ASUS Cerberus Mechanical RGB
Illumination at a decent price.
ASUS is looking to change the playing field with its latest entrylevel Cerberus device, with this mechanical RGB gaming keyboard promising great specs at a price that most of us can actually afford.
Lay your hands on this baby and you’ll immediately notice the rubberised plastic that covers every surface — this is both a pleasure to touch and an instant smudge magnet. While the four included spare keycaps don’t get this rubber treatment, their orange-red colour ensures those WSAD keys still really stand out.
The keyboard can lay flat or at a slight angle, but those who like a palm rest will need to look elsewhere. With the minimalistic aesthetic, the only strong assertion that this is a gaming keyboard is the RGB backlighting, offering seven different lighting effects and per-key colour configurations. You can save these effects to any of the six profiles, along with any macros you record, and switching between them is a matter of hitting the appropriate function keys. The ease of configuration is one of the Cerberus keyboard’s greatest strengths, with the ASUS Armory software making short work of setting up new profiles, although to a degree, that is at the expense of more elaborate light-effect tweaking. The switches are Kaihua branded and come in the familiar Red, Blue, Brown and Black — the Red switches we tested felt almost identical to their Cherry counterparts, with just ever-so slightly less resistance.
Verdict
The simplicity of the Cerberus will be a key selling point, rather than a drawback.