SteelSeries’ Rival 700 OLED & Tactile Feedback Gaming Mouse Now Available In North America

After a short delay, SteelSeries’ latest gaming mouse, the Rival 700, is now available for purchase direct from SteelSeries for people in North America. The Rival 700, which was originally announced back at CES this year, is a new generation of high-tech gaming peripheral. It breaks new ground in rodent technology by coming equipped with not just a single killer feature, but three. An OLED display, tactile feedback, and a new innovative modular sensor system.

We’ll start with the cool new glowy OLED display embedded in the left side panel, capable of displaying not just static clip-art, but also animations as well. It can be used as a means of displaying profile information, such as CPI level (DPI), but also in-game stats for supported games, as well as button layouts, images, and other useful bits of information. It’s monochromatic with a refresh rate of 10 fps, however, no resolution is stated that we can gather; but a look at the available GIFs that can be downloaded, it’s 128 x 36. Not exactly high resolution, but good enough for basic information.

The next cool feature is the inclusion of a tactile feedback system using a linear motor as a vibration mechanism in the palm rest. By using this linear motor, it doesn’t cause the mouse itself to rumble or move about, causing the sensor to drift; the feedback is only applied to the palm rest. Several alerts can be set depending on the game, from low health, to stuns, reload, and so forth. It should be fairly obvious that the game itself will need to support these features, but it may also accept normal ‘vibration’ inputs from games that are setup for something like an Xbox controller – we’ll test this out when we can.

The last key feature is a removable and replaceable sensor module. While the 16,000 CPI sensor is unlikely to fall short any time soon, unless you plan to purchase 3x 8K monitors at some point, the fact that it can be replaced is an interesting development. While you are unlikely to purchase just a sensor in the future, it does meant that should you prefer the Rival 700 over a new generation, but want the updated sensor, then perhaps an upgrade is a possibility. This ties in with the customization options such as a replaceable name tag on the back that can be 3D printed. There is also a choice of cables, braided or not, short or long, and they can be detached and replaced with relative ease.

While 7 buttons may be too few for some, it should provide enough for the majority of gamers, since it also ties in with SteelSeries’ unified software stack with full programmability using SSE3 (SteelSeries Engine 3). For full details and purchase availability, you can head on over to SteelSeries’ website for details and pre-ordering, priced at just shy of $100. We’ll be sure to take the Rival 700 for a spin when ours arrives soon.