Corsair Glaive RGB Gaming Mouse Review

Conclusion

Mice are, more than almost any other item of hardware you’ll use, a matter of personal taste as much as they are about raw performance. With anything else the ‘do I buy this’ factor is heavily weighted towards the price and performance elements. If you buy a K95 Platinum keyboard then the use of RGB Cherry MX switches is the overriding consideration, with the insanely high build quality perhaps second. Whether you like the design or not comes a long way down the list.

With mice though we spend probably more of our time with our hand wrapped around our rodent than we do with our fingers on the keys. They are extraordinarily familiar to us and a good one feels like it’s plugged in to your nervous system and is an extension of your arm. You almost think the pointer around and your thumb finds the buttons without it requiring conscious thought. So if there is a slight niggle in the ergonomics it has a much bigger impact on whether we would consider buying it when compared to any other piece of hardware. It’s a curious thing, but mice are much more personal than keyboards or headsets. Your choice of mouse says a lot about who you are, and the amount of time we use it can rapidly demonstrate whether we’ve made a wise purchase. We know we’re not the only people who used a mouse we’d brought for a couple of days and realised we wanted to throw it out the window.

All of that somewhat hints at our feelings about the Glaive RGB. Not the throwing it out the window bit, just that – despite hugely impressive performance – it doesn’t suit what we want from a mouse in the ergonomics department and it’s all down to the choice of side panels. Look at your mouse. Look at any mouse. They all have a flush side panel with the side buttons either also flush or perhaps slightly protruding. With the Glaive RGB though all the side panels sit proud from the side of the mouse with the buttons ending up recessed. So either you rest your thumb on the side panel and it’s a faff to hit the side buttons, or you rest your thumb atop the side panel which makes your decision about which to install a moot one, as they will all feel the same. If only Corsair had provided us with a single flat side panel then we wouldn’t be having this discussion because if you loved the shelf effect you could use it, but if you didn’t you had a choice. Here we have the illusion of choice but all three options are the same.

That is a hugely disappointing thing for us personally, especially because the performance of the mouse is so good. That sensor is a blinder, nearly infinitely adjustable to provide you with the most accurate placement of the pointer/crosshairs. As we said above, a good sensor can make using your mouse a subconscious thing, and the sensor in the Glaive is exceptionally good. The button response is crisp too, with a firm click that leaves you in no doubt if you’ve pressed it or not. The lighting is good with three different RGB zones letting you tailor it to suit your personal preference. However, much like the side panels, it is an exercise in frustration thanks to the huge DPI stage indicator lights which dominate what you can see when the mouse is in your hand and, bizarrely, aren’t RGB and cannot be disabled. You get ice blue and have to like it. Why on earth couldn’t they be RGB too? Corsair have fixed the “tiny indicator lights well hidden” problem that plagues other mice, yet in doing so have actually made it worse because you’re stuck with bright blue. If its a cost item why not just have them light up when they are being changed rather than all the time? 

How you feel about the Corsair Glaive will largely depend upon how much personal weight you attach to the fact that the lighting is good, but you’re stuck with blue indicator lights, how much you love the adjustable side panels and don’t care if they end up meaning that the side buttons can be hard to get at, and how much you like the idea of a macro but have no need at all to include mouse buttons or pointer movements into those macros. Because if you don’t care about any of those things, or at least they aren’t a negative, then you have a mouse which looks great, has great lighting with high colour fidelity and a sensor that is just about the best we’ve ever used. For us those elements are too much to overlook and our frustration is made all the starker by the fact that by including a flat side panel option and using RGB DPI indicator lights would have placed the Glaive RGB amongst the very best mice on the market. But that sensor is easily enough to win it our OC3D Performance Award. 

  

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