How do you “guarantee” 60 million clicks on a mouse? I get that’s an impressive number, but a guarantee is a legal term, and so does that mean that if you can somehow prove that you’ve only got 59,999,999 clicks on your mouse before it craps out, you’re entitled to a full replacement? If so, you need to know, SteelSeries, I am counting this and I better get to the full 60 million with the Rival 3 Wireless Gen 2 gaming mouse.
Jokes aside (yes, I really do know that 60 million is just promising a lot without them ever expecting anyone to actually count), the Rival 3 Wireless Gen 2 gaming mouse is a quality piece of kit, and designed to give players the basics of quality gaming equipment at a low-end price. For $AUS119 (and $AUS79 for a wired version), you get a highly durable, no-frills mouse that is focused on precision and glide.
The mouse offers two wireless options. One is a 2.4GHz option via a dongle, and Bluetooth. Naturally, Bluetooth isn’t going to cut it for a serious gaming environment, but the 2.4 GHz option should get you by. SteelSeries claims a 1.9ms click latency, and a True Move Air 18k DPI optical sensor, which will be precise enough for most gaming applications. Really serious gamers will probably want a wired mouse with many more buttons on it, but for some Age of Empires between work sessions, this little fellow gets the job done with no fuss.
It’s very light, too, coming in around 100g for the wireless model. It gets a little heavier when you add in the two batteries that it requires (no internal battery, to keep both cost and weight down), but more than light enough for all-day use in comfort. Those batteries will last forever and a day once installed, too, with SteelSeries claiming up to 450 hours on Bluetooth, and 45 to 200 hours when using the much more demanding 2.4GHz option. Either way, as long as you keep a spare set of batteries around for when the mouse finally does go flat, this is set-and-forget battery efficiency.
Despite the light weight, the mouse does feel robust and that you’ll get your 60 million clicks worth. It also has a simple, classical profile, fitting the hand nicely and neither too bulky nor too small for whatever you use a mouse for. There is an efficiency to it, with the minimum number of buttons and not a feature more, but, unless you’re about to run off to join an eSports team, you’re not likely to care that much. Point is you can throw this in the bag and use it for work, and then unwind with your favourite game and use it for play, and it won’t require much more than a quick flick of the switch to toggle between Bluetooth and 2.4GHz modes to do so.
SteelSeries has even released the mouse in multiple colours – white and black are iconic enough, but there’s also a soft blue and lavender option. These colour options are very understated – almost shockingly so for video game hardware – and will also fit in nicely across both work and home use, if you’re looking for a single mouse to do it all.
To customise performance, you’ll want to drop into the SteelSeries software, which remains as straightforward as ever to use. You can remap the limited number of buttons on the device, adjust acceleration settings, polling rate (125, 250, 500 or 1000 Hz), and the CPI (from 100 to 18,000 CPI). These are all standard settings for mice these days, but out of the box the settings are well-calibrated for most applications, and I suspect that for the target audience of these mice, many people will never even drop into the software.
So the Rival 3 Wireless Gen 2 might not be the most exciting thing you will ever purchase, but it does everything right. It’s comfortable, obviously durable, versatile thanks to the dongle and 2.4GHz connection, efficient on battery and offers more than enough accuracy that until you’re an elite eSports athlete, investing in anything more than this is probably going to be overkill.
