Turtle Beach Grip 500 Mouse Review

Performance

The Turtle Beach GRIP 500 is nice and easy to set up, which the mouse is plug and play ready, there’s also some software that can be downloaded from the official website. This software allows you to edit the button configuration, profiles, adjust DPI settings, lift-off height and change the LED backlighting colour; it’s all pretty straight forward stuff, but all the basics are covered. Once connected, the mouse lights up at the back, the scroll wheel and there are two more lights in the front, giving the mouse a nice glow effect.

The sensor performance on the GRIP 500 is very good and while I admit it’s nothing exceptional, it’s about on par for a mouse of this price and specification. The tracking is smooth with no jitter, prediction or stepping, but a little acceleration does creep in once you push past 3200 DPI although at those speeds, you’re unlikely to notice and lower DPI settings feel as smooth and accurate as you would expect.

The GRIP 500 is marketed as a gaming mouse, which isn’t surprising given that Turtle Beach are a gaming brand, but that doesn’t mean it’s only good for one thing. While testing the GRIP 500 I found it to be a very competent mouse, nothing remarkable, but a strong contender none the less. First person shooters demand a good sensor and the laser sensor used here didn’t let me down. The main selling points of this mouse are the ergonomics and configurable buttons, making it great for a wide range of games and I especially like having three buttons on the left side, that extra one comes in handy for melee attacks or throw item in games like Battlefield. I also found it made a handy push-to-talk button, but the whole point is you can set it to whatever you feel like, always nice to have an extra switch within easy reach.

The buttons and the scroll wheel are of a very good quality, they’re quick and responsive, without being so light that you accidentally trigger them. If you play games like League of Legends, which can be pretty mouse intensive, then you’ll find a lot to love about the GRIP 500.

The strongest aspect of this mouse is easily its day to day performance. This is a really nice day to day mouse, perfect for working in Photoshop, browsing reddit and a million other tasks that you can do with your PC. Then when it gets to the end of the work day and you want to play some games, just switch your profile from work to game and it’s good to go. A solid all-round performance.