CM Storm QuickFire Pro Mechanical Keyboard Review

When we finally got our hands on the keyboard we were very impressed with the solid build quality – something that CM Storm has yet to falter on. It was a breeze to connect to the PC and the additional cable routing options made it much easier to simplify the cable clutter going to the rear of our desk. The keyboard lacks any macro features or storable profiles, thus requires no drivers for it to operate at it’s full potential, a common thing with many mechanical keyboards.

The best way to test out mechanical keyboards is to clock up many hours of use in gaming and general use. This way we can discover all the minute issues or little advantages that many other review sites may overlook. First up, we’re going to punish the QuickFire Pro with several gaming sessions.

First Person Shooters

To kick things off we jumped into an epic fire-fight on Battlefield 3, with 1000 tickets to test the endurance and performance of the keyboard. The red switches resulted in a lighter touch required to activate the switch, this meant it was much easier to use for the very long fight we participated in, which unlike the black was also much more comfortable after hours of use. Some gamers prefer the extra force and lower noise of Cherry MX Black switches, but for this FPS game, we much preferred the reds. A really good feature that is becoming more popular on gaming keyboards is the ability to turn off the windows key,  which we made sure was turned off from the start, that actually resulted in us not tabbing out when missing the key to go prone for once! A very good little feature! We also hopped on Counter Strike: Source to test out a faster paced game, but both of which were easily dominated with the QuickFire Pro.

Role Playing Games

As much as we love our FPS games, we have to give RPG a go as it is a very popular genre. So we fired up our old Star Wars: The Old Republic account and continued see if we could define any limits of the keyboard. However, our attempt was in vain as the keyboard proved to be a worthy contender. Whilst some additional macro keys may have come in use for this genre, the keyboard performed flawlessly throughout despite not having programmable features, just as we expected after the superb performance in the previous genre. So, RPGs out of the way, next RTS.

Real Time Strategy

This is an important genre to test keyboards out on, as the use of the keyboard in RTS games is often heavily overlooked. Most people tend to use the mouse for controlling everything, whereas when it comes to playing RTS competitively, you need to use the keyboard as much as possible. We jumped into a game of Supreme Commander and rather unsurprisingly, the performance was just a good as it was for the previous tests. We much preferred the lighter touch required by the red switches as it made it easier to push many combinations of keys which the N Key Roller supported.

General Use

Much of this review was written using the QuickFire Pro and it was here that we actually discovered the first slightly negative aspect to the keyboard, or more precisely, the Cherry red switches. Whilst they are perfect for gaming, writing these big blocks of text resulted in some strain in our hands, most likely from the extra force required for Cherry black and red switches. For typing, we much preferred the brown variety, which was nicer to use, and produced less noise.

Testing out of the way, its now time to bring this review to an end.