Corsair Vengeance Gaming Gear From Digital Storm!

Corsair Vengeance K70 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard

The next we received in this bundle is the keyboard and well to put it plainly the K70 is an entry into the mechanical keyboard field which as all of us know there is no shortage of mechanical keyboards on the market so it will be interesting to see what exactly the K70 has to offer that makes it stand out from the pack.

One thing to note is that when Corsair entered the mechanical keyboard market their plate based designed with the floating keys definitely garnered some attention as it was much different from the standard framed designs. The K70 carries this floating key design and utilizes Cherry MX red switches which are a lighter linear design which do not have the tactile bump like you have with browns and no bump/click like blues, so imagine this like a lighter black switch.

Here you can see the packaging for the board with optional keycaps installed but we will get to those later. The front of the packaging is fairly simple but with a few key specs/features. The rear of the packaging lists off a few key points notated on an overview picture of the board itself.

Here you can see the full board which is a standard key layout and as you can see the board body is an Aluminum plate to which the switches are affixed and the keycaps ride on the stems about 6mm above the plate surface which allows full switch actuating with still a 2mm gap between the cap and the plate. This design is neat and looks very modern or even futuristic in design and one major feature i see is nothing like dust gets trapped down between the keys like a standard frame board would as the keys are free-floating.

There is an included extra set of keys with red metallic colored tops which replace 1-6 on the top row number keys along with WASD for the most common used keys. These keys carry a textures surface feel but more interesting is that the keys are aggressively angled at the outside corners so that the sloping banks back into the key array to ensure your fingers almost feel guided back into position for easy key location without taking your eyes away from the screen.

 Here you see the wrist rest which unlike many I have seen it attachment points are much more flexible compare to others I’ve used and also it seems to hold a lot better than others I have seen. the top of the wrist rest is a soft touch plastic almost like a rubberized coating. the coating or quality feel of it is quite good with a pored finish giving it a cool look but upon extended usage you will see the almost wet appearance from skin oil which can make it look messy pretty quickly but much like the mouse we saw earlier a quick clean up and it looked like new.

 Here you get a good look at the full board and the large braided cable.

The bottom of the board you can see it has two sets of extendable feet to allow optimal board positioning for pretty much any hand angle you may need. also all surfaces on the bottom have rubber feet to ensure even in the most intense gaming environments the board should not slide as it is well weighted.

The cable for the K70 is split off and terminated with dual USB connectors. One is for the Keyboard operation while the other is to feed the port on the keyboard which can be used for flash drives or a mouse or whatever else you may need connected via USB.

The top edge of the board you find the USB port which the cable feeds and also a switch which is a slider style and has multiple positions. 1-5 which are different polling rates available for adjustment although the default 1 setting is normally the one Corsair says will be the most liked by gamers and also has the “BIOS” setting which is made to be more compatible should you run into compatibility issues with some systems or maybe something like a KVM.

 Looking at the top right of the board you can see the multimedia and major control keys for the K70. First up is the roller and button which controls volume, the knurled roller scrolls up and down to adjust volume while the adjacent button will automatically mute the volume.

Also below the roller and mute key you can see there is a full set of media keys to control play/pause, stop, Fwd and Rev to allow full media control.

The other three buttons from left to right are as follows.

1) Backlight mode button – full backlight and selective backlight, the selective backlight can be programmed to light whichever keys you choose by simply holding down this button until it flashed then press the key to either enable or disable that keys lighting. after you are done setting the keys you want lit just hold the button again until it stops flashing and you are all set.

2) Backlight brightness – This key allows multiple modes of brightness to be selected to suit your gaming or working environment. 

3) Windows key disable – This allows disabling of the windows key which is useful for gamers who might otherwise hit the windows key and get kicked out of game and into the desktop possibly costing you the victory.

Corsair have installed a whole host of controls in the top corner to enhance functionality and usability of the K70.

With the exception of the spacebar which the knurled style finish plastic, the rest of the keys are completely smooth. We removed some keycaps to check out whats underneath and as you can see it is indeed a Cherry MX Red and you also see the LED used for backlighting.

Here I installed the secondary keycap set which came included in the packaging. The keycaps actually look very cool and I could see them being useful in games like FPS which would utilize these keys however they do not work well with regular typing as the angle of the keys actually can be easily caught by the fingers as you sweep for different keystrokes.

The second images shows how much of a slope the secondary keycaps offer as the edge is very steep the further outward you get.

Performance

The Corsair K70 keyboard performs just as well as any mechanical keyboard you can expect however being that I am so used to standard framed keyboard designs it really has taken some time working with it and im still not 100% on board with it yet as the keycaps simply feel so much higher than any I have used before.

Typing is my biggest issue on the K70 as I find myself making about 30% more mistakes on this board and it’s simply because I feel like I need to raise my hands to change key positions as no matter how I adjust the board I simply cannot compensate for the feel of the raised keys.

Summary

 The corsair K70 is a very nice looking and highly featured mechanical keyboard that simply does what it says and does it well. The unique designs means you may take some extra time to relearn the positioning as it is a bit odd of a feel but overall if you can learn to deal with it then you can have a really nice keyboard.

Digital Storm offers the K70 as an accessory item for $129 to any gaming build which is the same as you can find on eTailers such as Newegg.