ASUS ROG Falchion 65% Wireless Mechanical Keyboard Review

A Closer Look

What a cute little keyboard this is! It looks and feels utterly fantastic from the moment you take it out of the box. It’s a lot of little details that immediate catch your eye and that you can feel while handling it… it’s a keyboard, but it feels special! For staters, it feels like it’s sitting in a big plastic tub.

What do you know, it was! This is a special case that’s designed to sit under the keyboard while you’re using it.

It feels really durable, and has a textured and tinted base.

There’s a small cutout here to allow you to access the controls on the side of the keyboard.

It has four rubber grip feet, and a stunning brushed aluminium finish on the other side. We’ll come back to this later!

The keyboard looks amazing, with that 65% design chopping off the number pad and the main navigation and OS buttons, but they’ve actually got it down to a 60% form factor too, by having such a slim bezel.

Don’t worry about losing features either, as they’re all in here somewhere! Sure, it’ll take a little getting used to, but everything is clearly laid out and labelled too, so it’s all easy enough to find.

Moving some text down to the front of the keys really does allow a lot of extra information. No, this isn’t a republic of gamers switch, but some simple branding, and even that has been crammed in on a switch rather than the case of the keyboard.

Amazingly, you still get a full set of arrow keys, and they’ve slimmed up the shift buttons and especially the enter key to allow for a set of Ins, Del, PgUp, and PgDn, although they all have seconary functions too. Even the arrow keys can control the ARGB lighting, although that’s not uncommon on full-size keyboards too.

The top row or keys are actually the number keys, with a secondary function allowing you to use the F-Keys. You can use a special Fn-Shift to reach them, although this can be locked on or off should you need to keep one set or another enabled. You even get a full bank of multimedia controls on the QWERTYU keys, and profile buttons below that. Damn… that’s a lot of features.

Overall though, this is one seriously fine looking keyboard and as we’ve seen so far, it’s not lacking in ANY features. Actually, it has a few more!

Around the back, you can see there’s another cut out in the base/lid I showed you earlier.

This allows for access to the master power button, the USB-C port, and the USB wireless dongle. As I said before, the keyboard can be used wireless, or wired via the same USB-C port that is used to charge the internal battery. ASUS claims 450 hours battery life without the use of RGB. However, a few days of heavy usage can be expected if you’re absolutely grinding on this thing and keeping the RGB throwing rainbows at 100% all day.

Down the side, there’s yet another cut-away in the lid.

What’s this? Why it’s a touch sensitive slide control, duh! It’s set to volume by default, but you can play around with it in software and come up with some other uses such as…. uhm, brightness of something, or a scroller… to be honest, I’d personally leave it as volume.