I NEED this keyboard - ASUS ROG Strix Flare II Animate
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,243 words · ~11 min read
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- This is nicer than the keyboard I have at home and I'm not just saying that because ASUS sponsored us,
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covered this video on their new ROG Strix Flare II Animate.
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Let's check it out, inside the box you have a nice kind of one pager
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on how to attach the wrist rest, looks like it's a three step process
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more on that in a minute. In this cloth bag, which is really wanting to slip off, is the keyboard.
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Okay. It's a full size keyboard, got a nice
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thick yeah braided cable here,
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got two plugs, that's because there's a USB pass through on this puppy.
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Here's the wrist rest we were talking about something special about this puppy.
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Everything's a puppy today. (puppy barks) What else we got in here?
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Literature, get outta here. Oh cool. We have a pretty funky design of a key cap puller
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and a key switch cooler.
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So that means it's got hot-swappable key switches. Sometimes these things design can suck
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so I haven't seen this design myself before. Oh, look at that
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it even has like this little stem shaped notch on the top. Ga ga ga gamers.
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You take this stuff out. It's an ROG bag. Wow!
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My Robert De Niro face, by the way. Anyone can do it. You just raise your eyebrow, squint your eyes
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and then do this. Stickers for your hard hat or your case.
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Your car? - [Andy] Extra 690 horse power.
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- Extra frame for second on your car. Here's the board. It's a full size keyboard.
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Here's your number pad over here. You can tell this puppy wants to be RGB.
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I'm gonna plug it in already. There we go. As you can see it's RGB on all the keys.
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There's a diffuser down here and this is where this three step guide comes in.
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You actually take this off in order to
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put the wrist rest on. Oh, this is blinding now, look at it, it's all exposed.
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Nude. Does this just pass through? It almost looks like there's like this
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diffuser acrylic here. And then on the side that faces you as well.
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So I'm wondering if they just shine right through. You can see it like getting brighter.
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It really, it just passes through. They could have made it
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so that they only gave you one of these and the wrist rest didn't have it.
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You have to take it off here and plug it into here, but they didn't do that. You can just have a spare.
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And I think this would be really good in the locker room.
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Ha! Can you screw this up? Oh God.
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(chuckles) See the angle? This is cut that way.
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That's cut that way. It is meant to go this way. This one way.
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Yeah, that's better. Let's see if it falls down now. It does.
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That's a lot of force. The thing is pretty heavy. Can I get a scale?
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Two pounds, six ounces. What does that mean?
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Mode. Wow, it's over a kilogram. That's a, that's where you want to be at least.
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It doesn't shift. You're bodying me out into like bedrock.
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When it, the heavier it is, it just feels better. Cool. We have an aluminum face plate.
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Like this thing doesn't flex almost at all. It's got this cool LE thing.
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Did it just flicker? Yeah, it did. Apparently you can load this up with different designs.
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It can even be an audio equalizer. It can even give you a CPU, I think status,
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another computer stats. There's also some feet. I actually have a nice click in.
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Lots of rubber pads for non skid. And it's got that wash board, hillbilly instrument
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kind of quality intuitive if you want to join the band, then you got some
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media buttons up here that are pretty intuitive on the side. You probably didn't see this coming, Andy
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but you can actually click this side. Let's play and pause.
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This is forward and back on your media. And then this that's a ratcheted volume knob
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or I think you can assign that to other stuff. We're gonna try that later.
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And then there's these puppies, what do these do? Oh, it's brightness. Look at the steps here, this off
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and then there's 1, 2, 3, 4 steps of brightness.
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You can also do macro recording right on the fly. All you do is function alt.
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Now I'm in the macro recording sequence and I can go James function alt again,
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and now I choose the letter or the key that makes that macro happen.
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I'm gonna choose this plus button, but that's that's pretty easy.
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What else, about how about the switches? So these are not Cherry MX brown scissor.
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The ASUS NX browns. The N stands for new.
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They also have available blues and reds. Although we thought we had reds on here
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the red ones are speedy. They're linear they're for gamers.
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Unfortunately we don't have any here today but I can test with the browns for you.
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Sometimes you hear at the end, if you listen close so you can hear like the decay of a keystroke
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and it'll be like a springy bounce around in your ear,
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kinda like bang. And this doesn't have that really at all.
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According to the marketing materials it's because they have this foam underneath
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that is supposed to be absorbing those higher frequencies. So that's pretty cool
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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.
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This still is satisfying. Man that's fast.
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Look at that thing. You can pay respects fast.
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There's actually a stabilizer under here. Do these click in on either side of that.
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It really doesn't rock very much. Like I feel like I'm actuating it
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just as well there as here. That's right in, that came out with very little force.
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Some key keyboards, man I remember I did this key switch challenge
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for LTT where we did so many keyboards. I was like getting bruises,
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like pulling, went through multiple of these. That just came out real nice and easy.
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So, okay, even though this is a proprietary ASUS switch
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this board is compatible with third party switches but there you have it.
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You can just swap out whatever, they have blues, reds and brown equivalence
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from their own NX line. And you can see all the different actuation forces.
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They put a lot of effort into them to make them feel very uniform.
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I think they did a good job. I do have the blues.
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This would actually be my preference. I do use browns that work just so they're not as loud
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but these are a nice light blue. (clicking)
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That's the difference right there bringing blue and brown. (clicking)
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Now, these are compatible, again with any key caps you get as well.
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Oh, let's try this puppy while we're at.
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It can actually remap all of the keys except for function and shift.
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Every other key you can remap. The legend is kind of a standard ROG legend.
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It's pretty straight ahead. Doesn't look too gamery except for I would say maybe the D and the eight.
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They look, maybe the six have a little more sci-fi edge to them.
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I don't think it's like gamery looking to a off putting degree.
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Like if I bought this for my non gamer wife she still think it was cool.
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In fact, maybe I should, because the one I have at home is obnoxious.
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(laughing) It's an earlier RGB one.
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It doesn't have a diffused light like this and I wanna see the different, oh, what is this telling me?
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It just looks a little more subtle than the one that I got going at home. This a pretty plushy wrist breast.
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Unless you got real heavy arms, I don't think you're gonna be bodying out on it.
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That's cool. We'll do a quick typing test here.
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Couple of mistakes, but I actually type with a Don standard
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on Cordy keyboard, a keyboard on my desk. So I'm gonna make some mistakes regardless.
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I feel like I could get up to speed on this pretty quickly. It's pretty intuitive.
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All right, here we go. We're in armory create, this is the keyboard section.
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There's actually a bunch of subsections. You've got, I guess the general keyboard settings,
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then the anime,
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anime matrix, which is just this led dot thing up here.
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And there's a macro section. So let's start with just the general, oh, you must update.
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Raise your glasses, whip your a. All right, here we are.
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Ooh! I'm gonna select the F key. Oh man, I can change the function of it and everything.
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Geez. You can also, it looks like remap all of these media keys.
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So let's see what kinda options we get for this play and pause button on the side.
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Oh wow, it's, it's full on. You can make it launch a website or an application.
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You can make it be the right click if you want it.
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And I think that applies to everything. The direction of this toggle button up
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can be a thing, which is separate from it being down.
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And that also applies to scrolling this wheel up and down.
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And what is this? Is this a, you, it's a button.
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You can click this. And right now that's set to mute by default.
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You could launch like a bunch of programs with these for some stupid reason if you wanted to.
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I had my secret puppy hub button. (barking) Now what? These hot key keys though.
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Game mode, preference, disable alt and tab. Whoa!
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Disable alt F 4? Come on. And then there's some tabs up here.
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Lighting, here we go. You can see all the different effects that we recycling through on the keyboard.
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This is aura sync compatible obviously, it's ASUS. So you can have this synced up with your motherboard lights,
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your GPU, whatever other, or a sync compatible product you may have in your ecosystem.
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What's on the performance tab? You can actually specify the polling rate
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of the keyboard from 1000 up to 8000 Hertz.
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And they say that the input lag of it is 0.125 millisecond,
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just over a 10th of a millisecond. Good enough for me and my gamer chops.
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Okay, here's the animatrix. This is what I'm calling it.
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You can just turn it off if you hate it. And then there's a content library.
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I got a meteorite thing. If I apply that.
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(gunshots mimics) I see you.
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I'm feeling loverly today. (heartbeat mimics)
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Oh, and you can actually change the brightness of it. Let's put this down to 25%.
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I'm really glad they included that. That's sweet, 'cause in a really dark room, it could be overwhelming.
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Can I edit, edit effect? Yeah, we've gotta be able to put the Linus face on here,
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right? (laughter) Drag an image from your content library,
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library or press insert image to begin. This is Halloween.
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Okay, you can change the scale of it. Can I drag it around? Oh my God.
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They made it so useful. The interface is really quite good.
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I'm just gonna apply it and see what happens. Oh my God! (laughing)
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That's so sweet. This is like a meme Lord's keyboard. Man imagine you were a streamer
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and you had a camera on your mouse but then also this little meme face was in the shot.
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That'd be awesome. Oh, there's like slots. I can add a second meme and then make them loop.
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You can make like a video happen through this. This is gonna be like one of those things 20 years from now
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there's like an enthusiast retro community about tweaking with these.
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That's awesome. We've gotten to the point now where the big brands are really closing in
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even on what the enthusiast market has been doing for a few years.
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Like now that you have the hot swappable key switches you can, you can put any enthusiast switch you want on it.
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If you don't like what it comes with, you've got features
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that you just can't even get anywhere else. These are getting good. Now it's 219.99.
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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.
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So thanks for watching "ShortCircuit" today. If you like this keyboard check with the link below where you can
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check it out more and then just keep checking it out until your hands are checking it out.