Steelseries APEX M500 Mechanical Keyboard Review

Performance

The keyboard is plug and play friendly, so it’s good to go right out of the box. When you hook it up, the blue LED lighting fires up at 100% brightness, and holy cow is it bright! If you want a keyboard that’s nicely illuminated even in a bright room, this is certainly an option for you.

The key caps get a lot of light, with a huge font on them that makes them super clear to see at a glance.

Those who don’t need their retinas burning bright blue will be happy to know you can turn the lighting off, or simply turn it down to suit your taste.

The keyboard has fantastic build quality and Cherry MX red switches on all keys, so the performance is as spot on as you would expect. The keys are light and fast, with that lovely linear action that we’ve come to expect from one of the most popular keyboard switches on the market; for gaming and work, you really won’t be disappointed here.

To tap into all the features of this keyboard, you can download the SteelSeries software, allowing you to fully reprogram any of the keys to suit your needs, tweak the lighting effects, polling rate, and layout.

There’s a very powerful macro engine built-in too, and you can assign these to any key on the keyboard too, which is simply awesome for creating multiple gaming profiles.

Any key can be a trigger for a macro, function, launcher or anything else you may need.

You can even setup multiple profiles with ease, such as one where almost all keys are disabled, leaving only the important gaming keys in operation, allowing unmatched precision while playing competitively.