Steelseries 310 Rival and Sensei Review

Conclusion

Although the Sensei 310 and Rival 310 have slight differences – number of buttons and shape – in a lot of ways they are the same.

They both have the same materials for the main body of the mouse, a nicely textured matte plastic, whilst the sides of both have large rubber patches to ensure that both claw grip and palm grip users will be satisfied with their level of control. This ease of control is aided further by lengthy cables allowing you to have a comfortable amount of slack and the overall light weight of the mice helping keep fatigue to a minimum. Lastly the Steelseries Prism lighting on both is exceptional and amongst the very best available on any hardware, let alone mice.

The main event though is the new TrueMove3 sensor. Supporting CPI from 100 to 12000 there has been a lot made about the collaboration between PixArt and Steelseries. The headline element has to be its ability to provide you with 1-to-1 accuracy at resolutions below 3500 CPI, and a lot of time and effort has gone into building a new SROM and algorithm to ensure that even CPIs above 3500 have much lower latency and smoother jitter reduction than has previously been seen. The big question then has to be, was at that effort worth it? Yep. Hmm, that wasn’t exactly the kind of suspense that Hitchcock would be proud of was it, oh well.

Oddly I’m almost uniquely qualified to say that. I’ve been using mice since before a lot of you were born, back in the days when they came with balls in the middle and you had to keep scraping the fluff off the rollers. I’ve probably spent more waking hours of my life with a mouse in my hand than I haven’t. Sad though that sounds it’s nearly true. When not testing mice my main rodent of choice is set to 3400 CPI and has been for years. My muscle memory is thus honed to the kind of edge you could shave with. Thus as the Rival 310 and Sensei 310 both utilise the 1-to-1 tracking at CPI below 3500 it was easy to spot any differences. Whilst the TrueMove3 sensor wont entirely revolutionise your gaming capabilities if they aren’t already at a high level, there is enough of a difference in those pixel perfect moments to ensure that it will potentially give you the edge, and in ESports the difference between confetti and defeat is in those tiny margins.

Which you choose is a matter of personal preference. Normally it would be obvious to go with the Sensei 310 because, for the same price, you get two extra buttons. However, Steelseries have positioned the buttons slightly flusher to the side than we’ve seen on both earlier Sensei models as well as other mice in general. It made the ones on the opposite side to your thumb quite difficult to hit with any consistency. That is the only slight flaw in either of the two models we’re reviewing today. Otherwise they combine a comfortable design, with great lighting and a spectacular sensor and should be high on the list of anyone who wants an edge over the competition.

  

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