The gasket mounting system is tuned to slightly soften typing without feeling too floppy, and works with the switches to create a solid, slightly twangy keystroke with a great lower, quieter sound without sounding dull or dull. If switches aren’t for you, the Pro also has hot-swap sockets, meaning you can change switches without a soldering iron. While they no longer have kailh brandThe new plugs look almost identical to the ones on the BlackWidow V4 75% and still feel solid when flipping switches.
Beyond this, the new PCB-mounted stabilizers do not rattle or ping when typing and are a much-appreciated improvement over the base model’s board-mounted stabilizers. The keycaps are awesome for the shiny keys and sound good with the rest of the keyboard. You can replace them if you want – there are no oddly shaped keycaps, so any set of full-size keycaps can get full coverage.
The keyboard can be adjusted between 4, 6, and 9 degrees of typing angle, and the 75% layout is ideal for most uses. Compared to a full-size keyboard, or even a keyless keyboard (TKL), this design saves a lot of desk space. But unlike 65%, 60%, or smaller keyboards, you don’t need to memorize layers of functions and key combinations for everyday use.
Photography: Henri Robbins
Optimized, simple and elegant
With an intuitive design and incredibly soft palm rest, the Pro’s ergonomics hold up even during extended use and long typing sessions. One of my favorite functional improvements from the original model is the new dial on the keyboard, which Razer now calls the Command Dial. Along with the OLED screen, it can be configured to control multiple different functions, which can be toggled by pressing a button on the side of the keyboard. These range from volume controls to OLED, RGB and screen brightness. You can even use it to switch between open windows and scroll through videos.
Customizing the OLED screen is simple and streamlined, and you don’t have to do extra work to upload GIFs or images to display on this small screen – Razer’s Synapse software can automatically convert them to the correct size and format. The screen’s other uses include displaying system information (i.e. GPU and CPU temperature and load, date and time, etc.) and an audio visualizer, all of which are easy to set up and worked well in my tests. The system usage data was accurate enough to be useful, but it tended to be 3 to 5 percent off compared to Windows Task Manager (and at one point it showed that my system had a 115 percent CPU speed).