for forward and backward browsing. Left and right buttons aren't clicky but they don't give any hollow feeling unlike Cougar Surpassion. Side buttons are quite clicky though. Scroll wheel isn't that smooth but it has a groovy texture on it which is good for gripping. DPI button is located in a place where you have very less chance of mis-clicking it. It's cable is 2 meters long and covered with rubberized skin but it is very smooth and doesn't create any affecting friction with the surface. Cable is detachable. FPS oriented mouse's one of the most necessary things is wide sized gliding pads which this mouse doesn't have. We can bring Logitech G402 here that has a pretty big upper gliding pad which help's this mouse glide with better mobility since in FPS, you need to move your mouse with swift movements.

Now let's talk about the most important part of this mouse, which is it's sensor. This mouse features Pixart PMW3360's modified version named as TrueMove 3. Along with this optical sensor, this mouse also features depth detecting sensor and this entire sensor combination is named as the TrueMove 3+. There are many famous mice that contains PMW3360 such as, Logitech G502, Rival 700, Corsair M65 and many. But none of them are as accurate as Rival 600's modified version of PMW3360. This modified sensor's native DPI is 3000 and I assume they've divided the matrix once by both horizontally and vertically. That's why it's sensitivity has increased up to 12,000 DPI. Due to having higher native DPI, this mouse is able to track smooth and precise inside of 3000 DPI but when someone uses it at more than it's native DPI, setting the windows sensitivity at low is recommended for avoiding pixel skipping. This mouse has a gravitational acceleration of 50G (which I think is more than enough) but no hardware acceleration. It has a whopping tracking speed of more than 350 IPS. Since it has a higher tracking speed with no hardware acceleration, so it won't cause any acceleration (unless your enhanced pointer precision is turned on with higher windows sensitivity) or any deceleration at snappy movements. It tracks very accurately and doesn't spin out at swift horizontal flicks. It also has no angle snapping and stuttering.

Steelseries has brought up a brilliant technology with this mouse. They've added an optical depth sensor for detecting the lift-off distance and you can customize it from 0.5mm to 2mm. This allows vertical tracking system for the mouse. Most of the mice causes the cursor to jitter or jump pixels during lift-off and it becomes impossible for the sensor to track the physical movement. But thanks to Rival 600's depth sensing linear optical detecting sensor, this mouse can track precisely even after lifting the mouse off (according to your customization of lift-off distance) and it won't cause any uneven stutter at the lift-off movements. Here I've putted a picture of accuracy test (in maximum tracking speed) above where we can see that Razer Deathadder Elite's PMW3389 has both deceleration and acceleration (somewhere around 150-200 pixel) at 315 IPS. Logitech G403 at same tracking speed accelerates a lot more than it decelerates and sometimes acceleration causes the cursor to jump more than 200 pixels. Zowie FK1's acceleration rate is pretty much similar with the Deathadder but doesn't decelerate much. But at the graph we can see that Rival 600 has almost zero acceleration, deceleration and there's no noticeable pixel skipping. We can call this a 1-to-1 tracking since it has no significant pointer enhancements and it's way more precise than most of the hardcore FPS oriented mice out there. Another positive side to mention about this mouse is it's 32-bit ARM processor embedded beside of it's sensor. This micro-processor is very fast at determining the physical movement and processing it into pixel movement (according to DPI settings) without any noticeable delay and very low latency. This allows the cursor of the mouse to move with snappy responsiveness.

So let's highlight the pros and cons of this gaming mouse down below

Pros :

• TrueMove 3+ (modified PMW3360+optical depth detecting sensor)
• durable buttons and placed correctly
• weight tuning management
• high-profiled MCU
• detachable side grips and cable
• compatible for palm & claw grippers

Cons :

• rubberized body is a bit slippery
• gliding pads aren't wide enough
• not compatible for fingertip-gripping

So this mouse has a pretty good build quality but also has some issues at gripping due to it's uneven shape. Buttons aren't clicky but they're durable. Weight tuning is a big advantage for this FPS mouse. Sensor is very good for accurate tracking and the micro-processor is also good to deliver snappy cursor movements with low latency. Overall it's a really good mouse for precise tracking. If they can settle a sniper button at the next version of this mouse, then i think it'll be labelled as the best FPS gaming mouse.

Hope these facts and points will help you decide whether you should buy this mouse or not. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more informative stuffs.