Turtle Beach Grip 500 Mouse Review

Introduction

At the start of this year, we visited Turtle Beach at CES 2015 and one thing in particular caught our attention, keyboards and mice! Turtle Beach has a long history of creating gaming focused headsets for a wide range of formats, but until now, that’s pretty much all they’ve done. Now, just a few months after they were first revealed, Turtle Beach are looking to tackle the PC gaming market with a range of keyboards and mice.

“The Turtle Beach Grip 500 laser gaming mouse is an ergonomically engineered, illuminated 7-button scroll wheel mouse that uses premium components such as Avago 9800 laser sensors and Omron switches to deliver steady, precise gaming control. It packs a number of powerful features, including the ability to customize performance, change illumination settings, program all seven buttons and the scroll wheel, plus create up to 50 complex macros with up to 100 commands each and then assign them to any button. They can then be saved into five different colour-coded profiles, loaded into on-board memory and changed on the fly.”

It certainly has all the hallmarks of a good gaming mouse, with all the features you would expect, but what we really want to see, is how it feels and how it performs, so let’s get right to it and take a closer look.

For the purpose of this review, Turtle Beach also sent me one of their new DRIFT mouse mats, I don’t typically review these, as they’re really down to user preference, but it seems like it’ll be a nice match for the GRIP 500 mouse.

For those looking at this mouse at retail, there’s a cut-away section that allows you to test the buttons, scroll wheel and feel the finish on the mouse.

In the box, you’ll find the GRIP 500, which comes hard-wired with a lightweight cable and the instruction booklet; not the most comprehensive bundle, but it’s really all you need.

The cable is of a good quality, no gold-plated connector, but honestly, you really don’t need it to be gold anyway.

The main panels of the GRIP 500 have been treated to a grippy soft-touch rubber. This is quite common on gaming mice these days, as it gives improved grip, a stealthy aesthetic and it’s often quite resilient to scratches and easy to keep clean.

Down the left side, you’ll find three switches, which just like the rest of the switches, are fully programmable. They’ve got a nice light tactile click to them that gives them a nice responsive feel.

The rear of the mouse sweeps out a little at the base on both the left and right sides, giving a nice ergonomic shape that fits the palm of your hand well.

There’s a slight curve to both the left and right mouse buttons, providing a stable finger resting position and combined with the grip coating, the mouse feels just as adept at both palm rest and claw grip play-styles.

There’s a single toggle switch behind the scroll wheel that can be used for DPI, or anything else you wish since it’s also fully programmable. The scroll wheel is very low set in the mouse body, but it is quite big and features a very grippy coating and ridges that make it very easy to manipulate.

A small Turtle Beach logo at the back, which will look nice when powered up thanks to some internal LED lighting.

The 500 GRIP, contrary to its name, glides exceptionally well on both soft and hard gaming surfaces, that’s to its slip-mats and its relatively lightweight design.