Early this year, SteelSeries showed off its Rival 700 mouse at CES, and it's now finally available for purchase. Thanks to SteelSeries, we have our hands on a Rival 700 now, and we're ready to put it to the test.
The Rival 700 has a number of interesting features that help it stand out from the competition, but its two most prominent features are an OLED display and tactile alerts. The small OLED screen is positioned on the front left corner of the mouse, and it can display 128px x 26px black-and-white images or animations. More functionally, the OLED screen can display mouse settings or game stats like the user's kill/death ratio.
While the OLED screen seems like a bit of a gimmick, the haptic feedback seems quite useful to me so far. The mouse can vibrate with varying strengths and intervals to notify the user of ability cool-downs, low health, or switching tools. Unfortunately, both the OLED screen and the tactile alerts only currently support Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Minecraft. I hope to see the list of supported games grow—I'm not a CS:GO or Dota 2 player, but I'd love to have tactile alerts for the games I play.
Another feature of the Rival 700 is the customizability. The sensor, nameplate, and back cover can all be replaced with other parts from SteelSeries or with custom 3D-printed parts of the user's own design. It also features customizable RGB LEDs, as well as three programmable side buttons. The default optical sensor has a DPI range of 100 to 16,000 and a polling rate of 1ms. This may be the most intriguing mouse we've had in our hands in some time, so stay tuned for a full review.