Corsair K70 RGB Mechanical
£149 inc VAT • corsair.com/en-gb
We’ll say this for the Corsair K70 RGB keyboard: it’s a beautiful piece of kit. Constructed from aircraft-grade brushed aluminium, it’s both reasonably light and impossibly sturdy, on top of looking absolutely fantastic. The design itself is simple and square and a little dull, but we can live with that. It also comes prepackaged with a detachable soft-touch wrist rest, which is a bonus.
It looks even better switched on, too. The chief selling point of this model is the backlighting, boasting 16.8 million colours per key and virtually limitless combinations. Corsair’s cross-device software allows you to build an endless variety of pulse, ripple and wave effects in vibrant rainbow colours, as well as colour-coding specific keys, such as movement controls in green, skill keys in blue and combat buttons in red. You can also assign timers to the lighting, such as having your spell keys change colour when they’re ready to use. The lighting interface is a initially confusing, but makes up for it with unbridled flexibility, and looks absolutely breathtaking in action.
However, although macros and timers are supported within the software and can be bound to any button, the K70 RGB has no dedicated macro keys, forcing you to reassign any macros you build to an existing key. The key switches themselves are Cherry MX models, and the red versions that we used are nice and responsive. There’s not a huge amount of physical feedback and they’re pretty clacky, but whether that’s a plus or a minus is entirely down to personal taste. For the record, we’re fans.
Rather than assigning music and video controls to the function keys as most other keyboards do, Corsair has opted to give them special little buttons all their own. There’s also a special volume roller, for instant and precise audio control. It’s a small detail, but for some reason, we’re absolutely in love with it.
One thing we don’t like though, is the two USB ports required to run the keyboard. In this case we can understand why it’s necessary, given the intensiveness of the backlighting, but it’s still a little awkward. The braided cable is also unexpectedly chunky.
While it’s not as densely packed with hardware features as some of the other models here, in terms of purely aesthetic value it’s the clear winner by an absolute mile. If you desperately need macro keys it’s probably not ideal, but it’s just so damn pretty that we can’t help but recommend it.