Corsair Scimitar RGB Gaming Mouse Review

Corsair Scimitar RGB Gaming Mouse Review

Manufacturer: Corsair
UK price (as reviewed): £69.98 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $79.99 (ex Tax)

After a few stumbling attempts a few years ago, mice purely aimed at the MMO/MOBA crowd are definitely mature enough to warrant splashing some serious cash. No longer are they just FPS mice with a load more buttons bolted on, but the ergonomics are regularly tweaked to work well and the software sports the kinds of features you need to dish out those macros without fiddling around with a keyboard or software profiles.

The Scimitar RGB isn't Corsair's first effort here, but it's certainly aiming high with this £70 mouse, especially as the excellent Aorus Thunder M7 costs the same. The M7 also has Corsair well and truly beat on packaging too - its plush case really does blow your socks off when you open the box and the mouse is pretty edgy-looking too.


However, the Scimitar claws back some serious ground in a number of other perhaps more important areas. Firstly, it's a little larger than the M7, meaning it can suit a wider variety of hand grip styles. However, as we noticed with the nearly-identical Sabre, while the high arched back initially makes it comfortable for palm grips, it's not quite long enough at 120mm for your fingers, which can hang over the end. We did find our fingers naturally adjusting a few millimetres to compensate for this but if you have large hands and have an uncompromising palm grip hold style, you may want to look elsewhere.


You get the same 1.8m braided cable too, but there are obviously a few differences to the Sabre, the first of which that isn't physically obvious is the weight. At 147g it's nearly 50 percent heavier, thanks to the large numbered macro key set and surrounding metal frame. It feels remarkably solid as a result, but we also found it to be a little less nimble too compared to your average 100g mouse such as the Sabre or Logitech G402, but you do get used to the extra grams quickly.


The top of the mouse sports the same soft-touch material as the Sabre, except for the ring finger and pinky supports, which are clad in quite a coarse-patterned rubber. This initially feels a little strange, but we think Corsair has actually been quite cunning here and tried to balance the coarse feeling of the macro keypad so your hand feels like it's in a nice place. It's subtle but quite effective.


While the M7 and of course the Sabre sported the usual thumb buttons (the M7 did this while also offering an admittedly smaller section of macro thumb buttons) the Scimitar is devoid of these by default. You can obviously program a couple of the macro buttons to function similarly though, and Corsair's software allows you to allocate specific profiles to be loaded for certain games, so it's not as if you'd have to manually switch profiles regularly either. Whether this is a failing will depend on your point of view - it allows the mouse to focus more on the task in hand, but equally many consider dedicated buttons here to be imperative, especially on a £70 mouse.

There is a possible explanation for why they've been omitted though, and that is the Scimitar's trump card. The entire set of 12 macro buttons can be adjusted back and forth by 8mm using an included tool. This is a great feature to have as it allows you to fine-tune this section's position to your exact liking, which aids getting used to it and indeed being able to reach the buttons quickly. As a result of this, there's little if any room for extra buttons so while the Scimitar has a hefty programmable button count of 17, none of these are your typical thumb buttons.


The two south of the scroll wheel are by default the DPI toggle switches and with a pair of buttons this means you're able to flick up or down through the sensitivity range quite easily, with five settings allocated out of the box and each indicated by a particularly vivid LED colour at the front of the mouse. They're a little too far back for our liking, and somewhat needlessly so as there's a big gap between the scroll wheel and first button. Being Corsair Gaming-branded, illumination is a major feature of the Scimitar, which sports four distinct lighting zones - the macro keypad, rear logo, scroll wheel and forward-facing LED. All can be set through the full RGB spectrum of 16.8 million colours and are in addition to the DPI setting light. It doesn't appear to be possible to set individual macro buttons to specific colours.