SteelSeries Rival 3 Review

👤by Matthew Hodgson Comments 📅01-06-20
Performance Testing
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve spent £100 or £35 on your gaming mouse, you still expect things to be developed to an acceptable degree with proper tracking and robust software/drivers. To that end, we’ve not held back while evaluating the Rival 3, treating the device with the same rigour that we’d put any other gaming mouse through.

For day to day usage, the Rival 3 is absolutely fine, the sensors that SteelSeries use are so well tuned these days that you don’t give them a second thought, with the lightweight chassis and comfortable shape also helping the overall appeal. It’s a shame that SteelSeries couldn’t stretch to adding in thumb buttons on both sides so that left-handed users could join in on the fun but tight budgets cause cutbacks.


Gaming, a true leveller for mice of this price bracket, will either expose the drawbacks of spending less cash or show off the manufacturer’s true colours in their ability to delivery good performance at a wallet-friendly price point. Well, it’s good news from where we’re sitting. We tried the mouse out at a low-DPI of 400 in CSGO and War Thunder, two games were being accurate at a distance can make all of the difference; we were pleasantly surprised by the tracking and mechanical switches under the two mouse buttons, it certainly didn’t feel like a cheap mouse. Dialling up the DPI for games that don’t require as much accuracy, like strategy or MMO type games, also faired very well. All in, the Rival 3 passed our gaming tests with flying colours. We had no complaints at all and would happily use this daily going forwards.

The RGB lighting, helped along by the Engine 3 software, looks decent, but it is evident that, in an effort to save costs, SteelSeries have used fewer RGB LEDs than they might’ve liked to. The brightness and vibrancy of the colours is excellent but any kind of sweeping effect through the lighting skirt is notchy lacking in the absolutely smoothness offered by their higher end offerings.

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