luxlunae

A somewhat informal, highly personal review of the Corsair Vengeance K90.

Amazon New Keyboard Link

I took almost two months off from gaming, but I have been wanting to review my "new" gaming keyboard for a while. My previous gaming keyboard was a Logitech G11 with 18 programmable keys Amazon Link to old keyboard. Most of this review is going to be comparing the two.

Death of the old keyboard: I spilled Pepsi Max on my G11 about six months ago and this caused some strange behavior, some of which went away when it was given a chance to dry out and some of which didn't. The process of trying to pry the thing apart was quite frankly disgusting (where do all those crumbs come from!) and as previously indicated, even when thoroughly cleaned a few of the problem keys were still problems. Namely certain key combinations no longer worked (if I remember correctly, Shift + / no longer produced a question mark, for example). Also it was filthy and old, and my media keys were completely shot not by the spilling but by the attempted prying apart of the keyboard. I chose to switch keyboards for a few reasons: The current version of the G11 has 12 programmable keys and not 18. I prefer to play mmos with my left hand centered around the G11 key, and so I like having lots of custom buttons. I also wanted to try a hardier keyboard because I was disappointed with the custom media buttons on my g11, which I didn't really like even before they were broken.

TL;DR: If you care mostly about the hardware, Corsair wins, if you care mostly about the software go with Logitech

The look and feel of this keyboard are excellent. There are mechanical "clacky" switches under the typing keys (but not the Fkeys or the Gkeys), which makes typing on it a very satisfying experience. I am told that the clackiness is less pleasant for someone that you share an office with*. They are "Cherry Mx Red" switches, for those of you familiar with such things. Supposedly not as loud as the Blue switches that are in the Razer Black Widow keyboards. The metal front of the keyboard gives it a satisfying heft, it doesn't slide around the desk in a flimsy manner. The brushed aluminum is pleasantly cool and smooth. As the keys are raised above a flat surface those crumbs mostly slide right off rather than falling into the individual key slots. Which is a problem for my keyboards, apparently.

The individual keys are backlit (the cherry switched ones anyway), which means that nights of squinting trying to read the keys in the light of the monitor glow are things of the past (my old logitec had very uneven and weakish lighting that was hard to see when competing with monitor glow in the dead of night). I never need to turn the brightness above the lowest level.

I love the smooth roll of the volume control (a textured metal cylinder that spins in its socket, rather than a flimsy plastic disc). Once again this keyboard provides a positive tactile sensation. This is what a $125 peripheral should feel like. Tough and sexy. Those considering the keyboard at this point should note that it actually requires two usb plugs, reasonably adjacent, to plug this keyboard into.


Alas, the software is not as polished as Logitech. Corsair is not alone in this. Last year while playing Tera I swapped my mouse from a Logitech Mx518 to a Razer Naga and I found the naga software to be extremely underwhelming (and to randomly break macros, requiring me to re-record them). This was part of the reason that I chose to NOT consider the Razer gaming keyboards, actually.

Although the Corsair software appears very similar to the logitech keyboard, with the options to program advanced macros or repeater keys, out of the box I couldn't get it to playback in wow. I will add that it seems to have some advanced keypress options that I don't remember ever seeing for logitech, things like show desktop (which you can do with Win-D) or open Explorer (Win-E) or launch program. I don't use these features though, as I'm fine with just using Win_E.

This lack of "special keys don't work in wow" was very annoying as I have this thing where I despise physically entering my gaming password. So I bind it to a Gkey. For anyone suffering this problem, the secret is that EVERY TIME you change one of your custom keys, you have to make sure that "hardware playback" is enabled and then go to tab 2 , "Manage Profiles" and click "Save to K90". After this the keyboard will work as intended, although actually getting the thing to correctly record for the key that you want requires you to use the MR button on the keyboard, rather than a record button on screen. So it works but it isn't the easy and intuitive process of using a logitech product.

Multiboxing specific observations:

Isboxer currently offers native support of logitech g-keys, but not Corsair g-keys.

Only the original keypress activates the gkey, and another gkey will interrupt it. So say that you have repeater 1 mapped to g17 and 2 mapped to g18, you must re-press g17 after you press g18 if you want to spam 1111111112 1111111111. With a logitec keyboard you can simply hold down G17 and tap G18 to produce the same effect. A minor adjustment.

The keyboard also has a rare glitch where sometimes a key will be ghost spammed from the keyboard (a number of amazon reviews mentioned this) but it is easy enough to identify what is going on and hit the key again to turn it off. This does not occur often, I think it has happened to me maybe three or four times in the four months that I have owned this keyboard.

Bottom Line: I would choose this keyboard again because of the sheer awesomeness of its physicality, but it is far from perfect and I will keep updating the management software hoping for improvement.

Edit: Writing this review did inspire me to check the manufacturer for updates and although I was already using the latest version of the software (sadly), there WAS a firmware update which purports to fix the "stuck" key problem.

*If the person you share an office with has subjected you to three years of "Welcome to Summoners Rift!" they don't really get an opinion, though.