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Transcript of the review below:
There’s a couple of different versions of the K70 you can pick up in stores. Depending on what type of switch you like, Corsair makes keyboards with Cherry MX red, blue or brown switches. There is also a version with Cherry MX speed switches, but I’ll review that one separately. When it comes to backlighting, you can pick between red, blue, or RGB. Now, my version came with blue switches and red backlighting and costs around $120 on Corsair’s website. Anyway, if you choose to go with RGB backlighting, be ready to shell out close to $170 depending on availability. The K70 is Corsair’s middle of the lineup offering, above the $100 Strafe series but below the $190 K95 series.
The K70 is a full 104-key keyboard and it has the size and weight to show for it. It measures roughly 17 inches by 6 and a half inches and weighs in at around 2 and a half pounds. Part of the reason this keyboard is so weighty is because of its metal construction. The top of the frame is made from anodized aluminum, giving it a super solid build quality. The keyboard also includes two feet to angle or raise up the keyboard, and features a detachable soft touch wrist rest. The braided USB connector is one of the thickest cables I’ve come across, but that’s because it actually contains two USB cables depending on if you’re connecting to USB 2.0 or 3.0. The only neat features are a USB passthrough and polling rate switch, which are pretty standard among keyboards in this range.
The layout of the keys is as expected, there’s nothing really out of the ordinary here. The most interesting buttons lie in the top right corner. There’s a backlight brightness control that toggles between three brightness levels and off and a windows lock key which stops you from accidently opening up the start menu when pressing the windows key.
To the right of that is the set of dedicated media buttons.There a mute button, track control buttons, and probably one of my favorite aspects of this keyboard: a textured volume scroll wheel. I love that Corsair added this feature since it makes changing volume a breeze.
Moving on to the typing experience, all I can say is that it’s pretty much as expected. The Cherry MX blue switches feel similar to others that I’ve used in the past, meaning Corsair hasn’t done anything to significantly impact the typing quality. When switching to the K70 from my laptop keyboard, I didn’t really notice any drops in my words per minute, if that’s any indicator of quality. As these are blue switches, they have are both clicky and tactile with a peak actuation force of 60 grams. I have a tendency to bottom out my keystrokes, so I really like the feedback I get from blue switches. Right now I’ll play a small sample of me typing so you can hear what it sounds like.
Perhaps one of the biggest selling points of this laptop, apart from build quality, is the backlight. It’s very bright and makes it a piece of cake to see the keycaps in a totally dark room. Each key has a red LED that lights up the top of the key. This means the primary function of that button is in bright red, while the secondary (or shift) function is more dim.
You can program the keyboard backlighting using Corsair’s Utility Engine, also known as CUE. From here you can edit macros, remap keys, and do a wide variety of other actions. You can also change the backlight pattern on the keyboard. There are 7 presets available and I’ll be showing them off in the videos here. Some, like visor and rain function, without input, but others like key type lighting and ripple type lightning respond to your key presses. You can also create your own custom pattern with just specified keys being lit up depending on your preferences. The CUE software features a graphical representation of the keyboard and shows you the live coloring effects so you can see exactly what your keyboard will look like even if you don’t have it next to you.
My overall impressions of the keyboard have been positive for the most part. I absolutely love the metal build and appreciate that Corsair stayed true to the Cherry MX switches. The multimedia keys and volume scroll wheel are just the icing on the cake. Probably the only downside I can find with this keyboard involves the USB cable. With more and more people switching over to USB 3.0, I would have liked to have seen this model come with just a single USB connector. As it is right now, I’m left with an unnecessarily thick cable and a second USB connector that kind of just dangles in the air.
