Surface and Materials

The back cover and main buttons are coated in an extremely soft and grippy material. It feels magnificent and provided me with a nice and sturdy grip even when my hands were drenched in sweat (influenza season hits hard). Unfortunately, this type of coating tends to collect fingerprints extremely quickly, but I think it's a fair price to pay for how amazing it feels to the touch. The scroll wheel has a textured rubber surface to help prevent any accidental slips, while the side and CPI buttons don't seem to have any special coating on them.


The side panels feature the same coating as the top gripping areas, while the non-rubberized surface has a very nice, subtle blueish accent to it. Just as one would expect, these parts of the shell have a vastly different touch and feel kind of like a transition between a matte and a glossy finish, like the main parts of the Cougar Minos X5, for instance.

Build Quality

There is just nothing new to say about the build quality—the Rival 650 is perfectly put together. There is literally nothing I could objectively or subjectively nitpick on. The small thing that bothered me on the Rival 600—a slight wiggle on the main buttons—has been fixed entirely. This is how it's done!

Weight

The Rival 650 weighs a staggering 121 grams. I'm calling SteelSeries out on it this time; I'm not sure why, but the weight was not adjusted at all in comparison to the Rvial 600. SteelSeries simply added a ~25 grams battery, which makes the mouse outrageously heavy by default. Mouse weight is generally up to personal preference, but in 2018, the competition has mostly gone for mice that are as light as possible, which makes this feel like a very hasty decision. There's an option to add more weights, 4-4 to each side, each weighing 4 grams, which would have this mouse weigh 153 g. This weight-tuning system is great as it lets you adjust the balance in many ways, but it would be a lot better if the mouse were a lot lighter by default.