Steelseries Rival vs Cougar 450M

The Steelseries Rival gaming mouse has a built in Pixart PAW3310 optical sensor that offers great tracking control.

Steelseries boast of new in house built switches used inside of the Rival. Use reports have claimed that the clicks as "satisfying".

Steelseries uses a software suite called Engine 3 that is low resource and used to customize their gaming mouse options.

At $59 the Rival gaming mouse has a great balance between build quality and value for money.

The Steelseries Rival gaming mouse offers 16.8 million colors with two zone illumination.

When You have relatively large hands.

The 5000 DPI of the Steelseries Rival can be doubled to 10000 with Steelseries firmware.

The cable is braided so it doesn’t bend easily.

The DPI button, which is located on top of the mouse, is actually a profile changing button and can be tied to button configuration or lighting options.

This mouse has some basic sensor-related customization.You can modify the polling rate, DPI amount, lift-off distance and even angle snapping. The angle snapping is an on/off choice instead of a slider. Its UIX companion software has an extensive list of customization options, notably long for a budget mouse. It includes lighting options, button rebinding, macros, DPI changing, multiple profiles and several other smaller features that even other non-budget mice don’t have.

The Cougar 450M uses the Avago 3310 sensor and presents no jitter, acceleration or smoothing. The DPI choices ranges from 50 all the way up to 5000 with increments of 50. For this sensor, every DPI step of 50 should work equally well, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of native DPI settings.

Being an ambidextrous mouse, it avoids unconventional shapes and stay true to the classic mouse design. To facilitate control and finger grip, it has a slight incline located at the side and its sides are covered in textured plastic.

The mouse has an ambidextrous design, making it a possible choice for left-handed users. It also has extra buttons on both sides, so they can be used on both use cases.

It’s Avago optical sensor is a solid performer recognized many mouse enthusiasts. You can rely on it to track precise movement without worrying about acceleration or jitter.

Despite the low price point, this mouse still maintains a respectable list of features. It has a good shape, reliable sensor and plenty of customization options. It bridges the gap between low cost and high quality while still being well built.