- This is nicer than the keyboard I have at home and I'm not just saying that because ASUS sponsored us,
covered this video on their new ROG Strix Flare II Animate.
Let's check it out, inside the box you have a nice kind of one pager
on how to attach the wrist rest, looks like it's a three step process
more on that in a minute. In this cloth bag, which is really wanting to slip off, is the keyboard.
Okay. It's a full size keyboard, got a nice
thick yeah braided cable here,
got two plugs, that's because there's a USB pass through on this puppy.
Here's the wrist rest we were talking about something special about this puppy.
Everything's a puppy today. (puppy barks) What else we got in here?
Literature, get outta here. Oh cool. We have a pretty funky design of a key cap puller
and a key switch cooler.
So that means it's got hot-swappable key switches. Sometimes these things design can suck
so I haven't seen this design myself before. Oh, look at that
it even has like this little stem shaped notch on the top. Ga ga ga gamers.
You take this stuff out. It's an ROG bag. Wow!
My Robert De Niro face, by the way. Anyone can do it. You just raise your eyebrow, squint your eyes
and then do this. Stickers for your hard hat or your case.
Your car? - [Andy] Extra 690 horse power.
- Extra frame for second on your car. Here's the board. It's a full size keyboard.
Here's your number pad over here. You can tell this puppy wants to be RGB.
I'm gonna plug it in already. There we go. As you can see it's RGB on all the keys.
There's a diffuser down here and this is where this three step guide comes in.
You actually take this off in order to
put the wrist rest on. Oh, this is blinding now, look at it, it's all exposed.
Nude. Does this just pass through? It almost looks like there's like this
diffuser acrylic here. And then on the side that faces you as well.
So I'm wondering if they just shine right through. You can see it like getting brighter.
It really, it just passes through. They could have made it
so that they only gave you one of these and the wrist rest didn't have it.
You have to take it off here and plug it into here, but they didn't do that. You can just have a spare.
And I think this would be really good in the locker room.
Ha! Can you screw this up? Oh God.
(chuckles) See the angle? This is cut that way.
That's cut that way. It is meant to go this way. This one way.
Yeah, that's better. Let's see if it falls down now. It does.
That's a lot of force. The thing is pretty heavy. Can I get a scale?
Two pounds, six ounces. What does that mean?
Mode. Wow, it's over a kilogram. That's a, that's where you want to be at least.
It doesn't shift. You're bodying me out into like bedrock.
When it, the heavier it is, it just feels better. Cool. We have an aluminum face plate.
Like this thing doesn't flex almost at all. It's got this cool LE thing.
Did it just flicker? Yeah, it did. Apparently you can load this up with different designs.
It can even be an audio equalizer. It can even give you a CPU, I think status,
another computer stats. There's also some feet. I actually have a nice click in.
Lots of rubber pads for non skid. And it's got that wash board, hillbilly instrument
kind of quality intuitive if you want to join the band, then you got some
media buttons up here that are pretty intuitive on the side. You probably didn't see this coming, Andy
but you can actually click this side. Let's play and pause.
This is forward and back on your media. And then this that's a ratcheted volume knob
or I think you can assign that to other stuff. We're gonna try that later.
And then there's these puppies, what do these do? Oh, it's brightness. Look at the steps here, this off
and then there's 1, 2, 3, 4 steps of brightness.
You can also do macro recording right on the fly. All you do is function alt.
Now I'm in the macro recording sequence and I can go James function alt again,
and now I choose the letter or the key that makes that macro happen.
I'm gonna choose this plus button, but that's that's pretty easy.
What else, about how about the switches? So these are not Cherry MX brown scissor.
The ASUS NX browns. The N stands for new.
They also have available blues and reds. Although we thought we had reds on here
the red ones are speedy. They're linear they're for gamers.
Unfortunately we don't have any here today but I can test with the browns for you.
Sometimes you hear at the end, if you listen close so you can hear like the decay of a keystroke
and it'll be like a springy bounce around in your ear,
kinda like bang. And this doesn't have that really at all.
According to the marketing materials it's because they have this foam underneath
that is supposed to be absorbing those higher frequencies. So that's pretty cool
that you can actually see it in this cutaway here. It's a nice sound. You're not gonna get in trouble at work for this sound wise.
This still is satisfying. Man that's fast.
Look at that thing. You can pay respects fast.
There's actually a stabilizer under here. Do these click in on either side of that.
It really doesn't rock very much. Like I feel like I'm actuating it
just as well there as here. That's right in, that came out with very little force.
Some key keyboards, man I remember I did this key switch challenge
for LTT where we did so many keyboards. I was like getting bruises,
like pulling, went through multiple of these. That just came out real nice and easy.
So, okay, even though this is a proprietary ASUS switch
this board is compatible with third party switches but there you have it.
You can just swap out whatever, they have blues, reds and brown equivalence
from their own NX line. And you can see all the different actuation forces.
They put a lot of effort into them to make them feel very uniform.
I think they did a good job. I do have the blues.
This would actually be my preference. I do use browns that work just so they're not as loud
but these are a nice light blue. (clicking)
That's the difference right there bringing blue and brown. (clicking)
Now, these are compatible, again with any key caps you get as well.
Oh, let's try this puppy while we're at.
It can actually remap all of the keys except for function and shift.
Every other key you can remap. The legend is kind of a standard ROG legend.
It's pretty straight ahead. Doesn't look too gamery except for I would say maybe the D and the eight.
They look, maybe the six have a little more sci-fi edge to them.
I don't think it's like gamery looking to a off putting degree.
Like if I bought this for my non gamer wife she still think it was cool.
In fact, maybe I should, because the one I have at home is obnoxious.
(laughing) It's an earlier RGB one.
It doesn't have a diffused light like this and I wanna see the different, oh, what is this telling me?
It just looks a little more subtle than the one that I got going at home. This a pretty plushy wrist breast.
Unless you got real heavy arms, I don't think you're gonna be bodying out on it.
That's cool. We'll do a quick typing test here.
Couple of mistakes, but I actually type with a Don standard
on Cordy keyboard, a keyboard on my desk. So I'm gonna make some mistakes regardless.
I feel like I could get up to speed on this pretty quickly. It's pretty intuitive.
All right, here we go. We're in armory create, this is the keyboard section.
There's actually a bunch of subsections. You've got, I guess the general keyboard settings,
then the anime,
anime matrix, which is just this led dot thing up here.
And there's a macro section. So let's start with just the general, oh, you must update.
Raise your glasses, whip your a. All right, here we are.
Ooh! I'm gonna select the F key. Oh man, I can change the function of it and everything.
Geez. You can also, it looks like remap all of these media keys.
So let's see what kinda options we get for this play and pause button on the side.
Oh wow, it's, it's full on. You can make it launch a website or an application.
You can make it be the right click if you want it.
And I think that applies to everything. The direction of this toggle button up
can be a thing, which is separate from it being down.
And that also applies to scrolling this wheel up and down.
And what is this? Is this a, you, it's a button.
You can click this. And right now that's set to mute by default.
You could launch like a bunch of programs with these for some stupid reason if you wanted to.
I had my secret puppy hub button. (barking) Now what? These hot key keys though.
Game mode, preference, disable alt and tab. Whoa!
Disable alt F 4? Come on. And then there's some tabs up here.
Lighting, here we go. You can see all the different effects that we recycling through on the keyboard.
This is aura sync compatible obviously, it's ASUS. So you can have this synced up with your motherboard lights,
your GPU, whatever other, or a sync compatible product you may have in your ecosystem.
What's on the performance tab? You can actually specify the polling rate
of the keyboard from 1000 up to 8000 Hertz.
And they say that the input lag of it is 0.125 millisecond,
just over a 10th of a millisecond. Good enough for me and my gamer chops.
Okay, here's the animatrix. This is what I'm calling it.
You can just turn it off if you hate it. And then there's a content library.
I got a meteorite thing. If I apply that.
(gunshots mimics) I see you.
I'm feeling loverly today. (heartbeat mimics)
Oh, and you can actually change the brightness of it. Let's put this down to 25%.
I'm really glad they included that. That's sweet, 'cause in a really dark room, it could be overwhelming.
Can I edit, edit effect? Yeah, we've gotta be able to put the Linus face on here,
right? (laughter) Drag an image from your content library,
library or press insert image to begin. This is Halloween.
Okay, you can change the scale of it. Can I drag it around? Oh my God.
They made it so useful. The interface is really quite good.
I'm just gonna apply it and see what happens. Oh my God! (laughing)
That's so sweet. This is like a meme Lord's keyboard. Man imagine you were a streamer
and you had a camera on your mouse but then also this little meme face was in the shot.
That'd be awesome. Oh, there's like slots. I can add a second meme and then make them loop.
You can make like a video happen through this. This is gonna be like one of those things 20 years from now
there's like an enthusiast retro community about tweaking with these.
That's awesome. We've gotten to the point now where the big brands are really closing in
even on what the enthusiast market has been doing for a few years.
Like now that you have the hot swappable key switches you can, you can put any enthusiast switch you want on it.
If you don't like what it comes with, you've got features
that you just can't even get anywhere else. These are getting good. Now it's 219.99.
You get what you pay for. I like it. This is not a review but I've told you the features seems 100% not bad.
So thanks for watching "ShortCircuit" today. If you like this keyboard check with the link below where you can
check it out more and then just keep checking it out until your hands are checking it out.