No this isn’t an ad. Fuck their keyboards and their shitty software and horrific customer support
Honestly, I really hate glowing keyboards I go out of my way to avoid them. Same with fans and cases with a LED lightshow built in.
The problem is that it’s so hard to find components that constantly don’t glow all the time. Even my computer has a LED fan in it, because it was all I could find for cheap. Fortunately it’s a old “metal box” type case so except for a vent on the side the glow is almost unnoticeable… but occasionally when the rooms dark I’ll see the slight glow seeping out and get annoyed all over again that a tiny fraction of the power my PC is using is for lighting up a closed box.
Im the opposite. Rgb keyboards are the only rgb components I actually like as it can actually serve a function.
An rgb keyboard with good programming software is invaluable. Being able to color code your keys based on game/function is great.
To each their own I suppose.
Build your own, then instead of a 150 dollar keyboard you can have a 350 dollar keyboard that also has lights.
And the D button will never work. But that’s why you pay extra
Hand wired 4 life! That way, if a key doesn’t work, you can just add more solder until it does.
Never understood that hype for everything RGB. I had two shitty mouses (mice?) with RGB, and it was annoying as fuck.
The implementation of RGB LEDs for things to glow dimly in your preferred color? Neat. Flashing between the three primary colors tastlessly? Why… just why…?
What I find more funny is the mechanical keyboard trend of smallkeyboards (no numpad) with custom everything (keycaps/switches) without any lighting being hundreds of dollars.
It’s not lightning that adds up to the price, it’s stuff like aluminum case, quality mechanical switches and yes, keycaps.
Unfortunately these gamer keyboards have the worst keycaps you’ve ever seen, the cheapest Chinese switches money can buy and the highest amount of telemetry on that oh so important software. It’s pretty disgusting.
The mechanical keyboard trend has been around for a while and it’s really worth checking out if you use a keyboard for 8 hours a day.
Cheaper enthusiast keyboards can actually be really good right now.
Rainy75 is kinda crazy.
It really is crazy. I’m happy that keyboards are becoming more mainstream. Too many people use shitty keyboards! Invest in your tools, people!
Or it has “lighting” but for some unseen reason, everything but the keys are lit up with leds. No actual backlighting.
Thanks, that’s not helpful.
I hate how hard it is to find a cool mechanical keyboard WITH a numpad these days!! Seriously
After just 2 weeks with an Aerox 5 wireless, I refuse to buy anything Steelseries again myself.
Bought it on their website, they refused my in-warranty 30-day refund until I talked with support. After dealing with their troll support for over a week, I then resubmitted for a refund and was initially denied because it was past the 30 days. I then had to argue I wanted the refund weeks prior.
Steelseries are just shit products now with a shit support.
Ended up buying one of the last Microsoft Mice only because it has reliable kailh button switches.
Not to mention their Engine garbage crashes constantly and has barely any real illumination support. The shit about booting with certain applications works like 25% of the time. No idea why I trusted people and bought this crap. Only thing I like about it is the volume scroll wheel and the media button. Outside of that, meh. Actually the wrist rest is good but not exactly unique to them.
Seriously? Y’all are buying steel series? Oof.
Keychron offers superior keyboards for a 4th of the cost.
100%.Keychron keyboards are some of the best.
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Lol what a corporate shill delete my comment ya lost a potential customer sad
Ya can’t silence what I believe is crap lol keep shilling
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RGB ram and other PC internals are definitely a scam, but you can put them to use if you already have them.
I use OpenRGB (an rgb program) to set my built in motherboard rgb light to be a color gradient based on my GPU temperature (ie: minimum temp is cyan, and fades green/yellow/red for higher temps). Not distracting cause it doesn’t ever have major temperature changes in a short time, and it’s pretty convenient as a general monitor when I’m playing games.
Definitely not a selling point for rgb internals, but a neat usage if you already have it.
I love rgb on my keyboard though. Color coded keys are a godsend for me to break up letters/numbers/punctuation.
It’s not a scam, its an accessory. It’s not going to make your ram faster or make you better at gaming but no one is claiming it will. Sure, its definitely overpriced for what you get but you’re delusional if you don’t think every company is doing that, rgb or not.
At the end of the day, some people just like to play with colourful lights and its not like you’re being forced to pay for rgb you don’t want, you can just build without it and save some money.
I don’t really get the big deal about it. Personally I prefer a clean dark build without the flashy lights but again, that’s personal preference. I wouldn’t want to force anyone to give up something they like.
Steelseries is absolute dog water with keyboards, same with Razer. If you want a good mech for cheap, get an Epomaker, or build your own. I personally got a barebones for like $10 from a thrift store, put $35 of Gateron Milky Yellow switches in, then got some nice keycaps for $15. Sounds/feels nicer than anything you can buy off a shelf, and it doesn’t come packaged with shitty software for basic functionality.
Once upon the SteelSeries keyboards were pretty good, I had a split one that I swore I’d use forever. One day a windows update flagged the driver as suspicious, and I was left with a keyboard that clicked and clicked but did nothing. MS support said it was up to SteelSeries to update their drivers, and SteelSeries basically told me to get fucked.
I don’t want pretty lights on my keyboard. I want all the keys in the wrong spots so people who don’t touch type have an aneurysm when they use my computer.
I had a steel series mouse.
The build quality? Excellent.
Design quality? Great
Software? Almost seemed intentionally insultingly bad.
My problem is less whether they work OOTB, more the fact that the switches tend to be poor quality and soldered to the motherboard. If one breaks, you have to break out the soldering iron. Finding exact replacements for some proprietary switches is also almost impossible short of getting a broken unit for parts. A pack of your preferred switches will always feel better to use and easier to replace. WS Morandis and Gateron Milky Yellows are my favorites and 104 of those clost less than 95% of premium keyboards from big brands.
Some even come with proprietary keycaps for some keys (looking at you Razer). That means if their shitty ABS caps fade or smooth out, you’re stuck with them unless you buy replacements directly from them.
Anyways I’m just a keyboard nerd so your mileage may vary.
People like pretty things.
I find it increasingly hard to find decent stuff without that.
My steel series headphones blow ass, but my mouse… My Rival 300 has been through a lot, so much that the rubber on the sides has a spot worn down to the plastic where my thumb grips it, and its still doing great a decade later.
But yeah, fuck their software.
I have the Aerox 3 and I really like the mouse.
I really don’t like their software. Why can’t I see the battery level in percentage? Who wants to guess??
I ordered the wooting 80HE. Because I hate money.
Got my 60HE a few weeks ago and it’s definitely a game changer.
Downright broken in some games.
I’m hopeful I will still die constantly in Tarkov
I’m not sure how it’s implemented in tarkov but Socd + rapid trigger can wiggle/lean at insane speeds.
I suspect there’s a huge chasm in this between older gamers and younger ones - much better something with better performance (say higher and more precise DPI on a mouse) and robustness (i.e. it doesn’t break within a year) than the same kind of flashy light show as a battery powered kids toy.
From my point of view flashy lighting on a mouse is like flashy lighting in a power drill: why are you adding failure modes and weakenning the robustness of a tool to make it look more like a kid’s toy?!
What’s wrong with liking both form and function in an item? Especially because I hardly use a mouse or keyboard in a way that I would call it a “tool” like a power drill. That’s great if you need something like that, but a lot of us are more casual users and would appreciate something that matches our taste when it’s displayed on a desk all day. Your power tools don’t just sit out on your computer desk all day, do they?
I have been rocking an off brand Chinese mechanical tenkeyless (a must for my space) keyboard for 10 years now and a Logitech triathlon M720 mouse secondhand for a slightly shorter amount of time. A great combo for me and the keyboard can be lighted or off in any color I choose. It doesn’t constantly strobe at you unless you want it to.
It’s not wrong in a moral sense.
The “wrongness” is in it being a significant conflict of form and function both because mice and keyboards are heavilly used and the changes for form make them less robust and because the standards of communications for those devices were made to support the function not the form hence special software is needed to support the non-standards stuff that’s only there for form.
Beautification of heavilly used manual tools is highly constrained by robustness needs and ergonomy considerations and in this specific case, by the standards themselves that support those tools (i.e. USB-HID).
Also at a personal level I find blinking lights to be a cheap form of design because it’s so simple and cheap to implement (I can make a device with configurable multi-colored light cycles with all of a 1x RGB LED, 1x $.05 microcontroller and 1x push button - it’s pretty much an Arduino entry level project) and requires very little artistry.
There are some trully beautiful ways of using light and then there’s the typical kind of use of light in “game” mice and keyboards which is visually very basic, probably both because the people designing mice are not that great designers in the artistic sense and the “work of art”-level design wouldn’t work within the ergonomic and price constraints for mass produced mice. (I suspect trully beautiful mice can be made, possibly including striking artistic lighting, but that probably requires much more expensive base materials than plastic - things like titanium or fine woods - combined and shaped in complex ways thus with much more expensive processes for manufacturing the housing)
I’ve been a gamer and intensive pc user most of my 45 years of my life, and my experience in the last years regarding input devices:
- razer sucked 20 years ago and sucks still
- never buy no-name input devices for more than minimal investment, even if the featureset sounds nice
- logitech (my brand of choice for a long time) is only held afloat by their brand name, not by their hardware quality anymore (the last good mouse i had was the mx-5, the last keyboard the G11)
- but there are exceptions: my roccat keyboard works like a charm, and my current roccat mouse is robust and comfortable (but no RGB compatibility with anything else -.-)
Logitech mice can still be decent if you’re comfortable with opening it up and replacing or doing maintenance on the button switches. Had to do my G900 after owning it for about 4 years (though that was with several months of noticing the left button was going before doing something about it). It was a similar story with my G7 20 years ago.
Though using better switches in the first place would have only added dollars to the cost. It’s ridiculous that a 3 figure mouse doesn’t come with high quality switches.
Razor hardware can be ok (I really like my wireless headphones from them), but their software sucks. And I once bought a razor mouse when my old one died and that same day decided to buy another new mouse and keep the razor one as a backup. The scroll wheel was both loud and would skip some turns.
Their software is even worse. It had an auto update and for some reason always had an update any time I restarted, but would still frequently just “lose” the devices it was supposed to control. The devices would still be working fine, you just can’t go into the software to adjust any of the settings for them, which meant all it was going was showing ads (because of course it had ads; business majors just can’t stand something having attention without trying to use it to sell more shit or something).
Read customer reviews for pretty much any device from a known brand or not. Focus on the distribution of ratings and what the 2-4 star ratings say to reduce the number of fake reviews. There are unknown gems out there (I mean, a mouse or keyboard isn’t a very complicated piece of technology and can be done well for cheap), and we’re also deep in the age of enshitification and planned obsolescence.
Regarding RGB: Uninstall all the shitty software and install OpenRGB instead.
I wish I could. It doesn’t support my keyboard properly. Then again I’ve got some macro stuff going on too.
OpenRGB has a great API and command line interface for all your automation needs. Shame about your kb.
