Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're looking at rose wills Apollo arcade 90-100 xbb are a mechanical keyboard consequently saying that name has been the bane of my existence for the last two takes of his audio this mechanical keyboard is priced at $150 it's branded by Rosewill and ships in brown and blue cherry switches with blue or red backlighting the full written review is linked in the description below you'll find links to alternative keyboards also in that article so if you're looking for more check on that let's go through the features before we hit on opinions so the keyboard uses cherry switches it's feel will be exactly the same as any other Cherry MX brown or blue switch you've ever encountered the Apollo has a full 10 key numpad a function key right of the spacebar alternative functions on f1 through f12 and alternative functions on numpad 8 and numpad2 the numpad keys will adjust backlight brightness between four levels including off or three brightness levels f1 through F six with a function key serve as media control options so played volume change mute stuff like that and F seven through F 11 serve as gaming macro profiles with f12 toggling gaming mode on and off which is basically just disabling the Windows key other than that the keyboards got a sort of rubberized texture everywhere except for the keys which are just normal caps just plastic caps the apollo ships with alternative orange key caps for directional keys and WASD keys and honestly they feel a lot better than the stock key caps they've got a bit more grip to them as a result of the paint and that's something I'd really would prefer to see all over the keyboard because the current one is just kind of I don't know if they just feel kind of normal and uninteresting to me in the top right of the keyboard the Apollo has two USB ports and two 3.5 milimeter jacks which is always a nice feature on a keyboard it has a thick braided cable running to your system that splits into USB and 3.5 milimeter which then carry the signal to those ports or to the keyboard itself wrist rest is also included for those who like it that is pretty much everything in terms of specs as for opinions well the the brown switches feel like they always do the overall click eNOS and tactility feels good it's not really anything unique to board manufacturers it's unique to switch manufacturers so if you know the MX brown switches and like them and you'll like these I've had some issues with the keys sticking or the switches sticking on occasion maybe four or five times since I've had the keyboard I've had a key stick meaning if I hit E it just keeps hitting me over and over until I hit it again to release that and that's out of probably a couple of hundred thousand keystrokes because I've been doing all the article right it's a bit annoying but it's not dismal because again four or five times out of hundreds of thousands of keystrokes is not a terrible track record but it is worse than the g7 ten plus which I'll talk about in a moment I do question if that'll get worse with use though so I caution you if you do a lot of typing the software is sort of clumsy but it gets the job done the only purpose of Rosewell software is to map key keys to functions so you can assign macros core window functions things like that pretty standard stuff really if you've used any other mouse or keyboard mapping software in the past you've with these you have to sacrifice the base functionality of that key or mapping so it's important to find one you won't be using in game or for text chat in the game switching between profiles is very easily done if you need to reclaim that key though I would never recommend that for serious gaming if you're already in the game and you can just hit function f12 to disable gaming mode altogether which will give you all of your stock abilities back so realistically I don't I'd never used the profiles because remapping keys was kind of not something I wanted to do when I might use them for normal things I remapped six through zero in counter-strike that proved to be pretty annoying because you need those keys when you're buying stuff but I tried mapping a couple other keys like insert home page up page down and stuff like that and those work a little bit better but again I don't know that you really gain a whole lot of that out of that other than maybe for MMOs or something like that but that's that's what you have to do to map stuff so the great thing about the mechanical keyboard market is that there's a huge amount of competition which poses a problem for manufacturers trying to get a foothold with new products but it's a great problem for consumers so as I note in the written review there are a lot of great alternatives at similar or lower prices Logitech's g7 10 plus is a good one at 120 bucks Corsair k70 another good one at 120 bucks and pretty high-quality components Das Keyboard is is one of the premier mechanical keyboard manufacturers and they have stuff available in the same price range ducky is a supplier and a manufacturer they have their shine 3 in the same price range cooler masters got a 80 or 90 dollar quickfire which is pretty good if you don't need all the other functionality so there are lots of options and there's not much differentiating them some have extra keys some don't some have USB and 3.5 jacks some don't so you'll ultimately have to decide what features are worth the extra money for your uses for me at $150 I'd rather spend third dollars less and get the K 70 or g7 10 Plus which has basically the same feature set and even better in some cases like the volume scroll wheel if you're trying to spend less than $100 cooller masters quick-fire is pretty good and Corsairs k70 does occasionally go on sale for 80 to 100 dollars depending on where you're buying I like I like rose wills Apollo I just don't think I could justify 150 bucks for for something that is basically available at 120 elsewhere at 100 to 120 dollars I would be much more likely to recommend buying this keyboard as I said in the written review the rubberized finish is very nice and not something that you'll find on most the other keyboards but it's not $30 nice so that's all for this time at please like comment and subscribe as always check out the link in the description below for the full review and links to all of the alternative keyboard options and I will see you all next time peace