[section_title title=”Performance”]
First off, setting the keyboard up was a doddle, pretty much plug and play and when I first connected it, I was greeted by a nice red glow. The software was very simple to setup, although very tricky to get started with it. If it wasn’t for the comprehensive user manual and the many tutorials on YouTube I would have had great difficulty creating some fancy lighting effects. Coupled with the fact that there were plenty of bugs in the software, it didn’t make my life easy. Several hours later, and little play time with the keyboard, I actually created some awesome effects I was happy with. You may be wondering what this has to do with the actually performance of the keyboard, so put simply, it doesn’t really effect much in the grand scheme of things, lighting it pretty much a gimmick, although it can aid in night time gaming, of which you should be in a well lit room anyway!
Having now finished playing with the lighting, I took it to myself to play a variety of different genre games to see how the keyboard performs when it comes to gaming: before I got into the swing of things, I had to disable the lighting effects I had on my keyboard – for gaming it is just too distracting having the ripple flick across the keyboard, although stationary LEDs were fine, and a little bit helpful when identifying the different areas for each game (such as movement controls, actions and weapon slots). Jumping into a game of Battlefield 4 was great, I love mechanical keyboards and find they really perform well in most games, especially when they are MX red switches which have a low actuation force. I found I never missed a key press and when I had to press more than 3 keys at once (like when I fly jets/helicopters) I was not let down.
Flying into the MOBA (DOTA 2) area, I found it was great that I could setup various macros and text strings I could bind to unused keys – it made taunting (abusing) the other players and issuing warnings very easy and effective, whilst not retracting from the overall experience. I found the palm rest particularly comfortable for these gaming sessions as I was often on the computer for several hours at a time.
RTS was another category I threw at the K70 RGB, of which it passed with flying 16.8 million colours. Again I found the macros very easy to use – they was great for setting up various orders in Planetary Annihilation (a great game worth checking out), and the software was very easy to set these up.
The whole time I was gaming I had music playing the background (like some of us do) and controlling the playback could not have been simpler: at a press of a button I could change track, pause and stop altogether. I still need to work out how to make the volume wheel only effect the iTunes volume level, but I suspect this may not be possible.
For general use, such as photo editing, typing (like I am for this review), the keyboard is great, just like it is with any mechanical keyboard. Whilst I prefer the tactile feedback of MX browns, the reds were more than ideal for typing over 3000 words at a time. Again, media playback was great, I love keyboards that have dedicated media keys, so this is a big plus for me. Again, the ability to bind shortcuts to various keys was great, it meant I could launch photoshop at a press of a button, to then open Chrome at the press of another – I don’t think I’ve even explored all the possibilities with this yet.
So, the K70 RGB performed admirably in the gaming and general testing, now it’s time to wrap things up and find out my final thoughts of the keyboard.
