Performance
This keyboard features RGB lighting, with full per-key lighting effects, so you can customise it extensively. Of course, there are loads of built-in profiles too, so while it starts with a rainbow transition effect, which I’m sure many of you will love, you can set all kinds of patterns, transitions, or completely custom combinations of lighting to each switch.
While NZXT makes a black version of this keyboard too, I can’t imagine it looks better than this white version, which looks superbly clean and vibrant, and the white glows and reflects the LED lighting nicely. Of course, that’s subjective, but I do prefer the white aesthetic here.
There’s a good-sized font on the switches, allowing for good illumination, but the bulk of the effect is an underlighting effect that shines off that lovely aluminium top plate.
The optical-mechanical switches are some of the best on the market, and best of all, they’re hot-swappable. So while they’re firmly mounted in a durable metal plate, you can use the included tool to pull them out of the socket. This means if a switch ever fails (pretty unlikely), or you want to swap them out for the extra ones included in the box, or just any other switch you like, you can do a switch swap in seconds, and you don’t even have to unplug the keyboard to do it.
The switches are stunning through, and while the ultra-fast response times of the optical switches are true, I can’t say I felt that non-optical switches ever felt slow to me, because they don’t! However, the 8000 Hz polling rate is a clear benefit, especially for gamers using very high refresh rates. Anything that reduces the latency between a keystroke and a frame being rendered is pretty important, especially for competitive gamers, and while you’ll find similarly equipped keyboards to this, you won’t find anything faster than this right now.
The aluminium plate, the dual layers of foam and the tape mod on the PCB, as well as just the overall quality of the construction all come together nicely here. This keyboard feels durable, but it’s also very quiet for a mechanical. There’s no vibration or unwanted noises when you’re mashing away at the keys, and this just makes each key feel tighter and more responsive overall, it’s a very direct and clean typing experience.
Overall, this may look like the old Function keyboard, but the increased polling rate, improved controller, better lighting, new switches, and the fact that the NZXT CAM software is pretty decent now, all add up to making this one of the best keyboards on the market right now.
