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So I decided to see if I can go back to a regular mouse. I also wanted to replace my kinda crappy Corsair Harpoon Pro RGB, mainly because Corsair suck and you can't store RGB settings on-device. Against my better judgement I purchased a Steelseries Rival 3 Wireless.
This is Steelseries' cheapest wireless mouse. Retail here in the UK it's £50 but I got it for £35 on Amazon. I was expecting a better unboxing experience for £50 - the box was nice on the outside, at least.
In the box you'll find the mouse itself, a pair of Duracell OEM alkaline triple-A batteries and the usual warranty book that's nearly as thick as my Pixel 6a is. Putting the corporate rubbish aside...
The mouse feels nice in the hand and has a decent weight to it on account of it being wireless. Steelseries say it weighs 96g with one battery and 106g with two. Its overall construction seems alright and there is not a single rubber piece to be seen, meaning it's not going to melt in my hands after a couple years of use. This is a really positive thing, believe it or not.
For buttons, it's got the usual left, right and middle clicks alongside a mappable DPI button in the middle and two side buttons on the left side. The standard affair, no difference when compared to the Harpoon it replaces. I won't use the side buttons.
RGB is very limited. The only RGB on here is on the scroll wheel, on its sides. By default it's orange, and it will flash at specified intervals to let you know how much battery power is left. I was hoping there'd be some RGB on the logo but it seems that's only for the wired version. Not the end of the world but still a little disappointing.
It has Steelseries' TrueMove Air optical sensor, which can go from 100 to 18,000 DPI/CPI in 100 DPI/CPI increments. Its polling rate is 100Hz, or 1ms.
It glides pretty nicely across my desk pad, which is really the bare minimum I expect. Clicks are clicky and the scroll wheel is nice and smooth. I've connected it via 2.4GHz and its included USB dongle but it can also connect via Bluetooth. I've noticed no delay but your experience may differ, some people are more sensitive to it than others. When in Bluetooth pairing mode the rings on the scroll wheel will pulse blue. When searching for its 2.4GHz dongle they will pulse white.
Something that immediately stood out to me is that OpenRGB does not support it, unlike the wired version. Rebooting to Windows and installing Steelseries GG, I noticed that the ability to save the RGB settings to the hardware was suspiciously... absent. Steelseries have replaced hardware control with Prism, a software-only based system. This irritated me, as I bought it mainly because I wanted a wireless mouse that could also retain RGB info without crappy software running.
Sure enough I quit GG and it reverted to the default orange. I started searching to see what could be done and came across an old version of Steelseries Engine, the original piece of control software, available for download from Steelseries' official CDN. I grabbed it - version 3.22.1 - and installed it. Lo and behold, the option to change the RGB on the hardware was there. I can only conclude the modern version of Engine, now called 'GG' sucks, and it seems the internet tends to agree.
If you're wondering, I set it to be solid white and disabled the option where it turns off the LEDs while you're moving the mouse. The sleep timer I kept the same at 5 minutes.
UPDATE April 19th 2024: The mouse refuse to connect in the morning until I unplugged and plugged back in the 2.4GHz dongle.
The Rival 3 is a nice mouse but is in my opinion partially ruined by the terrible, shitty Steelseries GG software that they forced on people. As this mouse is still compatible with the older Steelseries Engine 3.22.x release I would highly recommend downloading that instead, as it allows you to save RGB info to the device instead of having to deal with crappy software only control.
At £35 it's a steal, but I'm not so sure about £50. Make your own judgement on that one. I'd give it a solid 7/10.
Rival 3 Wireless - Steelseries UK