Creative Sound BlasterX Vanguard K08

Lights and sounds—but they’re not all desirable

FORGET GRAPHICS CARDS, motherboards, and monitors. The mechanical keyboard market is one of the most hotly contested hardware sectors, and rightly so. The tactile experience of interacting with your PC is almost entirely determined by the tool you use, so a change of keyboard— particularly if moving away from a soft, rubbery membrane matrix to one with satisfying bite—can have a big impact. Accordingly, everyone and their mother has a set of crunchy keys on the market, and while this is Creative’s first time dipping its toe in the water, the company has already spotted the big selling point to many loose-pocketed buyers: pretty lights.

The K08’s RGB lighting is equal parts flexible and obtuse. Changing it is only possible by using Creative’s somewhat difficult Sound Blaster Connect software— so you’re out of luck if you’re not at your PC or if using a non-Windows OS—and its multilayer construction takes a while to get your head around. Put simply, you first set a multicolored animated layer, tweaking the speed, pattern, and precise color scheme. Then you add a static layer on top, enabling you to pick out individual keys, and assign them each a color of your choice, leaving the bottom layer shining through as you see fit. The combo of well-coated key caps, a white backing, and the full 16.8-millioncolor RGB range makes it really pop. The whole lot integrates with other hardware that supports Aurora reactive lighting, too, so you could potentially sync up your whole desk. It’s a shame there’s no way to change the key colors from the hardware itself, and equally that activation of the likes of Caps Lock is represented by awkward little white LEDs, rather than custom colors on the actual keys, but these are nitpicks.

In terms of overall design, Creative has outdone itself with its debut keyboard outing. The unit itself is weighty and well put together, featuring a row of lowerprofile dome-switched media keys, an incredibly satisfying volume roller, and a string of five macro keys. Our lizard brains initially struggled with the position of these keys, sitting as they do along the left edge of the keyboard, but it actually makes a huge amount of sense—if your left hand is sitting over the WASD keys, they’re easily reached with a nimble pinky. Customizing them is, again, done through Sound Blaster Connect, and they—and indeed any of the K08’s keys—can be set to perform just about any action, from keypresses to mouse functions to custom recordings. NOISES OFF So, functionality, design, aesthetics: all brilliant. But a mechanical keyboard truly lives and dies by its microswitches. Creative has selected a custom switch, designed in collaboration with Omron, which it dubs the PRES (“Perceive-ReactExecute Switch”). It has a shorter travel to activation than competing Cherry switches, and the switch itself is silent and rather soft; we’d place it toward the Cherry MX Black end of the audible spectrum. The K08 is absolutely fine to type on, and while it lacks the visceral edge of stiffer switches, your fingers will get tired less quickly. Beware typing fast, or at all, though: Every clack down of a keycap to the base of the unit causes a rather loud ringing sound. Even just tapping an empty space on the unit is enough to set it singing like a Tibetan bowl. We suspect this is an artefact of the springs used in these particular switches—a similar harmonic tone is present in other mechanical keyboards, but we’ve never known a keyboard to be quite as loud and, frankly, irritating as we found this one. We can’t really fault the hardware itself—it’s a quality, if rather pricey, package—but be prepared to don headphones if you’re getting down to some serious work. –ALEX COX