Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

Corsair Vengeance K90 Backlit Macro Gaming Keyboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2011-12-18
well you guys asked for it and this is the big brother to the k60 the coarser vengeance k9t keyboard now I made a mistake I would say a fairly fairly large mistake when I was doing my unboxing of the k60 and I said at the time although I corrected it by the end of the video I said at the time that I thought the k60 had blue backlighting I was wrong because I thought both the k60 in the k9t had blue backlighting and my only experience with these keyboards at all up to that time had been with the k9t so now when I talk about the wicked awesome individually backlit keys I would be correct because the k9t is a gorgeous looking keyboard in the dark with it's beautifully individually backlit keys so something else to bear in mind about the backlight is that it does shine through these laser etched numbers which are not printed that's right they are etched so that means that no matter what no matter how many times you press on any key on this keyboard it will always stay well illuminated and distinctly numbered or lettered according to how the manufacturer intended okay so let's get the keyboard oh you got a warranty guide here which is gonna tell us some little something about our probably two-year warranty I believe yeah okay you know what I think the packaging for course they're usually oh there we go its two-year warranty okay so two year warranty we've got a Quick Start Guide which probably pretty much hit oh that's great full-color illustration of plug the things into the thing also download the software for managing your macro profiles and whatnots from Corsair comm slash vengeance k9t alright so that's all pretty self-explanatory what else we got in here we have any rest rest rest rest can make or break a keyboard and one of the ways they make a keyboard is by being shaped and well and supporting your wrist in a in a fashion that is uh you know good and one of my favorite wrist rests of all time is actually on the SteelSeries 7g which is also a mechanical keyboard like this one more on mechanical in a bit and the way that they can usually break a keyboard it is by breaking and that often comes down to the mechanism employed by the manufacturer to attach the rest rest to the keyboard which is usually just you know a couple of little metal tabs although these ones seem to be fairly well built I can put a lot of pressure on them they're not going anywhere so Corsair has sort of seen that probably in action I mean there guys are I've met a lot of the force their team and their total enthusiasts so they've probably encountered wrist rest breakage in the past actually my own g15 has has a broken wrist rest which is one of the reasons that it's no longer in service so what they did is it went okay let's one up the rest of the industry and let's put check this out thumb screws which you can also screw in with a Phillips head screwdriver which might actually be easier based on my experience with my fingers here thumb screws in the sides to make sure also all look at this look at this so it keeps it from going too far here okay with the shape of this lip and then keeps it from coming up too far once again with this rather than putting all the pressure on these little plastic clips which no matter how well you build them are prone to brain so way to go of course they're for seeing what everyone else is doing and seeing why it was wrong and fixing it with a you know three cent piece of metal excellent love it okay well actually you know what why don't we finish up on the bottom here before we go I say look at that accidentally like went too far and it's fine we've got a couple of these little hide adjust tilt the dusty dudes we've got one two three four five six seven rubber non-slip grip e feet um some experts believe that it the use of any keyboard may cause serious injury so like be careful and stuff alright let's flip this back over so I think we're done with the underside of the keyboard why don't we go ahead and I'll show you guys the pass through here so this beak okay here so it's labeled with two arrows that means pass through that's the one that actually runs the keyboard so it's a pass through which means that this is a fully powered and fully speeded USB 2.0 port because there's no actual hub splitting going on inside the keyboard so you go ahead you plug your mouse in there or you plug your mouse directly into the back you plug a USB key in there it's all gonna work just fine so yes mechanical keyboards this is a mechanical keyboard at least most of the keys commonly used for typing are mechanical so the only keys on this keyboard that are not mechanical are these ones right here the macro key is part of the reason that course are opted to go with a regular well now these days it's a regular dome switch key for these guys is because they wanted them on a different plane than the main keyboard so see how these are quite a bit lower down than the rest of the keyboard this is actually for a very interesting reason now if you've ever owned a G 50 and I have a D 15 Gen 1 which was kind of the first keyboard to really do the whole matrix of programmable keys over here you've probably pressed this key instead of your escape any number of times so you go for escape you go oh why isn't escape working so that was why they went and they put these down lower so that you can easily tell when you're operating the keyboard when you reach the edge of the real keyboard and the beginning of the macro keys so that's very cool you've got three profiles for these so you've got eighteen keys times three profiles right there and you can manage that using the Corsair software you know actually another thing we haven't quite finished up with yet is the wrist rest so it uses like a rubberized dimpled feel actually feels very nice it's like Merle it's like a soft touch type material yeah yeah quite nice and should be fairly durable just based on how deep the dimples are so it should maintain that textured surface which i think is great for gaming gear because if you're gonna sit there and use it for a long time a lot of the time you can get sweat on it which means that if it has those recesses then you'll still maintain that bat slight grittiness even in the presence of palm moisture so yeah that's good uh what else oh yeah yeah yeah mechanical so mechanical keys ah everything but these guys the f keys all on the top here and then this block of keys right here these are mechanical these are all mechanical can you hear the difference okay so the reason course are opted for partially mechanical is because all of the typing all of the actual typing surfaces are going to give you that that typing feedback that a lot of people do desire and then the other ones that are very much less frequently used things like you know Escape and f9 and page up and page down are not mechanical the number pad is the arrow keys are let's have a look at some of the other functionality here so we've got our media keys so there's your volume scroll wheel this is one of the better implemented volume scroll wheels I've seen in the past got that nice this is not a sticker this is an actual texture to the to the wheel so it's very nice mute button stop back pause for word there are your LED indicators of your number lock caps lock and scroll lock you got a Windows disabled key and backlight control yes this one actually does have a backlight mechanical keys let's see if I can take one of these off fairly easily how about this one No okay there we go okay so these are cherry MX red keys the actual preferences vary dramatically from person to person what kind of keys they prefer so really the solution is probably to try them very shortly we're actually going to have Corsair keyboards and pretty much every NCIX store for you guys to just sit in front of them and play around with them a little bit because all mechanical Keys whether they're Browns blacks blues reds I think there's even a clear one but those are a lot less common do have a slightly different feel a slightly different sound of course they are determined that for their purposes the Reds were the most desirable for as a balance between gaming and typing another thing that you're gonna see here next to the red mechanical switch right there is actually one of the things that's I do like about them though is they're fairly quiet compared to some of the other mechanical keys is that is your blue light and so every single key has one of those lights and it not only illuminates the key but also kind of the area around it on the aluminum backboard that is part of this keyboard so one of the things you might notice about it if you see here is there's actually quite a bit of space under the keys between the actual the the rigid backplane and the keys themselves this makes it a little bit easier to clean and it also gives it kind of a unique look I've never seen a keyboard where they've done this before because every keyboard does have a backplane like this sorry I'm still a little sick that the keys are attached to but most of them cover it up with something which often leads to the accumulation of dust and dirt and doesn't really serve any other real purpose a couple times I haven't talked about yet although I did talk about them in my k60 overview are the full matrix artful full key matrix anti-ghosting which just basically means no matter how fast you type no matter what combinations of letters you press you're not going to accidentally register any additional additional letters or anything like that this is more of a software feature it's built into the software of the keyboard to make sure that everything is registered correctly over USB because USB does on some keyboards that don't implement these features USB does have some limitations another one of the limitations of USB is that typically you can only press I believe it's six keys at a time so 1 2 3 4 5 6 and the last one will not be registered at all what Corsair has done is they've given you up to a 20 keys so that's a 20 key rollover where you can actually yes press 5 6 7 8 9 and like you can press 20 keys before it will actually stop registering keystrokes which is pretty much the practical limit of actually I'd say that's above the practical limit of how many keys most people can press at a given time I just want to make sure there's nothing I've missed here you guys could actually I never even showed you guys the box really so there's Corsair to look at it fully customizable profiles 36 kilobytes of onboard memory it sounds like a really old computer hey I bet I bet if you showed this to sone you're like yeah it's about 36 km emery on a keyboard they'd be like oh that's crazy sorry I digress yeah yeah last thing I want to do is I do want to put this in for you guys and I'm gonna turn off the lights in here so I'm just gonna go ahead and run this around to the back end of my test bench here we're gonna plug that into a USB 3 port just for giggles so you guys so I can say it's USB 3 compatible of whoo ok and then you know hey I'll show you guys in the light first there you go it has just a beautiful beautiful backlit look because not only are the keys illuminated but you also see a very distinct glow behind the keys themselves remember guys here it's pan around and have a look at the lights we've gotten here so yeah on the other side so this is in my my little tech tips filming room here and that is how much you can still see the blue so I'm gonna go ahead and turn these like ah 1 2 3 and you'll see how much that's gonna stand out in the dark this is one of the strongest back lights that I've seen on a gaming keyboard yet and as I said before one of the most striking looking because of the individually backlit keys and the way that the the back board for the keyboard itself is a little bit for other away so it gives it a bit more room for the glow to spread out just looks outstanding in the dark so I think that pretty much covers it I'll turn one of these back back on just so you can see me again thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Corsair Vengeance k9 t don't forget to subscribe to latest tech tips from unboxings reviews another
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.