SteelSeries Rival 5 Gaming Mouse Review

A Closer Look & Performance

My first impressions of this mouse are certainly positive, it looks and feels very well made from the moment I took it out of the box. I’ve had a few days tinkering with it now too, and it feels very robust. It’s fairly light too, certainly not as light as the AOROX series, but certainly light enough to make it a bit more nimble and competitive while working and gaming.

However, they’ve clearly not cut out the features, as the mouse is very well equipped. There are five buttons on the left side, even if you can technically only see four buttons. There’s the usual forward/backwards navigation buttons, a thumb key, and then a long button above them all, which can actually be flicked up or down. This is pretty cool to use as a melee button in FPS games. However, I set it to one of my AOE attacks for playing Elder Scrolls Online, making it a bit easier to spam while farming some materials.

The mouse is quite large, but that does suit my hands, as I have a fairly wide palm and long fingers. However, the bulbous rear is matched with a slimmer front end and some deep recessed on the sides. This means you can use it in a palm rest, hybrid or claw grip type, so it should fit most hand sizes pretty well.

There are no buttons on the right, just a swell in the body to provide a better gripping point.

Something I really love are the mouse buttons. They’re each mounted on their own sprung panels, so there’s no feedback from one to the other. They’re also heavily scooped out, which provides a very natural finger resting position that puts your fingers in the most optimal spot for the best click.

The new switches deliver a very defined and snappy click, it has a nice tactile feel and sounds pretty crisp too. There’s no pre-travel either, with the top panel mounted right onto the switch, and there’s no post-travel either. The switches return very quickly, and you can really fire off some super-fast clicks when your game calls for it.

The mouse wheel is huge too, giving you a larger control surface and a soft rubber grip that makes it very easy to use. It’s quite a firm wheel too, and it stops dead even after an aggressive spin. There’s a well-defined bump at each stage too, so it’s pinpoint accurate when rolling through your weapon options. It’s clickable too, with a nicely defined click of its own.

Behind that, you’ll find another button slightly recessed into the body so your palm doesn’t trigger it. While this is the profile/DPI switch by default, keep in mind that the mouse is fully programmable using the SteelSeries software.

The TruMove sensor is awesome, I’ve used it in a bunch of SteelSeries products, and it never fails to disappoint. Even though this mouse isn’t exactly expensive, it delivers 1-to-1 tracking without faltering throughout the whole DPI range. There are two slipmats on the mouse too, but interestingly, there are two too holes to remove them. These are deeper than most, making it very easy to remove the pads should you need to change them.

Plug the mouse in, and you’re treated to quite the light show, thanks to a 10-zone lighting system. There are lights in the scrolls wheel, the two light bars on the sides, and the rear SteelSeries logo.

The lighting is fully customisable in the software, allowing you to do effects, fades, single colours, reactions and all the usual stuff. Frankly, I think we all know how RGB works these days, so let’s skip on.

One of the more interesting aspects of this mouse is the side button configuration. By default, the toggle switch and thumb key do nothing, which really confused me, so you have to set up the software to configure this. Thankfully, this was a quick and easy process. Windows 11 popped up to install SteelSeries software, I did, it was installed, and that’s it. You can set up the thumb key as a sniper button, dropping the DPI while it’s held, great for FPS games. However, I’m more of an MMO gamer, so having a hot key for a buff, potion, or spell on these extra switches is more my speed. Either way, with 9 buttons to program, you should be able to configure it to suit your taste.

The profile button on the top is perfect, allowing you to set button configurations, lighting and DPI settings that can all be changed at a single button press, making the mouse extremely versatile for gameplay, but also pretty nimble in the office too.

Overall, a really solid mouse, with great features. Taking the time to set up your profiles for each game is certainly worth it though. Disable a bunch of buttons for CS:GO, set up some macros for your MMO gaming, or some extra attacks for your MOBA games, and you’re ready to rock.