[section_title title=”Performance and Testing”]
Performance and Testing
As always, the best way to test keyboards is in real world scenarios, such as gaming, general use etc, the sort of activities that most of us would use the keyboard for. It’s worth noting, that the Masterkeys Pro is good to go straight out of the box: there is no need to install drivers or software. You can even customise macros and LED colours using inbuilt functions on the board.
Gaming
First up is gaming. Weapons of choice this time for FPS is CS:GO and BF4, the former for the quick reactions required and the latter mainly for the amount of keys that need to be pressed when operating some vehicles. As you can imagine, the Masterkeys Pro L performed admirably – quick to the touch (probably thanks to the MX reds in this case) and no matter how many key presses I had, the keyboard did not skip a beat.
Next up, StarCraft 2 and some Supreme Commander 2 for the RTS genre. Again, the keyboard performed well in terms of quick key presses and even using the numpad as a macro area, I could quickly taunt my opponent or issue a command, although this would have been nice on some separate macro keys, but we can’t have everything.
MOBA and MMO were up next, so DOTA 2 and SW:TOR it is. Just like with RTS games, the keyboard performed well and was comfortable for many hours during those late night raids (plus the backlighting helped in low light). Again the macro feature was useful, but I still prefer dedicated keys for it.
General use
For day to day tasks, I couldn’t fault the keyboard: it’s very comfortable to type on, has useful media keys (which are within reach of the FN key) and the macros could be used for common text strings – although I couldn’t open up programs or do more complex tasks.
