You may change the sensitivity of the dials; a multiplicative scale constant is stored in the datablock .dial_real. On the new SGI dials, 0.15 makes the reponse feel like the ESV dialbox.

In addition, the on-screen dial box (press F6; SGI only) can be used. Its main advantage is that when you have several options active which use the dials you have access to ALL dials, e.g. you can rotate your molecule and a fragment alternatively without having to do dial_next and dial_prev in between.