Corsair Scimitar RGB Elite Mouse Review

A Closer Look & Performance

The Corsair Scimitar RGB Elite comes hard-wired with a very nice quality black braided cable. In the box, you’ll find all the usual documentation, as well as a small adjustment tool that can be used on the side panel; I’ll show you that later.

The little details mean a lot too, and I love the new Corsair USB headers. They’ve got a textured metal head on them that just oozes quality.

The mouse its self looks fantastic. It has a slightly revised shape to the old model with the front left wing looking a lot more trim these days. Plus, Corsair is out of their mid-life crisis “Corsair Gaming” black and yellow phase we saw on the old model, so it’s black and grey all over and it looks a LOT better for it.

The big hot ticket selling point of this mouse has to be that epic macro control panel on the side. Forget your simple two side button design, this beast has twelve! I’ve used the old Scimitar before and it was brilliant, so I’m glad Corsair hasn’t messed with the look and feel of the buttons here.

The cable is mounted ever so slightly off center too, allowing a full cut-away between the LMB and RMB. Corsair do this to allow one massive scroll wheel to sit in the middle, giving you really smooth and accurate control over that.

Down the right side, you get a pretty large wing, allowing you to get a full hand grip on the mouse. Plus, there’s a really hard-wearing rubber coating on there, which should keep it firmly in your hand.

The ergonomics look pretty funky from the backside, but it’s tuned for right-handed use only. Plus, your hand will not need to be fully rotated flat with the desk, which means it’ll greatly reduce strain on your wrist.

The underside of the mouse is pretty clean looking, but still has a few style touches of its own. There are four good size slip mats, and the mouse glides really well on any kind of surface.

So back to that kick-ass control panel. It has some really trick features that make it stand out to me. For one, it’s got twelve buttons, and the unique 4 x 3 layout makes it very easy to use. Six are clean and smooth, which six more are textured. It’s a simple touch, but it’s exactly about that, touch. You can index your fingers quickly without needing to look at it, and that’s important.

Ergonomics are important, especially since everyone has different size hands, and even more so when dealing with so many buttons. The whole panel can be moved though, solving that ergonomics issue in seconds. By default, it was all the way back like this.

Grab that little tool that came in the box, and simply slacken off the bolt on the bottom.

That allows you to slide it and lock it anywhere from right at the back through to the front like this. I like it jacked up to the front, but as I said, you have that freedom to set it how you like it. You can customise it a hell of a lot more than that too, we’re not done yet!

Hook up the USB cable and the Scimitar RGB Elite sparks to life with a lot of colours. There are four lighting zones here, meaning you can really go to town on the lighting customisation. Of course, it’s all done through the Corsair iCUE software, so it’s super easy to configure, and there are loads of neat default profiles ready if you need them.

The first lighting zone is on the front, and it’s shared between that vented headlight bit and the massive scroll wheel. As you can see, the colours are fantastic, but it’s Corsair, so we know the RGB game is strong.

Then you have two more zones on the left side. There’s a light near the front shining back towards the panel, then another zone that backlights the side panel too.

That means you can set one sidelight colour and one button colour. The good thing with this is it gives you more options to visually identify your current profile and macro configuration, which is important on such a busy panel. Your final lighting zone in the Corsair sails logo on the back, giving us all four.

That side panel is staggering though, even though I’ll admit most gamers don’t need this much power. I play a LOT of Elder Scrolls Online though, and being able to have my entire attack bar on the mouse is a real game-changer. Plus, I can stick a lot of emotes, chat commands, timers and more in there thanks to the powerful macro engine in iCUE. It’s something that you may take a few days to dial in everything just right, but when you do, you’ll wonder how you did without it.

The ergonomics are superb though, it’s very comfortable and easy to move the mouse. The new 18K DPI sensor is sublime too, but since we’ve seen flawless sensors in a few Corsair mice over the last couple of years, it’s hardly surprising. Being able to dial in 1 DPI increments to fine-tune performance is great though, and with the surface tune and adjustable lift-off, it’ll perform great all day and night.