Software
Beyond its performance, one of the biggest features that SteelSeries is hoping people enjoy with the Siberia RAW Prism is the inclusion of SteelSeries Engine 3. I’ve covered this software multiple times in the past, SteelSeries has been using it with all of their recent products. You see a lot of budget headsets don’t come with any software at all or at best they come with software that makes you wish that it didn’t come with any software. The reason for that is because software development is actually extremely expensive and to put together something that works with all of your products it takes a long time as well. SteelSeries has already put in all of that time and money into their software, so adding support for the RAW isn’t expensive, in comparison to creating something from scratch at least.
I’ve bashed on their software in the past for little things like how it requires you to have two different windows open. But frankly in comparison to anything else at this price point it is amazing. As I mentioned before the software supports most of their product line. So when you open it up, if you have other SteelSeries products installed like I do, it will give you a list of options. From there you can select the Siberia RAW Prism and it will open in a second window where we can tweak and tune.
The tuning page for the Raw has a few less features than the Elite that I recently tested, but the elite did cost almost 4 times as much as the RAW. You still get a 5 channel equalizer with a list of different presents should you not want to tune it yourself. You also have the microphone auto optimization, turning this on helped slightly with the feedback I mentioned in the performance section as well. You don’t get things like the Dolby options on the Elite that frankly I hated anyhow. The lack of the volume controls seemed a little weird, but if you remember the Elite had a volume knob and the RAW doesn’t so if you turned it down in the software you wouldn’t be able to turn it back up quickly. You are better off sticking with the windows volume control that you can use with media controls on your keyboard.
Being a Prism headset it would be crazy if you couldn’t check the lighting on the RAW right? All you have to do is select the LED option and you can pick from any color you can imagine. Some of the lighting effects aren’t here that I saw on the Elite but you do still get the colorshift where you can let the lighting shift through a few different color designs. I still hope that SteelSeries adds an option to add your own colorshifts in the future, it would be very cool to be able to have the headset flip through all of your favorite colors or through colors that match your PC.