NZXT Function Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

A Closer Look & Performance

First impressions are great, this is a very nice looking keyboard with a good heavy weight to it thanks to that black aluminium top panel and a durable chassis. It’s pretty understated too, with a largely black design that is fairly minimalist, or at least as much as a device with over a hundred keys could be.

NZXT has kept all their modern products quite simple, with straight lines and clean overall aesthetics, and it’s the same for the new Function 2. There is a full-size wrist rest included with it, which features a textured design that looks like the surface of a golf ball, but again, this is a texture and design we see across a wide range of NZXT products, so it all matches up.

I’ve got my lights pretty bright today, and you can see the keys have a UV coating on them giving them a little bit of a reflective surface, which not only looks nicer in real life than it does in these pictures, but the keys also have a very smooth and clean tactile feel to them too.

The key caps are double-shot PBT, so they’re very durable, but while NZXT is using their optical-mechanical switches, they use a standard MX fitting, so you could replace or add custom keycaps if you so desired.

The top plate of the keyboard is lightly sandblasted aluminium, which looks very clean and tidy and matches the look of the keycap plastic really closely too.

There is a full-size numberpad on the right, so very much a standard layout, but there is a TKL version too, which we’ll be looking at next week! So there should be a version that suits your needs.

Down the left side of the keyboard, you’ll find three additional buttons; a master lighting control, a Windows key lock, and a mute button.

There’s also a side-scrolling wheel that is used for adjusting the volume. It’s rare to see these buttons on the left of the keyboard, but actually, it makes more sense as a gamer. You can move your hand from WASD to the volume or mute quicker than taking your right hand off your mouse to reach the right side of the keyboard; at least this way you can still aim and shoot for those few moments while you’re gaming!

The detachable wrist rest is awesome, I can’t work or game without one these days, and I’m glad to see (and feel) this one is so large, reached forward quite a long way, so my hands comfortably fit on it, and it has a hard-wearing soft-touch rubber finish that adds to the overall comfort and grip. Plus, it mounts to the keyboard magnetically, so snap it in place and you’re good to go.

There are four built-in profiles, allowing you to apply your key configurations, shortcuts, macros, RGB settings and more to each so you can quickly flip through your setups for work, video editing, MOBA, FPS gaming, or anything else you decide to configure.

There are no dedicated multimedia controls, but you can use Fn-Shift to access secondary functions on a few keys, allowing you to quickly skip through songs, play/pause, etc. It’s perfect for listening to music while gaming, removing the need to tab out to control your media player.

On the underside of the keyboard, you’ll find five thick rubber grips on the keyboard, which combined with its weighty design is more than enough to prevent it from slipping around. The wrist rest is (obviously) lighter, so it’s good to see they’ve put a lot more (10) grips on it.

There are some two-level kickstands here, allowing you to dial in some angle adjustment.

The small inner foot has a little rubber grip of its own.

As does the larger one.

The keyboard does support the CAM software for customisation and RGB control, so it’ll all sync with any other NZXT products you own. However, on the default profile, you’ll get a nice transitioning rainbow effect. However, I think NZXT should have put a more on-brand purple lighting effect to match their company colours as the default.

The four onboard profiles are configured to offer up a few different lighting effects, but as I said, the CAM software is all you need to customise these settings to your liking.

NZXT is using some lovely pre-lubricated switches on this keyboard, so they feel a bit smoother and cleaner to type on than something like the Cherry MX Red. You wouldn’t think you could get much smoother than MX Red, but you would be surprised what modern rivals have to offer if you’ve not tried them yet.

With the mechanical switches rated with a 100m click guarantee, pre-lubed, and mounted in a durable aluminium frame, it’s no surprise that they feel exceptional to type and game on. The 8000 Hz polling rate the response time is ridiculously fast, but keep in mind if you’re using it in 8000 Hz mode, it can put more strain on your CPU, and while NZXT doesn’t provide information on this, from my testing of Corsair’s 8000MHz hardware, they suggest a minimum of an Intel i7 9th generation processor or an AMD Ryzen 7 2nd generation processor (or equivalent) for this mode. Regardless, if you’re running a faster refresh rate low latency monitor, there are benefits to be had here.