CM Storm QuickFire Pro Mechanical Keyboard Review

First up you are presented with a slick red and black themed box, which is typical of CM Storm’s product packaging. The front features a gloss graphic of the keyboard in all it’s glory, with a sticker informing you of the type of switch it has, as there are other variations.

The rear of the box contains a short list of the features you are to expect from the keyboard, on top of a few graphics highlighting the more important features.

Straight out of the box you have some additional accessories including a key remover, quick start guide and the compulsory cable required to connect it to your PC.

The keyboard it’self is black in colour, with a red backing behind the keys. This is a simple, yet nice effect that compliments CM Storm’s colour scheme. The keys are made from an opaque plastic that are then painted black so the light from the LEDs is shown through the unpainted parts – which you’ll get to see later. Unlike the Rapid, the Pro is full size featuring a numpad.

Just like the Rapid and Trigger, the keyboard has a modular USB cable, which has dedicated routing. There are also four rubber pads to prevent the keyboard from slipping when under heavy, intense use.

As you can see in the above photo, there are two feet that can be used to raise the rear of the keyboard (like below), a standard feature on nearly every keyboard.

The main feature of the QuickFire Pro is the Cherry MX Red switches. These are perfect for gamers who want a slightly lighter touch than the black. They also look great with the red and black colour scheme – not that you’ll be looking at it with the keys off! You’ll also notice the LED – the Pro is only partially lit, which you’ll see later on.

The QuickFire Pro features a numpad unlike it’s little brother, which has an almost industrial look to it with the angular grooves. As with most keyboards the different lock areas light up when the corresponding button is pressed. The CM Storm logo also lights up when the unit is receiving power. The 8MS/4MS/2MS/1MS buttons along the top of the numpad represent the polling rate, which is when the PC “polls” the keboard to see if a key is pressed, typically most keyboards do this at 1000Hz (1000 times a second or every 1millisecond).

The standard windows keys have been swapped out to CM Storm’s logo. These can be deactivated when in “game mode”.

Along the top of the keyboard are the function and media keys, which can be activated when the Fn key is pressed (located by the bottom right windows key). From left to right there are the follow keys: LED on/off, brightness down, brightness up, LED mode, play/pause, stop, skip track back, skip track forward, mute, volume down, volume up and finally game mode, which disables the windows keys.

The keyboard is only partially backlit, where only the more commonly used areas are lit using a red LEDs. The areas covered are the WASD area and the arrow keys. The LED mode button can be pressed to cycle through the different modes – off, WASD only, WASD area (inc. ESC, Spacebar and F1-F4 keys) and pulsing, which is the same as the WASD area but slowly fades in out.

This photo just demonstrates the WASD lighting mode. The brightness of any of the modes can be controlled using the brightness up/down buttons.

So that concludes our look at the QuickFire Pro, now for the exciting part: we get to put the keyboard to the test. Read on to discover how it fairs.