Razer Tarantula Keyboard reviews

I've had issues with keyboards for years – the feel, the layout, the length of the cable, bugs… Don't worry about the fancy lights, this one is great.

Three things really stand out in my opinion: the keys have a responsiveness normally associated with laptop keys, but they have a reach halfway between a laptop keyboard and a normal keyboard. i.e.: they're not soggy like your standard keyboard, but you're not going to type a letter by accident just by looking sideways at it, or brushing off a bit of toast.

Second, it's USB2, and has a built in USB2 hub. That's great. I prefer having computers under the desk, but frequently need to recharge my phone, download images from a camera, plug in an external usb2 hdd or flash drive. With this keyboard that's all just right there behind the numeric keypad. And right next to that is the headphone / mic sockets, which is handy too.

Third, it's solid both in terms of weight/size and in terms of software drivers. It sticks to the desk, and there aren't any dopey problems with the software in any operating system I've tried it on to date (win xp, linux, mac os X).

The keys are a little more compressed than I'm used to. But it doesn't take long to readjust.

If you play RTS games then you will love this keyboard. You can more or less shove complete build orders into any key, and/or use the ten custom keys (five on each side of the keyboard). The battle dock thingy is a bit weird. I haven't seen any peripherals for it, but it looks like a standard mini-usb connector to me. Razer do seem quite keen on getting you to buy more proprietary gear… :)

Basically: reliable, quite expensive, more than decent performance.

this is a one fine keyboard for gaming. but it does have some good and Bad

good : nice layout(love it, love it, love it!). nice responsive keys. easy to pull off the keys(buttons) to clean the keyboard (dusts etc)

bad : sorta too wide(big), macro's aren't so good. (macro keys don't work while pressing other keys. for example, while playing fps games, you press foward key to move foward and if u press macro key while moving foward, the macro key don't work.), and requires 2usb slots to connect. (not sure why, thought maybe it's to give enough power to it's built-in usb hubs, but they still lack sufficient power to connect high powered usb componenets, such as webcams or gaming mouse etc.)

despite it's bad sides, i just love the lay out and it's so easy to clean the keyboards. once it's cleaned, it looks like a brand new keyboard! and it's why i'm still using this keyboard.

While the Tarantula doesn't look too bad, the driver support is terrible, with macros barely working, an inability to set any of the hotkeys to more than 3–4 applications that the drivers support, with no ability to customise them with support for other applications, and while the keyboard doesn't appear too large, it is in fact enormous, not quite as large as the Logitech G11/G15, but still much larger than a standard keyboard, and for some ludicrous reason they decided to make it out of stupidly shiny plastic that reflects the light annoyingly, and on which any smudges show up clearly, and cannot be wiped away. The keyboard will also completely freak out if you try to use it with a KVM, and basically I'd rate it as completely overpriced at $100, so $229 is just plain ridiculous. Having used hundreds of various keyboards in my time, including many gaming ones such as the Logitech G15, Saitek Eclipse, Wolf Claw, etc. I'd rate this as the worst keyboard it has ever been my misfortune to use, and I'd take a plain old generic keyboard over this any day of the week.

Having said this, many gamers will probably love this keyboard, as its perfect for the mindless FPS player who just wants a fancy looking keyboard that others will envy, and the ability to script in a couple of very simple macros for buying a certain weapon in CS, or somesuch. However, even so, its very obvious that the keyboard was designed NOT to offer things like backlit keys, simply so that they can then sell you an additional product that then shines light on them. Personally I find this sort of profiteering to be completely reprihensible, and it discourages me from buying any more Razer products.

Well I finally became a convert.

I used a Z-Board for BF2 for 2 years with the BF2 inlay. I truly rate the Z-Board as a good alround gamers kb.

I was asked to try the Tarantula which for starters is a move back to a qwerty away from a butterfly. That in itself is a challenge after using one kb for a couple of years.

I had trouble with the drivers install and firmware patch. I basically decided to do a fresh install of XP OS and start fresh.

Once I did that it seemed to run sweat. I've had no issues since.

The macro building is fairly excellent – simply to do and the option to store multiple kb profiles means you can set up game specific profiles – I think it was like 50 odd profiles.

I dont tend to use the usb hub. Im paranoid about clogging the I/O backplate with data charging back and forth – so i tend to run with the least number of things connected during a gaming session.

While its kind of a nice touch to have speaker ports off the kb as well, I run a 5.1 Zalman headset and Creative 6.1 speakers. Having a 5.1 option off the KB would be totally l338

again the KB has a 1ms response rate as opposed to a 8ms rate for most other periferal hardware in the market.

Overall now that I've gotten used to the different layout – I'm really enjoying it.

Using this keyboard was one of the best feelings, the keys were great to touch and press, I would recommend this over the G15. But one bad thing is that not all the keys glow, only the macro keys do, but the battle dock light could help with that. Everything on this keyboard looks nice and the keys are very responsive, I also like the Anti ghost feature as when Im playing a racing game the computer just starts to beep at me. The 10 customizable keys are great as well, Trust me when I say this "YOU WONT WANT TO CHANGE KEYBOARDS” I was using my cousins computer and oh my god the keys were so hard to press. I have been using this keyboard for a few days now and I am much better at AWPing on counterstrike, as I can pop out and go back in fast (Awping is sniping awp is a sniper rifle) one other downside is the glossy black on the keyboard always keeps figure prints on it, but I got around this by keeping a tea towel next to it and every night when I go to bed I just clean it a bit. The thing to take out the keys is also great to clean out under the keys I haven't done this yes as I clean it everynight.

This keyboard is exceptional no doubt.

Anti-ghosting is a really good feature and is noticable during gameplay. On-the-fly switching of different profiles that load when a specified game/application is loaded allows you to have a max of 100 different profiles each with 10 macros custom key assignment for EVERY key. Macro keys work like a dream for me on counterstrike, warcraft 3 and WoW giving me up to 20 differrent macros (10 each keymap).

This keyboard is full of win.