Steelseries Apex Pro
The life magnetic...
Steelseries’s Apex keyboards are all respectable offerings – high-quality peripherals for the discerning PC enthusiast. Each model has a dinky display and textured wheel for multimedia controls, and the same degree of overall design polish. But the Apex Pro brings something more than build quality and RGB lighting; it offers an end, finally, to the key-switch debate.
Mechanical or membrane? Linear or tactile? Clicky or quiet? The arguments may rage across reddit forever, but Steelseries has provided the answer with the new OmniPoint mechanical switch. This switch already ticks all the boxes for performance, with an incredibly fast 0.7ms response time an actuation point below 1mm, but here’s the kicker: the Apex Pro’s OmniPoint keys (which includes the entire main keyboard block, save the function keys, arrow keys and numpad) can be easily adjusted on a per-key basis by the user.
Thanks to magnetic sensors inside each switch, the actuation point of every key can be tuned between 0.4mm and 3.6mm; if you’re not familiar with key switches, that’s the distance the key must be depressed before it registers a response. 0.4mm is staggeringly low, requiring barely a fingertip resting against the key to register input. It’s simple enough to replicate the feel of most common mechanical switch types – such as Cherry MX Red, Brown or Blue – using the custom actuation, so it’s easy to recommend this keyboard to just about anyone.
The Apex Pro uses a simple scale for adjusting this. For regular computer use, we found that a lower actuation of two or three worked fine, resulting in a very comfortable typing experience. For gaming, though, setting that scale to seven or above proved useful. The ability to differentiate between keys here is fantastic. We took it for a spin in Riot Games’s new twitch shooter Valorant, reducing the actuation all the way down to the minimum for the movement keys, and raising it for the ability keys.
It played like a dream; running, crouching, and jumping felt smooth as silk, while it took a firm press of the X key to activate our ultimate ability; no embarrassing misfires here. These magnetic switches are also surprisingly quiet.
As we mentioned earlier, every Apex keyboard comes with a tiny OLED smart screen in the upperright corner. Accompanied by a broad scroll wheel and a lone button, this pixel display shows anything from key-switch actuation sliders to lighting controls for your current Spotify song.
The Apex Pro retails at $390 – certainly a lot of money for a keyboard, even one as good as this. It simply is worth the price, though; it’s been a long time since a keyboard has made us as excited as this, between its cutting-edge aesthetic and awesome performance. The Apex Pro is a great product, hitting all the same
VERDICT high notes as its competitors, and then going a step (or two) beyond with its OmniPoint keys and OLED display. This is a supremely good keyboard, make no mistake about it. CHRISTIAN GUYTON