SteelSeries Rival 5 review
Our Verdict
The SteelSeries Rival five incorporates the best features from previous SteelSeries gaming mice, with stone-solid performance and lots of colorful lighting.
For
- Comfortable, ergonomic shape
- Gorgeous lighting options
- Lots of buttons
- Intuitive software
Confronting
- No adjustable scroll cycle
- Paddle is hard to use
Tom's Guide Verdict
The SteelSeries Rival 5 incorporates the best features from previous SteelSeries gaming mice, with rock-solid performance and lots of colorful lighting.
Pros
- +
Comfortable, ergonomic shape
- +
Gorgeous lighting options
- +
Lots of buttons
- +
Intuitive software
Cons
- -
No adaptable roll wheel
- -
Paddle is hard to use
SteelSeries Rival 5: Specs
Max DPI: xviii,000
Buttons: 9
Size: v.1 x 2.7 x one.vii inches
Weight: 3.0 ounces
EDITOR'Due south Annotation: The SteelSeries Rival 5 won a "highly recommended" accolade for best gaming mouse in the Tom'southward Guide Awards 2021 for gaming.
The SteelSeries Rival v looks and feels similar a much more expensive gaming mouse. When I offset took this $60 peripheral out of the box, I couldn't assist but wonder what made it different from the $80 SteelSeries Rival 600 — still a strong contender for the best gaming mouse on the market place, even 3 years afterwards its initial release.
The reply is, thankfully, "non much." The SteelSeries Rival 5 doesn't have tunable weights, just it does have a comfortable, ergonomic grip, gorgeous LED lighting strips, a plethora of programmable buttons and a suite of sensible SteelSeries software. It also has an actress "paddle" button, which I never fully got the hang of. Merely either way, it does little to harm an otherwise-splendid mouse.
- Logitech G604 review
Read our total SteelSeries Rival 5 review for more than details on this well-crafted and affordable gaming mouse.
SteelSeries Rival 5 review: Design
If y'all're familiar with the SteelSeries Rival 600, you should have a practiced thought of what to expect from the SteelSeries Rival v. Like its more expensive cousin, the Rival 5 is an ergonomic right-handed mouse, with a high ridged palm rest, a small-scale indentation for the pollex and two LED strips running down either side. The SteelSeries logo on the palm rest also lights up.
In terms of buttons, in that location are quite a few for a mouse of this size. In addition to the left and right buttons, you lot also get a clickable curl wheel and a dots-per-inch (DPI) sensitivity adjuster right below that. On the left side of the mouse is where things get interesting, however. There are two thin pollex buttons, as well as a "sniper" thumb button that temporarily lowers DPI by default. That's all pretty standard.
What's unusual, notwithstanding, is the modest "paddle" button only above the two pollex buttons. The idea is that you residue your thumb on this long, thin push and press it either up or downwards for dissimilar effects. Y'all could use this to zoom in or out with a sniper burglarize, shift speed up or down in a racecar, toggle between weapons in an action/RPG or any other control that benefits from bidirectional controls.
Paddles on gaming mice are not unheard of (the excellent Razer Basilisk has a slightly dissimilar one), simply they're not very mutual either. I respect SteelSeries adding an extra, uncommon potentially useful button to a mid-tier mouse. At the same time, I never constitute it especially useful, as the ringlet bike can do a lot of the aforementioned tasks. Furthermore, the paddle's inclusion ways that the thumb buttons are tiny. Differentiating between all 3 of them within a carve up second requires a pretty steep learning curve.
SteelSeries Rival v review: Features
In improver to its anarchistic paddle, the SteelSeries Rival 5 has a few other interesting features, mostly software-based. Like other gear from this manufacturer, the Rival five runs on the SteelSeries Engine software, which recently underwent a pretty large revamp. The SteelSeries Engine has always been one of the meliorate gaming peripheral programs on the market, letting yous easily customize lighting, plan button shortcuts and create profiles for individual games and apps.
Using SteelSeries Engine is unproblematic and intuitive, whether y'all want to reprogram the pollex buttons or adjust the DPI levels. (You tin can now program 5 or more than different DPI levels; the previous iteration of Engine capped you at two.) The big depict, however, is that you can set gorgeous lighting patterns on the Rival 5'due south two bright, colorful LED strips. Whether you want a dissimilar static color for each game you lot play, or a pulsating rainbow while yous work, having RGB lighting that you can actually run into (unlike the palm logo, which your manus usually covers) makes a large difference.
My only complaint here is that some similar mice (more often than not from Logitech) offer adjustable scroll wheels, which let you choose between tight scrolling for games, and more freeform scrolling for documents and websites. The Rival 5 has only one middle-of-the-route gyre wheel resistance setting, which isn't ideal for either application.
SteelSeries Rival 5 review: Operation
Similar other SteelSeries Gear, the Rival 5 performs beautifully in-game. I tested the peripheral with Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, Doom Eternal, Baldur's Gate Iii and Final Fantasy Fourteen, and found that information technology performed well in every genre. The mouse responded accurately to my commands, whether I was leaping around a battlefield to chainsaw demons in half, or wandering the streets of Ul'dah to gather MMO quests.
My only quibble is that I didn't get much use out of the paddle in whatsoever genre I tested; the pollex buttons worked better for 1-off commands, and the whorl cycle worked better for dorsum-and-forth actions. I would have preferred bigger thumb buttons instead, but perhaps other players will find better applications for information technology.
SteelSeries Rival five review: Verdict
The SteelSeries Rival 5 is simply an excellent mouse, particularly for its pocket-size price. It'due south constructive; it'south functional; it's colorful. The only potential drawback is the unusual paddle push, though that may well exist a draw for some fans.
If you're willing to spend a little more money, the Rival 600 is a slightly better mouse overall, particularly due to its tunable weights. Also, the Logitech G502 is our gold standard for gaming mice, and usually available for effectually the same toll as the Rival 5. Merely if you want something that's both straightforward and packed with RGB lighting, the Rival 5 is an piece of cake recommendation.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/steelseries-rival-5
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