SteelSeries Rival 650: it loses its thread, not its performance

Presentation

The Rival 650 is none other than a wireless Rival 600 with 2.4 GHz radio link, battery and detachable cable. This is done at the cost of a logical increase in its total mass, SteelSeries not having seen the other components and materials of its mouse. However, it costs 40 € more for this 650 which thus appears at 129.99 €.

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Precision

In electronics, SteelSeries keeps its TrueMove3 + sensor duo here, consisting of an optical sensor signed PixArt and another optical sensor specifically dedicated to the measurement of lifting height. This allows you to choose an extremely low lift-off height, only 0.5 mm, in order to stop the movement of the pointer (or the camera, in a game) as soon as possible when the mouse. Enough to suppress a maximum of parasitic movements when you center your mouse on the carpet, which you do constantly if you use a fairly low sensor sensitivity. Note however that SteelSeries seems to have corrected the concerns that we may have encountered when adjusting the lifting height with certain surfaces during our test of the Rival 600. A counter allows anyway to automatically return to the initial setting after 10 seconds in case setting too low which would cause an unexpected cut.

Apart from this specificity of a second optical sensor, the Rival 650 can rely on its excellent main sensor (TrueMove3 which is also found in the Rival 310 and Sensei 310), capable of absorbing accelerations of 50 g and operating up to at speeds of 8.9 m / s. Unless there is a bionic arm, there is no risk of it dropping out. The 1: 1 optical tracking also ensures faithful capture without acceleration. If it is possible to use very high sensitivities, up to 12,000 dpi, note with satisfaction that SteelSeries itself recommends to be content with a much more reasonable level (below 3,500 dpi, which is already very high for our current monitors, as 4K Ultra HD they are), since this setting has nothing to do with the intrinsic precision of the sensor. Remember that at 12,000 dpi, a movement of less than a centimeter is enough to cover the entire width of an Ultra HD screen - in a first-person game, this results in a very large camera rotation. In such conditions, goodbye precision.

Let's finish with a key point for this Rival 650: the quality of its wireless connection. We simply did not notice any latency or interference with this 2.4 GHz radio transmission which is done with the same frequency of 1000 Hz as wired. Whether you connect the wire or not, you benefit from the same performance, without loss of information. However, who says high performance often says relatively large energy consumption and this is true here since the autonomy is limited to 24 hours of use. In comparison, Logitech achieves twice with its G Pro Wireless thanks to a fine management of consumption up to the sensor level, but we can imagine that with two SteelSeries sensors was going to have a hard time matching the Swiss mouse in the matter. Plenty of things to play until exhaustion, however, especially as any reasonable player can choose to recharge their mouse for a short break, the Rival 650 regaining no less than 10 hours of autonomy after a charge of only 15 minutes thanks to its fast charge capacity . Finally, when it comes to saving energy, the mouse goes to sleep automatically and you can activate an option of "intelligent illumination mode" which turns off the backlight when the mouse is moving.

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Conclusion

If one might be tempted to write that the Rival 650 is just a Rival 600 that can operate wirelessly, the 25 g that separate the two mice undermines this claim. Nevertheless, the 650 manages to retain the first-rate performance of its wired counterpart and we can therefore only advise it in the same way ... if we are not particularly looking for lightness.

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