The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless is a fine mouse as long as you’ve got needs for a LOT of mouse buttons in your everyday life — and as long as you’re right-handed.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| It has ALL the buttons | Button number layout is… weird |
| Customisable positioning for primary button set | Odd shape – and completely unusable for left-handers |
| Corsair iCue gives loads of customisation options | iCue is rather crash-prone |
Score: 3.5/5
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In this review
Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse Design
Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse Performance
Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer:
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse used in this review was sent to me by Corsair, but Corsair has no oversight into my review, which remains proudly independent.
Most sites bury this kind of detail at the base of reviews if they mention it at all, but I feel strongly that it shouldn’t be that way, and that you should be able to trust the reviews you read. For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse stands out, primarily because of how many buttons it has. 16 in total, which is a lot, and also I suppose a way to appeal to the growing crowds of AI-generated people with way too many fingers – but then, that’s not the point of this particular mouse.
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse manages to have sixteen buttons by placing twelve of them in an array that sits on the right hand side of the mouse body, arranged in three slightly concave rows.
One very neat bit of design here is that the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse’s button array can be moved backwards and forwards to better fit the positioning of your single thumb (or extra 12 fingers if you are an AI person). You do this with a tiny screwdriver provided with the mouse, loosening up the support plate and then sliding into the best position for your own digits.
Or, if you’re evil and want to win at any cost, you unscrew it from your foe’s Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse and hide the screwdriver so it slides around all the time. But maybe it’s wiser to lean away from the evil in this case.
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse is a relatively big and bulky mouse that really only works if you do your mousing with your palm resting over the entire body of the mouse itself. The orientation of the right side panel does give it a rather different shape that might not suit everyone, and certainly won’t suit you if you are of the sinister orientation.
No, I’m not leaning back into advocating for evil; if you’re sinistrous in the sense of being left handed, the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse won’t work well for you at all. You could reverse it to put the panel on the preferred left hand side, but then your palm will rest on the mouse buttons unless, again, you’re one of those weird AI-generated people with fingers sprouting from the base of your left hand. As far as I can tell, there’s no option for a left-handed Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse.
There are, however, colour options, and this isn’t just a matter of the RGB lighting that you’d expect in any gaming mouse. Corsair sells the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse in a Black/Yellow finish, Gun Metal (black) or White finish; it’s the Gun Metal variant I’ve reviewed. Tastes can vary, though I’d make my general observation on pure white products that you handle a lot that they’ll pick up and show grime and dust a whole lot faster over time.
One minor-it-might-just-be-me gripe to throw in here: I’ll get on to the utility of the button panel below, but every single time I look at the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse’s button panel, I’m annoyed by the fact that Corsair opted to run the numbers up the body of the panel and then to the right. This may well mimic an MMO interface I just don’t know about (comment below if it does, I’d be curious to know), but it gets on my slightly-OCD nerves. Why not opt for left to right, top to bottom numbering, Corsair? Is there something I’m missing here?
Like I said, a minor gripe, but something that’s been bugging me through the entire review process, and if nothing else, I feel better for getting it off my chest. See, sometimes talking through a problem can reduce its severity!
Performance
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse connects via Bluetooth, 2.4Ghz wireless with the included receiver or wired via the included USB-C to USB-A cable, which is also how you recharge it. I doubt too many gamers or streamers are going to opt for wired connections, but it’s certainly feasible.
The pitch here is primarily for players of more complex gaming titles – think your classic MMOs and MOBAs where there’s a plethora of different onscreen elements you might want to click on and time is very much of the essence – as well as streamers using the virtual software version of the Elgato Stream Deck.
Corsair owns Elgato, so that’s not surprising, and here it’s a matter of assigning those kinds of quick video macro commands that you might have used a Stream Deck for to the button panel as needed.
Also read:
All of the customisation for the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse is done via Corsair’s iCue software, its all-in-one peripheral platform app for PC or Mac. There’s a lot of power here, whether you want to change up the RGB lighting or adjust the DPI (up to 26,000 DPI, depending on how speedy you like your mouse actions).
Also read
Corsair K70 Pro TKL Review
In terms of tracking, I’ve had no issues at all using it across a variety of surfaces during my review period, but there’s lots of scope to tinker to make it work the way you prefer in any case.
The big play for iCUE here is in configuring the actions you want to apply to each of those 12 side buttons, whether that’s as a virtual Elgato Stream Deck controller (at which point you’ve pretty much just purchased a Stream Deck with Mouse attached), or for in-game commands mapped to your particular gaming style.
You could view it as a productivity tool as well, because it’s feasible to assign things like text strings to each of the side button panels. So if I assign the word “frog” to the 3 button, I frog can frog insert frog the frog word frog frog into frog my frog sentences frog at frog will.
Again, though, the point here isn’t to spread amphibian love, but instead to wreck your foes in online games.
This can work well enough, though I’ll be 100% upfront here and say that I’m personally not a huge MMO or MOBA player. My own usage has tended more towards simpler button integrations, but it’s easy to see the potential here.
It does strike me that there’s a significant investment here in muscle memory that you’re going to have to work with, because each of the buttons is relatively small. Over time you would develop (I suspect) a more braille-like appreciation for sliding your thumb over the button set to find the right one for your needs, but right now, I do tend to spend more time than I’d like looking down at the mouse to ensure I’m tapping the right button at the right time. Maybe that’s just a me problem.
In terms of battery, the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse is rated for up to 150 hours of battery life over 2.4Ghz, where it’s polling at up to 2000Hz, while if you switch down to Bluetooth you drop down the polling rate considerably, but get up a claimed 500 hours in return.
For the gaming crowd, 2.4Ghz is going to be the way to go, though if you’re also using it for more office-centric (or web doomscrolling) tasks, Bluetooth would be fine. Battery life in my testing has been on track for these kinds of figures, though I don’t quite have the endurance for a 150 hour gaming session – or indeed the time.
The one caveat here is that the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse uses a sealed battery, recharged via USB-C. The use of a standardised connector is a big plus here, but the use of a sealed battery isn’t; at the point where it starts failing, the entire mouse would either have to be split open and (likely) have a mouse re-soldered, or thrown away entirely.
Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse: Alex’s Verdict
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse is a truly specialised mouse; for most of us, there’s just no need for this many buttons. Even within the gaming space, it’s a niche-within-a-niche kind of mouse, because the shape and weight of the Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse means that it’s going to be less useful – not useless, but not quite the pro-grade FPS tool that some might seek out.
All of which is fine, actually, because this is a niche mouse, and the chances are that you’re already aware of your needs for such a device.
As a multi-device control tool, whether that’s for streaming and initiating onscreen actions without distracting your streaming performance, or in the kinds of games where select actions might otherwise lurk multiple button clicks or menus away, it’ll do the job nicely – as long as you’re right handed, that is.
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Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse: Pricing and availability
The Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless Mouse retails in Australia for $139.99.
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