Corsair K70 Black

[DavidTheWin]

Note sure if Linus will read this but they should definitely read the part on the reactive backlighting before they do their K70/95 reviews since the reactive backlighting feature isn't mentioned at all in the documentation with the keyboard.

 

Photos: http://imgur.com/a/jMloZ

 

My phone takes blurry pictures and I am bad at taking pictures :(

 

Why I chose it, where I bought it and price

 

I chose it because I loved the look, wanted something that wasn't TKL and wanted a backlight. I'm more limited for choice than others since I'm in the UK and this was my favourite of the ones I looked at. I bought it at overclockers.co.uk because they were the very first place I found with stock of them for £119 and £10 shipping.

 

Quick note, the silver version is identical to the black version except it uses a silver backplate and a blue backlight rather than a black backplate and a red backlight so everything I say relates to both models.

 

Features

 

• Cherry MX Red switches on every key (unlike the K60 and K90 which had membranes on the macro keys, the F keys and the 9 keys above the directional arrows)
• Media controls for stop, play/pause, forward/backward, volume mute and a volume scroll wheel
• Windows key lock
• 4 adjustable backlight levels, off, dim, bright and a tiny bit brighter
• Customisable backlighting (I'll touch more on this later)
• USB passthrough (I think it's USB 2.0, the port is black rather than blue)
• 4 polling rates from 125hz to 1000hz as well as a switch to put it in a mode compatible with older BIOS'
• Keycap puller
• Replaceable red, textured WASD and 123456 keys
• Full length rubberised wrist rest
• Adjustable height by feet on both the front and the back of the keyboard
• 6 foot (maybe, haven't measured it but it looks about that) braided cable that ends in two USB ports, one for keyboard one for USB passthrough, the braid is of a very high quality
• 2 year warranty

 

What I like about it

 

The anodised black aluminium looks amazing. This was a big selling point for me as I love that look. Similarly, the frameless design looks very nice and I've personally only seen it implemented on other Corsair keyboards and a random Chinese one.

 

The backlight is very strong, visible clearly even in broad daylight. It also has a nice underglow due to the frameless design and aluminium backplate. They went to extra lengths to make sure it was fully backlit; there are two LEDs underneath the spacebar despite it not having anywhere for the light to shine through, though I'm not sure if this is a feature on other keyboards. As mentioned before, the backlighting has 4 different brightness settings, from off to very bright.

 

I mentioned the custom backlighting in the features section and I'll expand on that here. If anyone saw the CES videos they will have seen that the K70/95 have a feature where you can choose exactly which keys to light up. By default it comes with 123456, WASD and the directional arrows with the lights on. You enter this mode by holding down the left most button on the top of the keyboard (check the photos) for 3 seconds, then you can press the key to turn the light on, then again to turn it off, after you're done setting it up you press the light configuring key again to go back to normal keyboard mode.

 

One feature that wasn't mentioned at all at CES (that I can find), or even included in the manual for that matter is reactive backlighting. If you hold CTRL and the light configure key it turns on reactive backlighting; this means that when the switch activates, the light underneath that key turns on and when the switch deactivates, the light turns off. It has a minimum timer of somewhere around one second, so during normal typing the light will turn off a tiny bit after the switch deactivates, but if you hold the key it turns off as soon as the switch deactivates. I can't think of any practical use for this mode, but it looks fucking cool, even though if you touch type you don't even look at the keyboard and your hands obscure the keys anyway.

 

The spacebar is textured, this might be annoying to some but personally I quite like it. The replacement WASD and 123456 keys are also red, textured and raised to stand out more when you're playing games. I played some games earlier with just the WASD ones in but it didn't really feel like I was finding my way back to the keys more easily than I would normally be, but I haven't played without them yet so it might not be a fair comparison.

 

The volume wheel is very nice too. My previous keyboard was a Logitech G110 which had a very nice volume wheel; it was sturdy and rubberised, but the volume scroll on this keyboard blows it away. It's made of aluminium and rather than smooth scrolling like the G110s, you can feel slight bumps like a very light mouse wheel.

 

The wrist rest is very soft and comfortable to use although with the back feet raised I found my hands weren't really in an optimal position to use it. Curiously, the keyboard also has feet at the front which serve to make the aluminium backplate horizontal. Surprisingly, this was quite a comfortable typing position, even though the keyboard felt really high off the desk.

 

Build quality is excellent, the keyboard itself has a fair amount of weight to it due to all the aluminium so it isn't the most portable keyboard, but the aluminium means that it won't flex at all.

 

What I don't like about it

 

There isn't much to say here apart from a few pedantic things. When the keyboard is put into the legacy BIOS mode, the scroll lock light blinks constantly without any way to turn it off. I've seen other users with this problem on the Corsair forums so it's possible there will be a fix soon although it won't affect maybe 99% of the users of the keyboard.

 

The enter key and backspace key feel a little mushy in comparison to the other keys that use stabilisers but they might wear in after a while. Similarly, the media keys aren't the nicest to press but you can't expect much in that regard anyway.

 

The manual included with the keyboard was almost entirely useless. It included instructions on setting custom key backlighting, but it took googling to find out how to turn on the reactive backlighting and to even find out what the switch on the back did at all and even then, I could only find one source on the internet that could tell me what the 1 2 4 8 polling rate settings did; to find the polling rate you divide 1000 by the polling rate setting. So setting 8 is 1000/8=125Hz, 1000/2 is 500hz etc. Overall, the manual really didn't cover much about the keyboard at all.

 

The keys included are laser etched to allow the light to come through, so the lettering won't fade but beyond that, the keys themselves don't feel very high quality. They look fine from the outside and feel OK to type on, although I suspect they might get greasy during long typing sessions but if you take a key off and look at the bottom you can see that they are plain white keys with a black coating. Not sure if this is a standard, but when you're paying this sort of price I'd expect nicer keys. The replacement keys don't have this problem and as far as I can tell they are custom made for this keyboard as the texture on the top is clipped on using holes I haven't seen on other keys.

[Xenotone]

Thanks for taking the time for this. It was useful in working out the lighting functionality.

 

It's my first mechanical keyboard and I just plugged it in about an hour ago. It'll take a while to get used to but I loved it immediately.

 

PS, you got free Haribo with yours? Not fair! :D