 Steelseries Rival 100 Review







Here I’m going to review the (new) Rival 100 by Steelseries. I got it gifted by a friend who already replaced the original mouse feet with MS3(?) ones so, but otherwise the mouse was in mint condition.







Boxing



Simple, small, nothing much to say here.



What's included:

Just the mouse



Box:















Weight & Shape



The Rival 100 is very similar in shape to the Kana







It also weighs the exact same with 90g which is also the same as the bigger ZA11.







Weight: 90 g

Height: 37 mm

Width: 68 mm

Estimated width at grip position: 56 mm

Length: 120 mm

Number of buttons: 6















G100s - Sensei - Rival 100 - ZA11





Sensei - Rival 100 - ZA11





The shape in general works just fine, it’s really like a better Kana (which featured the most ******ed side buttons in history). The back part does not offer as much support as the ZA series does, but I still found it easy to get a good grip on the mouse in a short period of time.



For reference, here is how I grip it:



















My hand is around 20 cm from the tip of my middle finger to the base.



Of course shape is completely individual preference, so everyone has to try for himself in the end.







Sensor / Performance



So yeah, here is where it get’s interesting, especially because of the marketing mumbo jumbo that is done by Steelseries to shine a good light on their choice of a A3050 variant, the 3059. Let’s see how well it does in the performance tests.



ALL TESTS ARE PERFORMED ON THE ZOWIE G-SR

The real cpi for each setting can be seen in the mouse tester print.



I only tested the mouse at 1000 Hz. For the tests in MouseTester I mainly tried to find the perfect control speed (PCS) for each step which is important to me because of my low sens and me regularly hitting speeds higher than 4 m/s. I summarized the results below:







Well, that is something you don’t really see with new designs that often, because most new sensors maintain a high PCS regardless of set CPI step. So why does the Rival 100 behave like that? Because it can only do a maximum of 127 counts per poll, which means at higher CPI steps the bandwidth is the bottleneck instead of the ability of the sensor to track. This is evident in the chart below showing the max counts per poll for each step.







For 500 CPI the sensor lost the ability to track at around 4.6 m/s which was around 92 counts per poll. For all higher CPI steps it capped at 127 counts except for the 4000 CPI step. Why for that one? Because that one just doubles every count from the 2000 CPI step, so basically like setting windows mouse speed to 8/11. That’s why it capped at the same speed as the 2000 CPI step which is an abysmal 1.7 m/s.



CPI steps are a bit off as well, but that might be due to new mousefeet.







MouseTester Screens (Click to show)

(Click to show)

Buttons / Switches / Scroll Wheel

Build Quality