SteelSeries Rival 500 Overview
Upon first glance at the Rival 500 the thing I noticed is that it is a much larger and wider mouse than most. Official dimensions are 4.68-inches x 3.08-inches x 1.7-inches (HxWxD). Being larger and wider means that this mouse has more of a palm or claw type grip. The mouse has a matted top cover which should make using it pretty comfortable.
At the front top of the mouse you have your left and right mouse buttons, scroll wheel, and a middle programmable button. Additionally you have 2 programmable buttons to the left of the main left mouse button and a long single programmable button to the right of the main mouse button. The positioning of these extra buttons should make them easy to press. The scroll wheel is rubberized which will give you a good grip. The center programmable button by default will switch between two preset DPI levels. You can set your DPI levels from 100 – 16000 DPI in increments of 100 DPI.
Taking a look at the left side of the mouse we can see that unique thumb button layout. There are actually six buttons here, three above where your thumb rests, one where your thumb rests, and three below where your thumb rests. The thumb rest itself has a rubbery texture to help your thumb grip better, this texture is also on the small button where your thumb sits. The button two buttons curve out to sort of provide a rest for your thumb. I did not have any issues by accidentally pressing these two buttons, but if you do you can actually turn them completely off, which will get into in a bit.
The opposite side of the mouse does not have that long single button, we can get a better look at it here. The rest of the right side of the mouse has the same rubbery texture we saw on the other side of the mouse. This will give you a good grip.
On the palm of the mouse there is a SteelSeries that will light up with RGB lighting. This logo along with the scroll wheel feature RGB lighting and can be controlled independently.
Flipping the mouse over we can see the Rival 500 uses an optical sensor, which is the PixArt PMW3360 16000 DPI optical sensor. There are three teflon mouse feet (1 front, 2 rear) on the bottom of the mouse which will help it glide across your gaming surface. There is also a switch on the bottom of the mouse that will disable the two bottom left mouse buttons. This is a hardware switch that actually fully disables the buttons so they do not click anymore or anything.
