Turtle Beach Impact 500
The Tyrion Lannister of the mechanical keyboard world. Only without the wenches. Or wine. Or wit
TURTLE BEACH is perhaps better known for the gaming headsets it’s been making for many years, but it's increasing its holdings in the peripherals market with a range of keyboards and associated pointing devices. They’ve all got something in common: They’re as black as a panther at midnight and are sturdily built, with the kinds of features you’d expect to see from more established desktop manufacturers, such as Logitech.
The Impact 500 is a mechanical keyboard with the number pad amputated, a kind of keyboard carbine for the sort of close-quarters typing that means waiting until you see the whites of your enemies’ eyes before you unleash a barrage of trash talk. There’s even a removable mini-USB cable (that’s nicely braided), so you can make a swift escape from a player more skilled at insults than you. Lol.
The soft coating we waxed lyrical about on the Grip 500 mouse (see page 83) is present, and makes a bit more sense on a keyboard. It’s still gorgeous, but the keys here are smooth-topped rather than rubber-coated, and feature the kind of contouring that the mouse was so sorely lacking. Even the sweatiest finger will have a hard time falling off, and there are deep gullies between the keys to channel your pouring bodily fluids away.
Cherry Blue switches lurk beneath the keys, with a click that activates quite high up in the button’s travel. It is, as we’ve come to expect, a positive action—there’s no doubt whether you’ve pressed a key or not—and there’s plenty of travel once you’ve pressed it. Whether you allow the key to bottom out or snap your finger straight back up again, it’ll still register. There’s six-key rollover with anti-ghosting (you can press six at once and it can distinguish them) for those finger-twisting combos.
MECHANICAL MINIMALIST
The steel-reinforced frame means it’s a sturdy unit, its compact dimensions perhaps adding even more stiffness than a wider chassis would. There’s little wobble in the keys themselves, just the tiniest movement if you rattle one about, and there are some decent feet under the keyboard, too, meaning it sticks, geckolike, to your desk as you thrash from side to side. Extend the little feet that raise the back by about half an inch, however, and a disturbing degree of slippage creeps in. The feet are capped with hard plastic rather than grippy rubber, an oversight on the manufacturer’s part, as the front rubber pads aren’t enough on their own.
What you don’t get are any programmable macro keys (boo) or Las Vegas-like lighting systems (yay), which means there’s no application or special drivers to install before you can use it. It also keeps the desktop footprint small. Perhaps they could have gone further— Print Screen has its uses, but when did you last use Scroll Lock or Pause Break?
An FN button next to the right Alt key gives access to media controls found on the central F keys, and an indicator lamp on the F9 key lets you know when the Windows key lock is engaged, but that’s about as complicated as it gets.
Unless you really need a number pad, this is a great mechanical keyboard. It may lack frills, but its build quality is excellent, it does the fundamentals well, and is a joy to use in a keyboard-intensive game. It’s only $20 less than Corsair’s K65 RGB though. How much do you like the colored lights? –IAN EVENDEN