Testing

Windows usage

In standard Windows usage, this board performs as well as hoped with the keys easy to press and they feel much better than a standard keyboard; much like silk rather than cool plastic. It sort of makes you want to type when you first get your hands on it, and you’ll find new vigour in completing that English essay that you’ve been working on, or indeed the review of the product…

The keys are easy to press, although they are reasonably loud when compared to a laptop-style keyboard that I normally use, but substantially quieter than an OEM keyboard. The keys are pretty easy to press, but not easy enough to make erroneous key-presses count. The distance to signal of the keys is quite obvious while the HyperResponse claim is harder to appreciate as when typing the difference between 8ms and 1ms is rarely an issue.

The board feels slightly lighter than the Tarantula, although it sticks to your desk with several rubber feet and refuses to budge. It feels solidly built and perfect for general typing and it doesn’t sound hollow like generic keyboards. The one downside however to having the eye-catching glossy black plastic is that it soon becomes dulled with various fingertip greases and begins to look like your mobile phone screen after a short period of time.

The wrist rest is the most noticeable difference from a standard keyboard, and it’s much more comfortable than my previous model especially during continuous typing jobs.

Gaming

When you fire up the latest first person shooter, you are going to be playing on a great feeling board which has an appropriate level of feedback of each key press. The anti-ghosting feature of the WASD cluster couldn’t be tested, as I’ve yet to find a game that’ll allow you to simultaneously go backwards, forwards while going both left and right. As a result, I’d ignore this point that Razer seem to make a big deal of.

There doesn’t seem to be anything outrageously gamer-esque about the board, with no special layout that you’d get with a separate board such as the Revoltec FightPad or Cyber Snipa Gamepad. The underlying technology of this board seems to be its selling point, although I couldn’t honestly feel any difference performance wise from using it. It feels nice, but that’s about it; my kill to death ratio didn’t suddenly spike after using the board, although I did feel that that the board is very slightly more responsive. The WASD keys feel slightly easier to press when compared to the other keys that you won’t notice when typing and it doesn’t appear to make a difference during gaming.

It would have been nice to see the WASD keys have a slightly different shape to help you find where they are without having to look at the board. Another cool feature would have been to have the WASD lighting customisable so you could choose any key to have individual backlighting, that way you can set up a profile where your most often used keys are highlighted; possibly in red rather than blue. This feature would be particularly useful in a game such as WoW where you can have several buttons corresponding to a different spell or item usage. Combined with any key macros it would have been perfect. Instead you’ll just have to remember where you set your macros up.