[section_title title=”Performance and Testing”]
Performance and Testing
The CM Storm QuickFire XTi is bar far one of the simplest keyboards to setup – it’s all plug and play: no additional software required to make the most of the features – it’s all on-board. This is ideal if you travel with your keyboard a lot and want to keep the setup wherever you go.
For the real-world testing I put the keyboard through it’s paces in several different genres: FPS, RTS and MMO, combined with general use, such as web browsing, media playback and typing (like I am for this review).
As always, first up is FPS, with my game of choice being Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Battlefield 4: Whilst the ANSI keyboard layout took a little getting used to, it quickly fell into place as the mechanical Cherry MX brown switches felt great and enabled me to react quicker than if I had a stiff rubber dome keyboard. I couldn’t really find any benefit to increasing the repeat rate, in fact I had issues when flying the jets with it on any setting other than 1x speed. The NKRO was glorious as ever, and not once did I have any issues with too may key presses. The windows key lock feature was also incredibly useful as I am forever bashing the windows key mid-game at crucial moments!
StarCraft 2 was up next for the RTS category, of which the keyboard performed admirably as it allowed very quick key presses. Recording macros came came in handy for this section, as I could bind quick commands and taunts to one key, however I had to bind it to regular keys (like the numpad), so standalone keys could have come in handy here, considering the on-board macro recording feature.
MMO, was just like the previous two categories combined – great performance, but lacked dedicated macro keys.
For general use, the keyboard was great. I get on incredibly well with MX browns, so typing felt great and the lighting was useful during those late night typing/browsing sessions.
Whilst I prefer dedicated media keys, they were useful, especially since they are much closer to the Fn key, unlike some other keyboards.
