Introduction
Roccat has one of the best reputations in the PC gaming market. Time and time again they’ve delivered incredibly high-quality peripherals that offer class leading performance. Their Kone and more recently their Ryos gaming mice are still some of the best mice I’ve ever used. Their ISKU is one of the best membrane keyboards on the market and again, their Ryos MK Pro mechanical keyboard which I reviewed a year ago, you guessed it, one of the best keyboards I’ve ever used. It’s for these reasons that I have very high expectations of the Ryos TKL Pro mechanical keyboard I’ll be reviewing today.
The Ryos was a great keyboard, but it’s design meant it was pretty unwieldy and not of much use to those with limited desk space and even less convenient for those who wanted to take their keyboard with them to LAN gaming events, as packing it in a big would be a tricky endeavour. TKL means ten keys less and that means the Ryos has dropped the number pad on the right of the keyboard entirely, making it a lot less wide.
At my disposal today, I have the gorgeous Cherry MX Brown switch edition of this premium grade mechanical gaming keyboard. It comes hard-wired with a long and thick black braided cable, which should provide the cable with a lot of extra durability throughout its lifetime.
Typical of modern Roccat keyboard designs, the Ryos RKL Pro comes with an oversized chassis that forms a fixed wrist rest. It’s quite a big wrist rest too and should provide you with a comfortable hand position while working and gaming.
Another unique aspect of this keyboard is the popular Thumbster keys; perfect for deploying extra macros without taking your hand off the important WASD keys.
The keyboard features high-quality key-caps with a laser etched font to allow the internal LED lighting to pass through. There’s a nice black and grey finish to the keyboard chassis, which has an almost Carbon style appearance.
The keys are really nicely spaced, despite this being a TKL keyboard, it’s actually still quite large, but nowhere near as wide as its big brother, the Ryos MK Pro.
The Ryos comes equipped with an FN-Shift function, giving you access to a range of multimedia controls and popular shortcuts via the F-Keys at the top of the keyboard. Personally, I prefer dedicated multimedia keys, but Fn-Shift is certainly a lot better than nothing.
The wrist rest is really nicely designed and has a huge Roccat logo across the front.
The keyboard chassis is fairly thick to allow for the mechanical key fittings, but overall it still has a nice and flat profile.
Here you can better see how far the wrist rest extends out from the space bar. There’s a slight rise towards the back of the keyboard, but this can be increased further with the kickstands on the underside.
On the base, there are four large rubber grips to stop the keyboard sliding around your desk, although given the overall weight of the keyboard, it’s unlikely to slide around anyway. Another welcome feature, slots are cut into the base of the keyboard to allow routing of cables under the keyboard.
Nothing of interest around the back.
The key-caps are removable, although Roccat didn’t include a key-cap removal tool. The Cherry MX Brown switches are just like every other MX Brown switch you’ve seen before and feature built-in LED lighting; which we’ll be testing shortly.
