[section_title title=”Performance and Testing”]

Performance and Testing

Testing keyboards falls into two categories: quantitative testing, where you can use various programs and equipment to get hard numbers and data, and qualitative testing – how does it feel? Is there a noticeable increase in performance? Typically, I can only do so much quantitatively as I do not have access to to the sophisticated equipment required to record the reaction speeds, however, I can test things such as NKRO, by using off the shelf software. I can also comment on how the keyboard feels to me, as at the end of the day, with mechanical keyboards, it’s entirely subjective when it comes to the switch type. With this in mind, let’s move on to the actual performance and testing:

Gaming

To fully test a keyboard for gaming, it’s vital to spend many hours with it, playing several genres of games; FPS, RPG and RTS to cover the main categories. First up is an FPS, to test this I fired up my favorite: Battlefield 4 and quickly jumped into action. Reaction-wise, I noticed nothing different over my previous mechanical keyboard, however it was useful to turn off the windows key to avoid pressing it by accident – although, when disabled, I noticed that the left ALT key was also turned off, meaning I couldn’t alt-tab out, so perhaps this could be a bug with the firmware?

Again with RTS and RPG, I detected no noticeable increase in my personal performance, however it is much better than any scissor switch or rubber dome keyboard that I’ve used for gaming and the addition of the palm rest meant it was comfortable for many hours. When playing StarCraft 2, no matter how many keys I pressed, there were no ghosting issues thanks to the NKRO, which was backed up by a quick run through with Aqua key tester.

General

When it comes to everyday use, I cannot fault the MX Board 6.0: whilst I prefer MX blues or browns for typing, I got on well with the reds, when typing large amounts of text (such as this review). The additional, segregated media keys meant I could easily skip tracks and play/pause my music, without the hassle of having to press the Fn key first. The bright backlighting made it easier to type at night and can be turned off at the press of one button.