Mechanical Keyboards

We had a lengthy thread on the previous forum about mechanical keyboards and the various switch types, etc.

Anyway, I got myself a Corsair Vengeance K90 keyboard about 1.5 years ago, and it has been fantastic, up until now.

Starting about two weeks ago, the ‘o’ key and one or two others suddenly started doubling or tripling in some cases (ah yeah, the ‘g’ is one of them) - which as you can imagine is pretty damned frustrating. I think ‘t’ does it as well from time to time. I don’t know if it’s the cherry mx red switches that this keyboard uses, or something else that is going wonky - controller possibly? Anyway, now that about two weeks have passed, the above mentioned keys sometimes don’t even respond on initial keypress. It’s frustrating as hell, especially since I do a lot of typing.

So I’ve ordered a Gigabyte Aivia Osmium which looks quite cute.

It also has the cherry mx red switches, so the actuation should be the same as what I have grown accustomed to. I will report back in a few weeks, once I get it and can run it through its paces.

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That’s a very short lifespan especially from a Corsair product.

From what I can see on the datasheet, the switches are rated at 20 million operations minimum.
I would say you should send it back and get a replacement.
You would have to press the same key once every 2 seconds for a year and a half just to reach the minimum.

thats a LOT of typing TG :wink:

I’ve had my Aivia Osmium for two days so far. It’s quite a bit smaller than the corsair width-wise, but that’s to be expected. It has the macro keys across the top and not on the side like the corsair. Although it’s using the same switches, the action and sound is a bit different. Much louder than the corsair (but not clackety, the cherry mx reds are non-clackety mechanical keys). Although apparently plastic, this keyboard is fairly heavy, and it has nice risers - even has smaller risers at the bottom end of the keyboard for stability if you keep the wrist rest attached.

Inside the box, there are 4 extra keytops included (and a key puller), but they have different glyphs on them. Like a lightning bolt, a shield, and two others that I forget right now. I suppose you can replace whatever keys you like with them.

On the right hand side of the keyboard, where the windows button would normally be, is an Fn key. I imagine this is for accessing the media control keys which are doubled on the F1 through F4 keys. Those are the only twin function keys that are on this keyboard, so it seems a waste to have a whole Fn key just for that. Next to the Fn key, where the windows context button would normally be, is a “Win lock” key. This button disables the left windows key. It’s a bit annoying, as out of habit I press right-winkey+L to lock my screen when getting up from my desk… only to have it fail, and then fail again when I press the now disabled LEFT windows key+L to try lock the screen, only to realize my mistake, press win lock again and do the left win key thing again. Sigh. I’ll get used to it eventually I suppose.

There are 5 macro keys across the very top left of the keyboard, for a total of 25 possible macro keys. You can configure 5 profiles, and switch between them by pressing the Aivia logo on the top right of the keyboard. Each profile has a different colour associated with it, so the logo changes colour depending on what profile you currently have enabled. It’s cute. The rest of the keyboard is backlit with blue LEDs, the brightness is controlled by the left roller just to the right of the macro keys. There are quite a lot of brightness variations, unlike the corsair which had 3 and off. If you press the roller, it switches the backlight off. The right hand roller is volume - pressing it mutes.

The cable is pretty thick, has a nice braided material cover, and it ends off in two USB plugs, and two 3.5" stereo plugs. One USB plug is USB2, for the keyboard itself, and the other one - blue - is a USB3 extension plug that is purely for the USB3 port on the right hand side of the keyboard. This is purely for convenience. There is also a USB2 port on the back side of the keyboard, inline with the numlock indicator. The 3.5" plugs are for extending your speaker & mic ports to the side of your keyboard. All the plugs are gold plated and have individual plastic covers.

So far I’m liking the keyboard, although it has taken me a few tries to get the keyboard in exactly the right spot, so I don’t keep offsetting my keypresses when I blindly reach for it. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Did you change the polling rate?

I was looking at the K90 MMO or the K95 RGB, but not so sure now. I dont want the keyboard to only last me 1.5 years.

I’m eyeing the Logitech G710+, Cherry MX brown (so I can keep my current G510 macros)

Gigabyte Aivia is pretty nice. Has the same cherry mx keys as the corsair - blue I think? They’re mechanical, but they don’t clack. It also supports macros (has 5 macro keys and 5 different profile modes for a total of 25 macros). Obviously the macro configuration is not the same as logitech’s.

I’m very disappointed in the corsair. And no, I made no changes to the setup.

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Got a Logitech G710+ a couple of days ago.
It’s my first mechanical keyboard and, being a Logitech slut, was a great choice for me.
It’s got the Cherry MX browns, so it’s nice and quiet.

Logitech has recently released an iPad and Android app that works with their gaming software, giving you hardware monitoring, macro changes, media controls etc. It supplements the on-board LCDs that featured on their older gaming keyboards but seems to something they’re phasing out.
I have a G13 gamepad which I’ve been using for ages and I got quite reliant on the monochrome LCD on the thing, so the new app meant I wasn’t losing a feature I was using a lot.

Here’s my current setup:

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