Is this your gateway drug? - NZXT Function Keyboard
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
1,869 words · ~9 min read
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- NZXT sponsored this video to cover, I don't even know what, look at all this stuff.
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Good God. Okay. Let's start with the function keyboard.
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Okay. We got a black one. Oh, wait, we got a white one.
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There's multiple colors, guys. This is kind of sweet. It's not cushy, but it's super rubberized
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and it's got this cool circular pattern on it. Wow. Sure got enough rubberized feet on the bottom.
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That ain't going no place. A branded purple keycap puller.
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Okay. This is a removable USB type C to A braided cable.
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And finally the piece de resistance.
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It's 926 grams
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and it's low profile. It's got an aluminum face plate.
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It has this much deck flex. Mmm.
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But look at this. You got some feet on the back. They have rubberized feet on them as well.
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And then a second level of feet. This clips onto here, it's magnetic.
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- [Jono] It's magic. - Do not recommend holding it up.
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(keyboard keys clicking) Now they come with Gateron keycaps.
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So the whole thing with this, I guess what they're trying to do is say,
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"Look the customizability you get "with the mechanical keyboard space,
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"as an enthusiast, is amazing, "but what can we do to bring new people into that space?
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"And how can we be a player in that space "without limiting customizability?"
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That's what I gathered from reading their thing, anyway. This keyboard has fully removable keycaps.
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Fully removable key switches. And from their site you can buy various key switches,
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all Gateron types. So they have like two different configurators. There's like the normal kind of cart page
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where you're like, "Hey, look, two colors. Here it is." And then there's the keyboard builder page,
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where there's different colors, different keycaps and more different key switches.
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And you'll even be able to get this as just a chassis with no keycaps, no key switches,
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just empty, which is sweet, because if it turns out that it is the best chassis for X customer,
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like if there's a subset of the community who just really like the chassis,
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they may become known as like a staple or like that's a great chassis use for this use case.
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So then in that way, they're in the community without kind of ruining it.
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You know what I mean? Now, this particular one, the base spec is the Gateron red switch,
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which is a linear switch, 'cause gaming.
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And you get this key switches that are ABS
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the RGBs gonna shine through. I haven't even plugged this in but, there's lighting, I'll tell ya.
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I'll tell ya, there's lighting. But if you order it in the configurator,
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you can get ABS keycaps and you can get, again,
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different colors of keycaps. I read in their materials that they were talking about
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this volume knob over here. That they said was like a gamer's volume knob,
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because gamers love adjusting their volume. But actually this is a sweet little knob.
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Okay, here we go. This is like kinda an icy blue.
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Oh, it's NZXT colors. I see what they did there.
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This is what it sounds like y'all. (keyboard keys clicking)
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Why don't we pull out a switch. This is not really a switch puller, but we'll try it.
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Do you have a key switch puller somewhere? Oh no, Jono, you went all that way,
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I just looked in the box. - [Jono] Oh you son of a (beeping) (both laughing)
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- I just looked in the box and there it was. Oh, it's actually kind of sweet.
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I've never seen one like this before. It's like a giant pair of tweezers. Oh, think I can get my unibrow with this thing?
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Oh, I've got it. Oh yeah.
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(upbeat music) - Oops. You see the RGB light there.
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These are per key, addressable RGB lights. You can also assign macros to all the different keys.
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All that happens in the CAM software, which we're gonna check out in a bit.
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It's a completely standard key switch. Cross pattern in the middle.
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It's a five post switch. And another thing they did to make this compatible
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with most of the keycaps out there you're gonna get is that they made the bottom row, all standard,
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all standard widths and everything. That even is true on their compact keyboards
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which we haven't out, like this one. Yeah. This is their MiniTKL.
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So it has all the keys of a Ten keyless, which I have here.
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Except it takes out all the unnecessary space
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and just compacts the crap out of it. And look how tiny that puppy is.
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That is cool. You still have a full size enter key. You still have all your arrow keys.
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You have, everything is normal in the bottom row. I love this top row where the F keys
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are just completely ortholinear with the number keys below them.
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It looks sweet. Oh, this is a different switch in here too.
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Yeah, these are linear. All right, I will tell you what these Gateron on silent blacks sound like.
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(keyboard keys clicking) You know what the longest word you can type with just your left hand is?
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In the English language. Stewardess.
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Why do I know that? I think I know that from a fact book I read in grade eight.
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This is a cool little keyboard. All right, let's talk pricing. For the retail models.
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The different sizes are 130, 110, $100.
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But then if you buy them as the bare bones kits, 90, 80, and $70.
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But I don't just have keyboards today. I also have mouses.
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Oh my, oh my God. Excuse me. (groaning)
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So they come in black and white. NZXT actually calls these ambidextrous.
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Although these buttons kind of have something to say for that,
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unless you're really good with the ring finger. But strictly speaking they're,
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it's not like it's bent one way or another. They got omicron switches.
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Ooh. Yeah. Very tactile and pretty light force to click those down.
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They have these low friction paracord cables. They got five buttons.
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Ratcheted mouse wheel. You can, of course, click the mouse wheel.
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(mouse clicking) I like the sound of the click. Oh yeah.
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They slip around pretty good. The mouse is 50 bucks,
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but you can also customize these on the website and get different accent colors.
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I have another stack of boxes. These are are different accent cables for the keyboards.
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Okay. I like what you've done here.
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Purple, blue, more blue. That's a good match for that keycap right there.
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Now what if I had the white one? Gotta go purple. Especially with that lighting scheme that they had default.
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That'd be cool. Ooh. All right why don't we take a look at the CAM software?
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Wow. This is very minimalist and postmodern software you have here.
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Oh, there's different tabs base being the blue color that I have now.
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And let's say, I'll switch that to red.
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And then reactive is after I hit a key
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and the color does whatever pattern based on that input.
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What is that color gonna be? Let's make that white.
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Interesting. There's actually some buttons.
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I didn't show you, guys before, those are on the side really cool and tactile.
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This one is the brightness button. That's off. 1, 2, 3, 4.
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4 steps. This one over here in game mode
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so the Windows key doesn't do anything. And this third button here is the mute button.
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But look how, it's only red when I hold it down.
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Is it not a toggle? I wanna check it out. No it toggles.
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I like to check out the sensitivity of volume knobs.
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You gotta do a fair few flicks to get this up and down.
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It's pretty insensitive. I actually prefer, there's something about like when a good song is on,
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you wanna just be able to crank a knob like that. And it hits just the perfect loudness
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but this doesn't really do it. Kind of gotta give it a couple flicks.
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(upbeat music) What else can you do in this CAM software?
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You can change the pattern. You got ripple. We got line. What is line?
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Oh, weird. I don't think I've actually seen that on a keyboard before,
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just like a solid line horizontally. And off, so now I only have my base layer.
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How to make a bit of small ripple, a little tiny.
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Whoa, this is like super powerful, actually 'cause you can make the base a gradient,
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and then you still have the pattern. Now that's kind of cool. And it looks like you have a limited set
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of default gradients, but then you can also customize them. And you can change the direction:
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top, bottom, left, right, radial. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised.
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They're kind of an aesthetics focused company. They have designers there
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who I would say have some pretty good taste. So kind of a hip, I would say.
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And then, okay, now we got some macros.
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Create a new macro group. The name is James. Create a new macro, add, activation key? D.
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Start recording new macro. James, whoa,
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D, a James, a James. (laughing)
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My wife! And then on the mouse side of things, what have we got?
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These are the mouse profiles. There's DPI settings up to 16,000 DPI.
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So when you switch to the DPI levels you can see it flashes the color you've set to it.
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Just to tell you what you're doing. You can change the polling rate from 500 to a 1000.
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Lift off height from two millimeters to three millimeters.
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You can do macros for the mouse. Mouse button remapping.
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Mouse forward, mouse back, middle click and the DPI button you can all remap.
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So it looks like you can assign different media functions
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like volume and mute, play and pause.
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You can do print screen on your mouse, if you really want to. Actually, I kinda do have that on my mouse at my desk.
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I use the snipping tool, tied to one of the clicks. Base and reactive again, same kind of deal.
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I like this underglow. So wait, the ripples like if I click?
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Yeah, it is. Huh? So that's the Lift mouse and the function keyboard.
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Super cool, what they're doing. I really hope it brings more people into the custom peripheral space.
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For more information, obviously go to NZXT's website and play around with the configurator.
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Pretty cool, all the different options they give you. And consider getting a custom cable.
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Check all the stuff out at the link below guys. Thanks for watching sort shirt, (sputtering)
10:00
okay, Sort Shircuit. It's a machine that sorts shirts.