Logitech Atlas Spectrum G410 TKL Review

A Closer Look

The G410 comes hard-wired with a light-weight USB cable, so it’s ready to plug-and-play right out of the box.

The key caps are nicely designed, with a slightly curved design that gives you that slight edge in terms of control and accuracy. This being a gaming keyboard, the WASD keys have been giving a funky design that further highlights the keyboards gaming intentions.

The same designed is also found on the UDLR keys.

This keyboard is quite compact, but there’s a slightly larger chassis around the outside as well as a small handle design on the left edge, although it’s mostly aesthetic than practical, I quite like the look of it.

At the top, you’ll find the ARX dock, it’s a plastic fitting that can be slid out at the back, but we’ll take a closer look at that in a moment.

In the top right, you’ll find some dedicated keys from the gaming mode and the master lighting button (for on/off). The gaming mode button is particularly cool, as it will disable the Windows key, but also any other keys that you define in the downloadable software. Want to disable EVERY other key apart from WASD, space, shift and CTRL or any other combination of keys? You can absolutely do that at the touch of a button.

Tucked away on the bottom edge of the top row of keys, you’ll find some Fn-shift accessible multimedia controls. These are seriously handy for controlling your music and other multimedia while gaming, as you can skip through songs without having to tab out of your game.

The Romer-G switches and the key caps are set slightly into the G410’s chassis, giving them a nice low profile. The keys have a shorter travel distance that most mechanical switches, meaning you cut the time from press to action by around 25%.

On the underside, you’ll find four large, thick and grippy rubber pads. This keyboard is very light and therefore prone to sliding around, but these rubber pads do a great job of holding it in place.

The kickstands are extra side and durable while even coming with their own rubber grips so that you’re not losing any traction when raising the back of the keyboard.

The ARX slides out at the back, giving you a snug spot to mount your phone.

It can be completely detached too, meaning you can find the perfect spot for it and your phone anywhere on your desk. This puts the Logitech mobile app within easy reach but is also handy for just using as a day-to-day phone stand so you can see your Facebook messages and calls.

The Romer-G switches are certainly unique, their action feels like a hybrid of so many things. They have the relatively low noise and travel distance of a membrane key, the feel (and technically the design) of a plunger switch, with the soft bump of an MX Brown switch. The shorter travel distant makes them super quick and the keys return rate is snappy too. Overall, they’re very fast, tactile and responsive. They feel a little strange at first, but that’s to be expected since I’ve never typed on this switch before. Basically, MX red speed and lightness with MX Brown tactile feedback, which is a very welcome balance in my opinion.

With 16.8 million colours at your disposal, there are no problems finding your favourite hue on this keyboard. What’s even cooler is that every single key can be tuned to any colour you want, or you can use built-in effects that give the whole keyboard a nice colour flow effect. The keys are designed to only illuminate the keys, however, not underlighting as many other keyboards do. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a different style is all.

The font on the keys is nice and big and does give very clear, defined and vivid lighting effects on each key.

By far the best feature of per-key lighting is that you can dial in really specific layouts, which is a huge benefit to those playing MMO and simulation games. You can set ranges to your colours so that you have movement in one colour, options in another, items in another and so on, this makes it really easy to glance at your keyboard and know exactly where the buttons you truly need are. What I found even better was setting a profile like the one below, and completely disabling every other button on the keyboard using the gaming mode button. This really reduced the risk of accidental keystrokes and when it comes to pro-gaming, I’m sure a lot of people are going to love this feature.

Working day-to-day on this keyboard is certainly a pleasant experience. The light and fast action of the switches has a noticeable benefit to those who touch type and even more so for those who type thousands of words per day. Your fingers don’t feel as fatigued at the end of the day, leaving you ready to get stuck into a monster gaming session. This is a great keyboard in general, but using it for gaming is where you’ll find the most potential, with great accuracy and comfortable ergonomics that are well suited to any play style.

One noticeable benefit of the TKL design is the amount of desk space it leaves available. If you’re using a mouse with lower DPI settings, this frees up a huge amount of space to use it, preventing you from having to use a lift-off technique to make up for lack of space.

The software can be downloaded from the Logitech website and for those of you using multiple products from Logitech, it also supports those, so no need for multiple software on your desktop.

The software is nicely laid out, showing you the product you want to configure and some icons at the bottom for each function.

The RGB lighting is super easy to use, you simply select the colour from any of the 16.8 million available then left click on the keys that you want to apply it to.

This means you can create custom lighting patterns such as the one seen below.

Here you can disable any button and set it to the gaming mode button on the keyboard. One tap of that button will disable any keys you set here, may also be used as a handy keyboard lock if you have kids that like to touch your desktop when you’re not looking.

eSports is all about performance and the heat map feature is very handy for showing you what you’re using the most. This can help you better adjust your profiles and key assignments to be more efficient while gaming; it’s a bit technical for me personally, but it never hurts to have more features.

Finally, we have a few other cool features that allow you to tweak macros, profiles, game controlled illumination and more.

You’ll also find Arx Control, allowing the desktop software to pair up with the mobile application.