This Gaming Keyboard is really ADVANCED! - ASUS ROG Claymore II
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
1,916 words · ~9 min read
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- I actually wouldn't be surprised if this was the way the industry is heading.
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This is the ROG Claymore 2. "It's from ASUS who sponsored this video to see,
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for me to unbox it for you people, to show the world what's inside this box.
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Apparently it's a wireless optical mechanical gaming keyboard.
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Whoa. Okay. First thing I see, there's two sections to this box.
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This appears to be a shortened like 10 keyless.
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Yes. Keyboard. And this? Is it a mouse?
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No, it's the num pad and it doesn't look like it has any way to attach to this keyboard, but it does.
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I'll try that in a second. First let's look at what else is in the box.
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Oh no, it's a bunch of stickers. Cool. Some literature.
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Okay. Then there is a wrist rest.
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It's kind of embossed on this side with the ROD logo. And that is how cushy it is.
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This is the charging cable. It is USB-C to shining C.
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Okay. There's a couple of little doohickey's in the box. This one is a USB A to C adapter,
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so the C to C cable is going to go into your PC and you don't have a spare USB-C port,
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plug that into your spare USB A port. And the other one is an extender,
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so if you are finding that you're getting intermittent issues with connectivity,
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if your peripherals are glitching, it's nice to be able to pull your dongle
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out and off your PC tower and somewhere closer.
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I actually have mine behind my monitor and I have no issues then.
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Look at that, it's magnetic. First of all, it's nice that it just has it at all.
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I'll accept just like a piece of tape on the back. Like anything, any place for this to live I appreciate,
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but this is one of the nicest I've seen. So it's a wireless keyboard that is 10 keyless, or not,
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and you can actually put this num pad on either side.
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This. So it is on a track, stays on there.
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Is this magnetic? It is.
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This looks like your standard 104 key and num pad and I'm ready to type kind of thing.
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Or you can put it on this side
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and then this is your kind of gamer layout. So, you have more mouse room and less fatigue when
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you're stretching your ARM way over there. So that's cool.
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One setting for the feet. Ah, look at this. Even this guy has a big foot.
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And each of the feet have little rubber sub feet.
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This is stiff. The build quality, this is pretty stiff.
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I like that. It looks like it has an aluminum front plate,
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glossy plastic back. And then as you can see, it has USB pass-through.
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So you can plug in your USB-C cable for pass-through where you can also plug
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in like your headphones or whatever, or you can switch, instead of pass-through,
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you hit F, you hit function F12, and it switches to fast charging mode.
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So this is wireless. Okay. That's the full setup.
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Obviously, I can move this to whatever side I want or I not use it at all,
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but now that it's set up, let's touch it. The whole reason this thing exists is
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because it is an optical keyboard, and you can see they even have their own STEM design
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but more on that in a second. First I kind of just want to touch it.
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Yeah and this is definitely giving me a faster activation
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than I'm used to with less activation force than I'm used to. I am used to using clicky switches
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and you can get this keyboard with blue clicky switches
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or linear ones like they have on here. These are the kind of red type.
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They recommend you use this for a few days
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even before you do an unboxing, like I am right now, but I can see why, because they don't want you to write it
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off because you're getting misclicks because they're more sensitive than you're used to.
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I don't think I would be less accurate off the bat, but I at the same time, I can feel that
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I think I might be faster with this eventually.
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There's just something about it that makes you wanna type faster. Okay, so optical switches are sweet, mostly
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because they're going to last longer. They're going to be consistent.
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And even though a normal mechanical switch will last
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for 50 million presses, these will last longer because, believe it or not,
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you can hit a switch 50 million times in actually just a matter of months,
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especially if you're talking about your WASD or your arrow keys or something like a spacebar.
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So reliability is good because there's just fewer moving parts.
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There's just, you're hitting the switch down and it's interrupting a laser beam.
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And so that means that there's no history resets (?) or like reset when you're
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when you D bounce off of that switch it's going to actuate faster and more consistently.
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So that's why I kind of, I wouldn't be surprised if the opticals kind of takeover over time.
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Oh and by the way, ASUS wants you to know that when the switch was first announced
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a lot of people compared it to the Romer-G's from Logitech, which ASUS respects but these are completely different
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with a quite different design, they say. There you go.
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This switch, you can tell from the STEM it's different, it's kind of like a box design,
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totally open in the middle. So once I get this turned on you're going to see
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a lot of RGP shining through that, I'm sure.
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It seems like a flashlight is coming through there. And then you can see they have these four corner
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latches to give it more stability. I've wobbled a lot of key switches
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and that's pretty minimal actually.
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You can see the key switch design has these four posts. It's a little different. With these reds
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it takes an initial force of 40 grams to go one
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and a half millimeters before it actuates. And then at 55 grams for the whole,
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the whole stroke to deep bounce back up. (typing sounds)
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I don't think you're going to have too many accidental strokes on these.
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Oh my gosh.
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I'm just unreal at typing.
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I did have a couple of miss-strikes where, you know, you get used to a certain tolerance level where like, well
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my fingers can just flail around the board, it's fine.
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But on this, you might have to be a little more disciplined.
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I think I'd get used to this pretty quickly. There's like little indicator lights up in here.
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Let's go function. Yeah. Okay. A single white LED for Windows lock.
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Sure. There's your caps lock. Let's talk about this little key pad for a bit.
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On the one hand you might be like, oh cool, there's like super tactile macro keys here,
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listen to this click. But on the other hand you might think, well
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it kind of sucks that my macro keys are way over there.
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Maybe you want them closer on your board. Well, you're in luck because on this board
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almost every single key can record a macro and it's really easy to do.
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I believe you just go function alt and then you record whatever macro you want it to be,
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or key, and then you hit function alt again.
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And then I think you have to assign the key to it.
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Let's say one.
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Whoa, it worked. You can see on the alt button it says macro.
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So alt one, there you go. QWERTY. Nice.
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What I do like about the keypad on the side is that it is symmetrical.
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So whether you have it on the left or right it doesn't really matter
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because the macro keys are on the top, not on the side of it. You imagine if
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those macro keys were on the left, when it's over here
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they're not at the end of the keyboard, or when it's over here, they are. That would suck.
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For other lights you've got the breathing ROG logo, and then there's actually a battery indicator
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light up here. Only two are illuminated right now but there's actually four bars and they light
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up according to how much battery you have left. It'll look different if you're full
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and it'll actually be blinking red if you have less than 25%.
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So this puppy actually has a 4,000 millionth hour power battery inside, which
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of course is rechargeable by USB type C. And then they say that you can get 144 hours
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out of it with the lights off and 43 hours with the lights on and blasting 100%.
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You get 61 hours if you have it at 50% brightness.
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And because it's USB type C fast charging, 30 minutes of charge gets you eight hours
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with the lights on and 18 hours with the lights off in 30 minutes.
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That's pretty dang good. You can pretty much be set for the weekend just by half an hour of charge.
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All right. So you saw me record macros for the normal keys.
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You didn't see me record a macro for these ones. And that's because to do that
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you actually have to use the armory create software which looks like a pretty robust software.
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This is what's used for more than just this keyboard, it's used for lots of ROG products.
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You can auto sync all your different RGV peripherals together. And I guess some PC parts as well, but
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but you can see, you can click on individual keys and change their functions.
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And then these are my macro keys up here.
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So that's the key tab. Then there's the RGB indicator tab.
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Oh, cool. So what I thought was the battery indicator doesn't actually have to be the battery indicator.
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You can make it just breathe with the rest of the RGB. Then you've got all these effects for RGB.
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Man, you could spend a lot of time in here. And this is a really clean looking software. Then on the power tab
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it tells you your current battery life. You can set when you're get an alert,
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you can actually choose when it goes to sleep mode after being idle. This is the RG Claymore 2 keyboard.
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I would love to try this with their clicky optical keys, which I don't have.
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This is 269, nice, 99.
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Check it out at the link below. And thanks ASUS for sponsoring this unboxing.
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So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, maybe you'll like to watch me check
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out other keyboards like that crazy, really heavy, pink, candy bar one we did a while back.
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Check it out.