This video is a paid promotion for Steelseries, who have provided me with these products which
I shall be talking about. Steelseries is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year.
20 years since it introduced the Icemat, way back in 2001. And now, it’s rolling out
its Prime Headset, and Prime mouse series. These are all products which forego the RGB
lighting. They don’t contain millions of buttons and features- instead,
they focus on performance and durability, containing just the essential features,
and top-quality components for their price-points. The Prime Headset, for instance,
has the same high-resolution drivers as their more expensive PRO headset range. And all of the Prime
mice are light-weight, feature 1-to-1 tracking and are equipped with the new Prestige buttons,
which use MAGNETS! More on that later. But first: unboxing. Now I can’t just
unbox this in my room. I did better than that in 2014 when I made a video about the RAW,
showcased to Cornwall’s beautiful landscapes. But how to one-up it this time?...
Thanks Philip. So once I ran back down, like, England’s tallest mountain, I delved into the
details of these devices. DESIGN
All of the mice feature the same ergonomic right-handed design.
You can see from the back that the mouse slopes down quite significantly on the right hand side.
Steelseries says that the design has been optimised for finger and claw grip, which
are the most common styles among FPS players. All 3 mice have the same standard 5-button
configuration, though underneath you’ll find an extra button, used to jump between different CPI
sensitivities. There’s no option to add weights to these mice, and they’re all quite light- with
the Prime being the lightest of the lot at just 69 grams. I got the same when I first tested it,
but of course when filming this it just HAD to be stubborn and to come out at 70. I guess my mouse
has over-eaten. 70 grams… which is the same as this amount of loo roll. The wireless is
the heaviest, but still only weighs 80 grams and obviously foregoes the bulk and weight of a wire.
I’m used to heavier mice, so going to these I’d describe it like you’re holding an empty shell
of a mouse with nothing inside. It certainly makes it easy to launch these mice across the desk for
flickshots. And friction is kept to a minimum, as underneath these mice you can see they use
PTFE skates, shaped like a smiley face. BUTTONS
A new special feature for all 3 of these mice is their use of ‘Prestige’ switches,
which are designed for durability and are rated for 100 million kliks,
which is far beyond most. And because of the way they’re designed, their klik should remain
consistent throughout their entire lifespan. They go about this by using a much stronger piece
of metal to control the movement than other button types do, and to detect the klik itself it uses
MAGNETS and light. These combined features means that there’s not much that can go wrong with them,
and not many parts to wear out. So while you will change and age and deteriorate over time,
don’t worry, you can live safe in the knowledge that your mouse won’t suffer the same fate.
In terms of how the buttons behave, I’ve had some mice where resting my fingers on them is
enough to trigger them, but the Prime mice require a bit more pressure than that so I
find myself gaming with my fingers resting on the buttons even when I’m not pressing them.
The side buttons protrude slightly and are quite thin- you have enough space to put your thumb
underneath them without touching them at all. And the scroll wheels all feel slightly different
in use. The Prime’s has the least resistance out of the 3. It’s very easy to scroll.
The Prime+ has a heavier feeling scroll wheel and a more solid sound to it.
And I’d almost describe the Prime Wireless as being somewhere between the two.
So I guess here, it comes down to personal preference which you’ll prefer.
The rest of the buttons feel similar between the models-
here is how the rest of them sound when pressed.
SENSORS All 3 of
the mice use Steelseries’ top-of-the-line optical sensors with true 1-to-1 tracking,
so there won’t be any silly acceleration issues or anything like that. They all have ‘tilt tracking’,
meaning that it doesn’t do any silly business while the mouse is lifted off at strange angles.
However, all 3 of the mice feature slightly different configurations which I shall cover
separately later on. RGB
As I’ve already said, this range doesn’t sport a lot of lighting- it’s just the ring of the scroll
wheel that lights up. But in the Steelseries software you’ll find all sorts of settings for
this: you can have it lit up in one colour. You can have it fade in and out. Or you can
choose multiple colours for it to smoothly fade between. Or… you can just have it off.
Time to cover the differences between the different models.
PRIME The series starts with the Prime, for $60.
It weighs just 69 grams and contains many of the same features as the more expensive variants,
like the same shape and button configuration, the same ‘crispy kliks’ and the same 18,000 CPI.
And while it’s RGB-lite, the colour of its mouse wheel can still be configured to any
colour you like… as long as it isn’t brown. And while it’s a corded mouse, the wire it
comes with is detachable, meaning that any cable damage is cheap to fix since you don’t have to
replace the entire mouse. It uses a micro USB connection and attaches securely to the front
like so. And the triangular shape ensures you won’t try to ram it in the wrong way.
Now, with these braided cables, the last thing you want for them to be is stiff. Here’s the cable
from my keyboard, to demonstrate how horrible a stiff cable is. It doesn’t really matter much
for a keyboard, but for something like a mouse that you’re hurling about all over your desk,
you want it to have more give than this so that it doesn’t get in the way of your mouse movements.
So I proudly present to you, The Prime mouse going through my sophisticated wire-waggle challenge.
So yeah, it’s softer than a lot of braided cables are. It isn’t going to impale you
or anything like that… but it is still a cable. And if you want a different one,
as long as it’s Micro USB and small enough to fit into this gap at the front
then you’re going to be good to go. PRIME+
For $20 more you can get the Prime Plus, which weighs 71 grams.
For these extra 2 grams of weight, you get a second sensor to monitor lift-off distance,
which should minimise jitter as you’re lifting off and putting down again. This can be configured
down to as little as .25 mm from the surface. And you can see it also comes with this little
OLED display underneath. This serves numerous uses- pressing the CPI button,
it will tell you what it’s been changed to. OR, hold it down and you reach a handy little
options screen to allow you to change the polling rate, scroll wheel colour and so
on. Which could be useful if you’re using it on a computer without the Steelseries
software installed, like in LANs or tournaments. BUT, when you do have access to the Steelseries
software, you can customise the OLED screen to display whatever message you’d like it to.
PRIME WIRELESS If the Prime+ is
the premium version of the Prime, then the Prime Wireless is the… wireless version of the Prime.
It trades stuff like a dedicated lift-off sensor and OLED display for wireless functionality.
So this model is great if you want a neat, tidy desk with as few wires showing as possible. But
it’s also good for messy people such as myself, where wired mice are always getting caught up in
my cans of energy drink and numerous fluffy toys dotted around the place which I use for good luck
in Counter-Strike matches. I definitely appreciate a mouse that isn’t connected to anything.
But when it comes to wireless mice, people generally have 2 concerns, being the latency,
and the battery life. I couldn’t spot any latency with the Prime Wireless. As far as I’m concerned,
these days there is no difference between a decent wireless mouse and a wired one,
and switching between the Prime Wireless and Prime Plus I couldn’t tell the difference,
other than the weight, with the Prime Wireless being slightly heavier at 80 grams.
As for the battery life, this is one area in which wireless gaming mice have certainly improved in
recent years! This one can last for 100 hours on a single charge. This is all thanks to the Truemove
Air sensor, which has a few optimisations over the Truemove Pro sensor that’s seen in the others.
It still tracks at speeds of up to 400 IPS, 40 G acceleration and it has the same 18,000 CPI
as the other mice. And in the software you can customise it more to get the balance of
performance and battery life that suits you best. All this wireless action is enabled via this
dongle, and when it does come to recharging the mouse, the USB-C charging cable fits in snug and
securely, and 15 minutes of charge will give you 40 hours of play. The Prime Wireless is $130.
PRIME HEADSET And finally, the Arctis Prime headset! As you
may have gathered from the name, this one is NOT a mouse. It is instead a headset. It contains very
few features and frills. This is a gaming headset for people who favour accurate sound quality over
everything else, allowing this product to punch above its weight in the sub-$100 price range. It
does this by featuring the same high-resolution speaker drivers found in the more expensive PRO
model. And it contains NO RGB whatsoever! The headset has a customisable strap to let
it fit your FACE. The material surrounding your ears is incredibly soft and squishy,
so I found myself poking at this quite a bit. These being closed speakers, it means that when
you have them on they mask the noise of everything going on around you, so you won’t hear some one
shouting to you, or entering your room, or sneaking right up to you and putting their
head right up behind yours or anything like that. Together with these product releases, Steelseries
has also released numerous videos and I’ve got to say, the headset one is particularly dank,
using videos like this one to demonstrate how clear the audio is and how it’s been calibrated
for maximum detail separation for surround sound and so on. I’ll link to it in this video’s cards.
Same as the mice, it comes with a detachable, easily replaceable cable,
and another one with a splitter for line in and microphone connections. This is NOT a
USB headset- it uses a 3.5 mm connection, so you won’t get a load of options to mess about with in
Steelseries’ Engine software. This is a headset that you put on, and use. It comes
with a volume control on the headset itself, and a button to mute the microphone, and that’s it.
And I’ll test the microphone right here so you can hear what it sounds like. It’s built in, so
you’re not faffing about looking for a microphone every time you boot up voice chat, and the mic
is highly directional, being pointed directly at your mouth to keep background noise to a minimum.
They’ve got a whole article on their Clearcast microphone technology that you can check out if
you’d like to know more. But in short: it’s sat close to your mouth but slightly out of the way,
so your teammates will be able to hear the words you say, but won’t hear every breath you take.
Or every move you make. Every bond you break. Every step you take. They won’t be hating you.
So there you have it: Steelseries Prime: A range of products that are stripped down
and designed purely for performance. And with minimal RGB. Check them out
in the video’s description, and use the code ‘3kliks12’ to get 12% off.