Hardware CM Storm Quick Fire Rapid-I Gaming Keyboard Review

"black switches aren't an option but it's available with blue or red too. Build quality is excellent and there's a top soft-touch coating that eliminates finger prints and reflections too." ... "Connectivity is via a detachable 1.5M braided cable, which uses a right-angled micro-USB connector, with both ends being gold-plated too"

I think that, at 11, there were too many "too"s.

 

Personally, I don't need the extra keys and welcome some more Tenkeyless gaming k/boards.

The Storm Quick Fire Rapid-I is £20 more than the Corsair K65 and for that extra money all you get is plain white lighting and still no macros, the K65 also has separate volume controls, the price of the Quick Fire Rapid-I is even more confusing when you consider that the Storm QuickFire XT which is a full 105 mechanical k/board with Cherry MX switches only costs £65!
Whilst I appreciate that there is a smaller market for a Tenkeyless k/board does less really mean that much more money

The corsair website is not very clear which k/boards support their gaming software so I d/loaded the corsair gaming k/board software manual, it's 153 pages and a lot of it is just about setting up various lighting configurations, frankly, much of it looks overly complicated and rather pointless and I'm still unclear which k/boards support key assignment?

Guess someone might use it but you would have to be prepared to invest a lot of time learning the software and you could spend more time playing the k/board than playing the game, what the hell has five brightness settings and five lighting modes - all on, slow pulse, light on touch, light on touch with slow fade and gaming cluster, which illuminates the WASD and direction keys only, got to do with gaming?

What I want for a gaming k/board is a mechanical Tenkeyless board with some macro keys and decent configuration software, (Logitech software is quite good) I couldn't care less about multi-coloured lighting with ripple effects and timers, W,S,A,D keys with a tactile surface are easier to locate when looking at the screen than keys that are lit
Anyone know of such a k/board?

 

The keyboards that come with macro keys are fr too often huge desk space thieves, but if you can live without dedicated macro keys though give AutoHotkey a try:
http://www.autohotkey.com/

Works with any keyboard and allows you to make macros however complex you can think of.

 

Yes they are, I have one (logitech g510, a real plank of a board)) but with a Tenkeyless board it can obviously bring your hands closer together (more comfortable, less RSI etc) and that's the important thing to me, I don't care if the board is a bit longer on the left hand side with some macros.
I've yet to find a Tenkeyless board that has some macros, It's just annoying that with all the different k/boards and all the effort put into the lighting on some models that there doesn't seem to be this simple option

 

Normal keyboards have one context-menu key, and two Windows keys. You can afford to lose one Windows key, but you can't afford to lose the only context-menu key.
Why, then, did Cooler Master remove an irreplaceable key while leaving behind two Windows keys? It makes no sense!

 

On a laptop, I find the context menu key to be useful. On desktops, I pretty much never press it ever. In many programs you can substitute it with F10. That key, along with scroll lock, and pause/break are pretty pointless keys.

As a linux user, I actually find the Windows keys far more useful. Depending on the environment, both of them can be used as independent modifier keys, though in some environments they're not registered separately. I can reduce a lot of my application icons by running my most common ones from keyboard shortcuts involving the Windows key.

 

quickfire ultimate

I have the Quickfire Ultimate and it too lacks the Menu/context key. I don't miss it at all. I actually realized I never even used it on my previous keyboard which had it.