Cooler Master CM Storm Mech Aluminum Keyboard Review

Performance

I always struggle to review mechanical gaming keyboards, mostly because the use of MX switches ensures a fairly unwavering level of performance no matter what keyboard they’re installed in. If you love Cherry MX Red, Blue or Black switches then you’re still going to love them in this keyboard.

However, it obviously isn’t always as simple as that and the chassis of the keyboard can make a big difference to the typing response. One of my gripes about mechanical keyboards is that many of them allow the keys to bottom out, by which I mean the bottom edge of the key cap collides with the chassis of the keyboard. While this isn’t an issue in terms of performance, it makes the keyboards incredibly noisy at the best of times and you have to use things like the O-Ring mod to reduce the issue. Fortunately then the MX Blue switches here are mounted in a way that doesn’t bottom out against the keyboard chassis and the only response you feel is the mechanical “click” of the MX Blue switch. The click of the switch on MX Blue is audible, it’s also fairly tactile and some may love or hate such a typing response, I personally love it as I find MX Red are a little too light.

Gaming is an absolute joy on the Mech and I find the blue switches give you a really nice response that works well for MMO gaming, never missing a single cast. Things can get a little more chaotic on games like Battlefield 3 and the keyboard didn’t let me down there either, especially when I had the local lighting set to WASD on an evening as I never needed more than a glance at the keyboard to find out what I was doing.

Typing is beyond luxury also, this is partly due to the mechanical switches, but also due to the angle and size of the keyboard. Everything is nicely spaced, the wrist rest promotes a nice hand position and the high quality key caps feel great at your finger tips, which is pretty much all I could ask for when typing a 10 hours a day. Having extra USB ports on the back is handy too, even now I’m using it to keep my smartphone charged.