Having a percentage or, better still, a running tally of estimated time remaining would help remove the guesswork. It’s still odd that SteelSeries doesn’t include a more meaningful way to measure battery life for its wireless gaming mice. While the Sleep Timer is set to a reasonable five minutes, you can lower or raise this, and you can absolutely go lower because bringing the SteelSeries Rival 3 back to life is just a click away. This is where you’ll find that ‘High-Efficiency Mode’ setting, plus you can tweak mouse sensitivity levels for the CPI button, tweak the sleep timer to further preserve battery life, and manually tweak the polling rate (set to 1000Hz by default). While SteelSeries Engine 3 software doesn’t hold up in comparisons to more fully featured offerings from Razer and Logitech, it still has all of the essential options you need that are a couple of clicks away from customising.

At 1000Hz, this is a viable budget wireless gaming mouse for even the most demanding of shooters, but you will want to manually shift the polling rate and RGB to find that mix of longevity and accuracy. Like the shift from wired to wireless, it’s hard to go back after you’ve experienced 1000Hz vs 125Hz. Without getting too lost in the details of the debate, as long as your CPU isn’t completely ancient, higher polling rates don’t have any disclaimers to offer, and the speedier positional reporting rate (1ms for 1000Hz vs 8ms for 125Hz) results in in-game accuracy that feels better.Įven for everyday computing, especially for people like me who use multiple monitors (I have three), higher polling rates helps with fast-movement accuracy across active windows spread across multiple monitors. Now, this is an area that has long been debated, particularly among shooter fans, but as someone who considers 500Hz to be the minimum of what feels perceivably responsive for shooters, 125Hz is concerning for me. The other compromise for reaching that 400+ hours of battery life is enabling this battery-saving mode also drops the polling rate from 1000Hz to 125Hz.

Rival 3 wireless review