SteelSeries Rival 3 Wireless

Wireless freedom and long battery life—isn’t that all you really need?

- IAN EVENDEN

FIRST, A CONFESSION. We’ve used a few wireless mice in our time, but we have never spent quite so long searching for the USB dongle that connects one to our PC. Over and over we turned it in our fingers, pausing to admire its matte black finish and nicely slick pads while we did so. However, we found no evidence of a little door to release the dongle. We couldn’t even find where to put the batteries in.

A quick check of the box revealed no instruction leaflet to put us on the right track, just an assurance that the dongle and two AAA batteries were included. We shook the mouse—nothing, no rattle, no cries of the imprisoned. It was starting to look like we’d have to use Bluetooth to connect it, and nobody likes that. The mouse looked up at us from the desk, mockingly, the slight gap where the buttons meet the back of the casing appearing to crinkle into a derisive smile.

Eureka! Applying a small amount of force to that gap slides the casing off, revealing slots for both batteries and dongle—all filled. Transferring the dongle to a vacant USB port on our PC, and flicking the switch on the bottom of the mouse to the 2.4GHz setting (the other options are off and Bluetooth), we instantly had pointer movement. Windows found the driver immediately and, neatly, a popup prompted us to install SteelSeries’s Engine 3 software, which served up a firmware update straight away, so we could customize the lone RGB zone (the wheel) and the button configuration (there are six).