I upgraded to this from my Blackwidow Ultimate (2014) keyboard. I'm not a
massive PC gamer, but I use my keyboard at least 50+ hours a week – mostly
for work – and I liked the look and feel of my Ultimate (until I broke a
key cleaning it…), so I thought I'd give this a go. The keystrokes feel
really familiar, making the transition between the two pretty seamless, but
there are a couple of extras on this Elite keyboard that I'm really liking.
With the Ultimate, you had to remove the keys to get at dust/debris because
they were set into a… Pit, I guess- Like a traditional keyboard. And, man,
did it gather a bunch of crap over its 5 years of use. The keys on this Elite
are set on top of the keyboard though, which allows dust to be blown out really
easily or swiped through with a cotton bud without the need for taking the
keys apart.
The media keys are great. It's so much nicer than having to FN+F3/F4 to
adjust volume, and having the ability to pause/resume/mute/skip just a button
press away is really handy. The “click” button press of each of these keys
is really satisfying, and the dial turns smoothly with gentle clicking feedback.
The quality of it all is excellent.
The colours are a wee bit gimmicky but kinda fun. My young kids like hitting
a key and having it ripple out, and playing around with the Chroma studio is
kinda fun at first. I did notice that the React (where you press a key and just
that key lights up) and Ripple (where the lights ripple out from your key press)
effects you can add seem to stop working after a little while. Whereas effects
like Flames and Static stick around pretty consistently. Probably a problem with
the software rather than the keyboard. The sleep setting for the LEDs – which
I've set to 10mins – seems to work consistently and reliably.
On the software too – I hooked up my Hue lights using Razer Synapse to
see what it did, but I'm not sure what the purpose is. All it seemed to do was
lock the lights in the area out from the rest of my home automation system, so
I disabled that pretty quickly.
The wrist rest is really nice, having not used one for years it actually
feels excellent on my wrists/hands. One tiny niggle with it is that sometimes it
pushes up underneath the bottom row of keys, making it impossible to press them
(and you don't notice until you go to press one). Otherwise, it's sturdy, and
the magnet system connects it to the keyboard nicely.
In terms of the structure/build of the keyboard, it gets a big tick from me.
The USB port actually takes a bit of force to get the USB into it, and it really
clings on tightly – which I guess is for gaming where you wouldn't want
whatever is plugged in to rip out accidentally. The USB port is on the opposite
(left) side of the keyboard compared to my old Ultimate which took a small
amount of adjustment but doesn't bother me.
The keyboard itself is quite hefty, it has a really solid weight to it and
feels like it could take a battering. The kickstands underneath are a massive
improvement on the Ultimate – I found the Ultimate would quite easily
collapse if you tried to shift the keyboard forward, but the Elite has a lot
more resistance to it and slides across the desk nicely. I haven't tried out
the audio passthrough – I use Bluetooth headphones, so I can't comment
on that.
The cables for the keyboard are braided (as the Ultimate was) and really
solid feeling, there's a small routing hole for them to tuck through
underneath, as well as a rubber clip tie to tidy up the length a bit. The USB
plugs at the end of the cables (there are two – one for the keyboard, one for
the passthrough port) have green accents in them which is a nice touch, but
otherwise, are pretty standard.
I would recommend this keyboard. I think the software could do with some
improving, but overall I'm really stoked with this purchase.
