Be sure to visit for all the latest comprehensive hands-on reviews and best-of roundups. It's an ingenious system that keeps the side panels firmly in place during play sessions, and the seams on the topside are nearly invisible. If you plan to buy the Rival 600, please consider using my affiliate links to support my channel, thank you so much: - Amazon: - SteelSeries - Get 15% off for your purchase: Timestamps: - Unboxing - Mouse Review - SteelSeries Engine 3 Software - Rival 300 vs Rival 600 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Gameplay Music: - Roman Müller - Easy Life Vlog No Copyright Music Music promoted by Vlog No Copyright Music. This program presents a clean, navigable interface that lets you reprogram any of the mouse's buttons and make the peripheral light up in a variety of attractive patterns. With eight zones of lighting, you can not only have this mouse cycle through multiple colors but display a rainbow of hues at the same time. It should be noted you can also make adjustments to the three buttons on the left side of the mouse too. The software gives you several presets that include: Steady, ColorShift, Multi Color Breathe, Reactive Key and disabled.
The most interesting new feature of the Rival 600, aside from its dual-sensor design, is its customizable weight system. The lighting ties into GameSense apps similar to SteelSeries keyboards. The software is divided into several sections: basic settings, illumination, and Engine Apps. All the settings are very easy to figure out and intelligently organized. I love the weighting system, and am surprised it's taken this long for someone to finally do it right.
Again, this is a minor gripe, but it doesn't apply to some of the Rival 600's competitors. Last year, SteelSeries reinvented itself with a new range of stylish headsets and a return to form with its iconic gaming mice. If you already have other SteelSeries gear, you'll be able to sync the Rival 600 very easily with that equipment, so it's a smart investment. Every time I deliberately lifted the Rival 600 off my mousing surface it stopped responding immediately and did not track during lift-off, to its credit. The Rival 600 proved supremely comfortable, and the clicking sensation is one of the most satisfying I've ever experienced on a mouse. There are also, thankfully, significantly fewer buttons on the Rival 600 compared to the Rival 500.
There's both an audible click and a very reassuring feeling on the fingertip too, making it seem very well-made, tight and taught, and immediately responsive. This mouse not only packs the TrueMove 3 sensor we came to love on the Sensei 310, but also a secondary sensor to stop your cursor from drifting when you lift the mouse off your mousepad or table. Thus, the TruMove3+ dual sensor system was created. Everything about the mouse feels nice and tight and never loose and sloppy. SoftwareThe SteelSeries Engine software plays a rather large role in the daily life of this mouse, though you can obviously adjust your settings and never open it again if you have it the way you like it. Better still, it has a detachable cable, which means you won't wear the cord out if you need to travel with it. I'm of two minds about this.
It's really the total package, and there's very little to complain about aside from some excessive software add-ons which bring little the table. You can change the lighting easily in the included software, which I'll cover more in-depth below. I assume it might benefit some players, but I personally wasn't one of them. I'm not complaining about it since you can just ignore it, but it's not something I think a lot of gamers will find useful. SteelSeries has an all-new flagship gaming mouse, and it's got some new tricks up its rubber-coated sleeve. I made a very attractive dark-blue-purple-light-blue cycle to accompany my StarCraft sessions, but it kept snapping back to the start of the pattern rather than fading, until I made it loop manually.
This allows you to make some pretty interesting color combinations as you can have color breathe on the logo, for example, but everything else a different color, or using a different effect. The software is a little less intuitive than it could be, and managing the weights is more of a pain than I was expecting. The Rival 600 looks beautiful, feels great, provides nearly unparalleled performance and offers some of the slickest customization options on the market. My second impression is that the base is wide enough that it seems more suited to people that are palm-grippers as opposed to claw grip aficionados. To give it a backhanded but sincere compliment, it's easily the second-best generalist gaming mouse on the market right now. In the past, mice like the Logitech G502 required you to just put the weights into the middle of the mouse, so they were all sort of clumped together in the same area.
I prefer a claw grip and the wide base made my fingers flare out just a tad more than I would have liked. Instead, you can pop off either side of the mouse to reveal four individual weight-holding channels. All of the technical breakthroughs of TrueMove3 are in TrueMove3+, but now with an even lower lift off distance. In the end I put the weights at the top and bottom of the mouse on both sides to make things equal, and found it made the mouse feel absolutely perfect. The mouse has some onboard memory too, so whatever settings you apply are saved to the mouse in case you have to plug it into a foreign computer, which is a nice touch. . Is it better than the mouse it's aiming to unseat? Moving it around my mousing surface felt like it was locked on to where I wanted it to be at all times, with zero slop, jitter, or latency.
Let's dive in: Design and FeaturesThe Rival 600 is similar in shape and design to the Rival 310, and it has the same TrueMove 3 sensor, which is now called TrueMove3+ due to the addition of the second optical sensor. As far as the lighting goes, it looks great when you're just looking at it from across the room, but as you can imagine when you're using the mouse you can't see any of it, so it's one of those features that is nice to have but not something that really adds to the gaming experience at all. With that in mind, we made improvements to another area — Lift-off distance. As it is now you have to manually select all the zones assuming that's what you want , which is kind of a pain. SteelSeries also includes a handy case for the weights so you won't lose them. The most innovative feature of the Rival 600 comes in its adjustable weights.
You can select any of the lighting zones to have the presets applied, or just one or two. The mouse buttons felt fantastic, and the side buttons also offer a very satisfying feel as well. It's easy enough to copy patterns, but it still requires some trial and error that you won't encounter with comparable programs from Razer, Logitech or Corsair. The peripheral was equally suited to building up a Terran military base, touring the halls of Arkham Asylum and throwing up a shield to protect my allies as D. Performance Aesthetics aside, the Rival 600 is well-tuned for performance as well.