Well, you guys asked for it and this is the big brother to the K60, the Corsair
Vengeance K90 keyboard. Now, I made a mistake. I would say a fairly fairly
large mistake when I was doing my unboxing of the K60. And I said at the
time, although I corrected it by the end of the video, I said at the time that I
thought the K60 had blue backlighting. I
was wrong because I thought both the K60
and the K90 had blue backlighting. And my only experience with these keyboards
at all up to that time had been with the
K90. So now when I talk about the wicked
awesome individually backlit keys, I
will be correct because the K90 is a
gorgeous looking keyboard in the dark
with its beautifully individually backlit keys. So something else to bear
in mind about the backlight is that it does shine through these laser etched
numbers which are not printed. That's
right, they are etched. So that means that no matter what, no matter how many
times you press on any key on this keyboard, it will always stay well
illuminated and distinctly numbered or
lettered according to how the manufacturer intended. Okay, so let's
get the keyboard out. We got a warranty guide here, which is going to tell us
some little something about our uh probably 2-year warranty, I believe. And
yeah. Okay. You know what? I'll I'll I think the packaging for Corsair usually
Yeah, there we go. It's a 2-year warranty. Okay, so 2-year warranty. We've got a quick start guide, which
probably pretty much Oh, that's great. Full color illustration of plug the
things into the thing. Also, download the software um for managing your macro
profiles and whatnots from Corsair.com/vvengeance
K90. All right, so that's all pretty self-explanatory. What else we got in
here? We have a wrist rest. Wrist rests
can make or break a keyboard. And uh one
of the ways they make a keyboard is by being shaped and well and supporting
your wrist in a in a fashion that is uh you know good. U and one of my favorite
wrist rests of all time is actually on the Steel Series 7G which is also a
mechanical keyboard like this one. More on mechanical in a bit. Um and the way
that they can usually break a keyboard is by breaking.
And that often comes down to the mechanism employed by the manufacturer
to attach the wrist rest to the keyboard, which is usually just, you
know, a couple of little metal tabs. Although these ones seem to be fairly
wellb built. I can put a lot of pressure on them. They're not going anywhere. So
Corsair has uh sort of seen that
probably in action. I mean, their guys are I've met a lot of the Corsair team
and they're total enthusiasts. So they've probably encountered uh wrist
rest breakage in the past. Actually, my own G15 has uh has a broken wrist rest,
which is uh one of the reasons that it's no longer in service. So, what they did
is they went, "Okay, let's one up the rest of the industry and let's put,
check this out, thumb screws, which you
can also screw in with a Phillips head screwdriver, which might actually be easier based on my experience with my
fingers here. Um, thumb screws in the sides to make sure Also, oh, look at
this. Look at this. So it keeps it from going too far here, okay, with the shape
of this lip. And then keeps it from coming up too far once again with this
rather than putting all the pressure on these little plastic clips which no
matter how well you build them are prone to breaking. So way to go Corsair for
seeing what everyone else is doing and seeing why it was wrong and fixing it
with a, you know, three cent piece of metal. Excellent. Love it. Okay. Well,
actually, you know what? Why don't we finish up on the bottom here before we go? See, look at that. I accidentally
like went too far and it's fine. Uh, we've got a couple of these little
height adjust tilt adjusty dudes. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven rubber non-slip grippy feet. Um,
some experts believe that it the use of any keyboard may cause serious injury,
so like be careful and stuff. All right, let's flip this back over. So, I think
we're done with the underside of the keyboard. Why don't we go ahead and I'll
show you guys the pass through here. So, this be okay here. So, it's labeled with
two arrows. That means pass through. That's the one that actually runs the keyboard. So, it's a pass through, which
means that this is a fully powered and fully speeded USB 2.0 port because
there's no actual uh hub splitting going on inside the keyboard. So you go ahead,
you plug your mouse in there or you plug your mouse directly into the back, you plug a USB key in there, it's all going
to work just fine. So yes, mechanical keyboards. This is a mechanical
keyboard. At least uh most of the keys commonly used for typing are mechanical.
So the only keys on this keyboard that are not mechanical are these ones right
here, the macro keys. Part of the reason that Corsair opted to go with a regular,
well, now these days it's a regular um dome switch key for these guys is
because they wanted them on a different uh plane than the main keyboard. So, see
how these are quite a bit lower down than the rest of the keyboard.
This is actually for a very interesting reason. Now, if you've ever owned a G15,
I have a G15 Gen1, which was kind of the first keyboard to really do the whole uh
matrix of of programmable keys over here, you've probably pressed this key
instead of your escape any number of times. So, you go for escape, you go,
"Oh, oh, why isn't escape working?" So, that was why they went and they put
these down lower so that you can easily tell when you're operating the keyboard
when you reach the edge of the real keyboard and the beginning of the macro
keys. So, that's very cool. You've got three profiles for these. So, you've got
18 keys times three profiles right there. And you can manage that using the
Corsair software. Um, you know, actually another thing we haven't quite finished
up with yet is the wrist rest. So, it uses like a rubberized dimpled feel.
Actually feels very nice. It's like more it's like a soft touch type material.
Um, yeah. Yeah, quite nice and should be
fairly durable just based on how deep the dimples are. So, it should maintain
that textured surface, which I think is great for gaming gear because if you're
going to sit there and use it for a long time, a lot of the time you can get sweat on it, which means that if it has
those recesses, then you'll still maintain that that slight grippyiness
even in the presence of palm moisture.
So, yeah, that's good. Uh, what else?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, mechanical. So, mechanical keys. Ah, everything but
these guys. The F keys all along the top
here. And then this block of keys right here. These are mechanical. These are
all mechanical.
Can you hear the difference?
Okay. So, the reason Corsair opted for partially mechanical is because all of
the typing, all of the actual typing surfaces are going to give you that that
typing feedback that a lot of people do desire. And then the other ones that are
very much less frequently used, things like, you know, escape and F9 and page
up and page down are not mechanical. The number pad is the arrow keys are. Uh
let's have a look at some of the other functionality here. So we've got our media keys. So there's your volume
scroll wheel. This is one of the better implemented volume scroll wheels I've seen in the past. Got that nice This is
not a sticker. This is an actual texture to the uh to the wheel. So it's very
nice. Mute button, stop, back, pause, forward. Uh there are your LED
indicators of your uh number lock, caps lock, and scroll lock. You got a Windows
disable key and backlight control. Yes, this one actually does have a backlight.
Uh mechanical keys. Let's see if I can take one of these off fairly easily.
Uh how about this one? No. Okay.
Apparently, there we go. Okay. So, these are Cherry MX red keys. Um the actual
preferences uh vary dramatically from
person to person what kind of keys they prefer. Um
so really the solution is probably to try them. Uh, very shortly we're
actually going to have Corsair keyboards in pretty much every NCX store for you
guys to just sit in front of them and play around with them a little bit
because all mechanical keys, whether they're browns, blacks, blues, reds, I
think there's even a clear one, but those are a lot less common, do have a
slightly different feel, a slightly different sound. Um, Corsair determined
that for their purposes, the reds were the most desirable for as a balance
between gaming and typing. Another thing that you're going to see here next to
the uh red mechanical switch right there is actually one of the things that's I
do like about them though is they're fairly quiet um compared to some of the
other mechanical keys uh is that is your blue light. And so every single key has
one of those lights and it not only illuminates the key but also kind of the
area around it on the aluminum uh
backboard that is part of this keyboard. So, one of the things you might notice
about it, if you see here, is there's actually quite a bit of space under the
keys, uh, between the actual the the
rigid back plane and the keys themselves. This makes it a little bit
easier to clean and it also gives it kind of a unique look. I've never seen a
keyboard where they've done this before because every keyboard does have a back
plane like this. Sorry, I'm still a little sick. um that
the keys are attached to, but most of them cover it up with something which
often leads to the accumulation of dust and dirt and doesn't really serve any
other real purpose. A couple things I haven't talked about yet, although I did
talk about them in my K60 overview, are the uh full matrix uh full key matrix
anti- ghosting, which just basically means no matter how fast you type, no
matter what combinations of letters you press, you're not going to accidentally
register any additional uh additional letters or anything like that. This is
more of a software feature. It's built into the software, the keyboard to make
sure that everything is registered correctly over USB because USB does on
some keyboards that don't implement these features, USB does have some
limitations. Another one of the limitations of USB is that typically you
can only press, I believe it's six keys at a time. So 1 2 3 4 5 six and the last
one will not be registered at all. Um what Corsera has done is they've given
you up to 20 keys. So that's a 20 key rollover where you can actually yes
press 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 like you can press 20
keys before it will actually stop registering keystrokes which is pretty
much uh the practical limit of actually I'd say that's above the practical limit
of how many keys most people can press at a given time. I just want to make
sure there's nothing I've missed here. You guys can actually I never even showed you guys the box really. So,
there's Corsair's look at it. Uh, fully customizable profiles, 36 kilobytes of
onboard memory. Sounds like a really old computer. Hey, I bet I bet if you showed
this to someone, you're like, "Yeah, it's got 36K of memory on a keyboard."
They'd be like, "Oh, that's crazy." Um,
sorry, I digress. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Last thing I want to do is I do want to plug
this in for you guys and I'm going to turn off the lights in here. So, I'm
just going to go ahead and run this around to the back of my test bench
here. And we're going to plug that into We're going to plug that into a USB 3
port just for giggles. So, you guys so I can say it's USB3 compatible. Woo. Okay.
And then, you know what? Here, I'll show you guys in the light first. There you go. Has just a beautiful, beautiful back
lit look because not only are the keys illuminated, but you also see a very
distinct glow behind the keys themselves. Remember guys, here uh let's
pan around and have a look at the lights we've got in here. So yeah, and the
other side. So this is in my uh my little Tech Tips filming room here. And
that is how much you can still see the blue. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm
going to turn these lights off. One, two, three. And you'll see how much
that's going to stand out in the dark. This is one of the strongest backlights that I've seen on a gaming keyboard yet.
And as I said before, one of the most striking looking because of the
individually backlit keys and the way that the um the backboard for the
keyboard itself is a little bit further away. So it gives it a bit more room for
the glow to spread out. Just looks outstanding in the dark. So I think that
pretty much covers it here. I'll turn one of these back back on just so you
can see me again. Uh thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look
at the Corsair Vengeance K90. Don't forget to subscribe to Lest Tech Tips
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