Gadgetory

excellent most of us use a keyboard hand for the longest time a buying one was pretty simple you pay about $15 for a cheap 104 key rubber dome keyboard and when that one breaks or perhaps becomes too gooey for further use you recycle it and you buy another one but over the past five to ten years the premium keyboard market has really taken off thanks largely in part to the use of mechanical switches that last way longer than rubber dome switches have a much more satisfying feel while typing and it also comes in a variety of flavors that determine key press resistance click enos and whether or not there's a little tactile bump on each key as you push it down g.skill known to many of you as a memory maker is the latest manufacturer to dive into the extremely competitive and fairly crowded mechanical keyboard market with the Ripjaws km 780 RGB gaming keyboard that were taking a look at today it's available with genuine Cherry MX red or brown switches looking at the brown version that we have here and if the 160 dollars selling price is a little bit rich for your blood there's also a version called the Ripjaws km 780 MX which has red backlighting and it's only 120 dollars MSRP but no RGB all the other features remain the same now the first thing you might notice when taking a look at the km 780 is the gamer II design gamer II that's a word especially when compared to Corsairs keyboards for example which are much more squared-off an industrial looking the angular style and aggressive lines just scream this is the look we think gamers are into and who knows they could be right I'm more of a function over form guy myself so I will leave it up to you to decide if you like the look and feel free to let G scale and me know what you think in the comments section down below climb on the topic of YouTube feedback feel free to hit that like button - if you enjoyed this video back to functions though let's start off with the stuff around the edges it's got USB 2.0 pass-through which is a feature that I really like on a keyboard whether it's to daisy-chain your mouse to it or to act as a conveniently accessible port for flash drives there's also an analogue mic and headphone pass-through as well as an option switch to go between n key and six key rollover modes which can be very helpful if you're having trouble getting the keyboard to talk nice with your motherboard especially in pre operating system like changing settings in your UEFI or BIOS you of course get full and key roll over and anti-ghosting which is to be expected for a keyboard that costs as much as this one does and then moving to the top of the keyboard there's a set of six programmable macro buttons along the left side up top there's a dedicated macro record button next to the three profile select options windows lock and brightness buttons and there's a timer button there which will work with g.skill software which we'll take a look at in just a moment on the right top side there are media controls which are always nice to have a volume of roller wheel cylinder thing which I also like having there despite not knowing exactly what to call it and an LED volume display these are all great features and you don't always get them with high-end mechanical keyboards I just wish that the LEDs for the media controls and that volume indicator were RGB as well instead of just solid red or just give us the ability to turn them off in the software g.skill so that they don't clash with our super sweet RGB lighting schemes that we set up now I have to give g.skill a lot of credit for the build quality of the km 780 it's very sturdy thanks in part to the functional and visually appealing reinforced metal pipe that goes all the way around the outside you can use this to attach the included accessory box it also holds the foldable cable holder right up here on the top right that will hold your mouse cable to control the slack in the mouse which honestly is a simple yet very very nice feature I was thinking that also if you have maybe a hook on your wall or something and you like to keep your setup really clean when you're not using it you can maybe use that wraparound pipe to like hang the keyboard up when you're not using it who know it's just a thought finally there's a black brush Lumina metal top plate that's the cover that goes up between the keys and the actual keyboard and I prefer this style to the recessed top plate that you see in some keyboards since it's just way easier to clean and get down in there between the keys as for accessories you get a detachable soft touch wrist rest which is nice and comfy comfy and optional if you don't like what wrist rests 10 extra gaming key caps as well and that will help you find the WASD keys for example since they're angled and a little bit more texture on those you can swap those out and then it can keep them in this little case when you're not using them the case also snaps onto the edge the little piper on the outside so you can store it there or if you don't want to keep the keep caps in there maybe keep something else in there snacks it's always nice to have snacks now I believe I've already pointed out that the km 780 has perky RGB backlighting that's kind of the point of an RGB mechanical switch keyboard but all the keys are also fully programmable and g-scale does provide a downloadable software to control all of these functions in their g.skill unified driver system let's take a look at the most recent version of this software next just look at the software guys software's up top I also have an image of the keyboard down on the bottom bear in mind as you're watching this there's a flicker on the backlighting of the keyboard that is not apparent when you're looking at it that's just the recording because they're recording it at certain frames per second and it's refreshing at certain frames per second and it leads to a flicker in the recording anyway the software up here on the top left you got your macros button and your lighting profiles so consider these two top buttons the buttons where you go and kind of set up macros the way you want them you can also you can record macros you can you can add them here you name them and then they're available via drop-down you can get rid of them with the delete butter with the trashcan button and then you can also copy import or export macros as well you can also do a delay no delay record button at all appears over there and it's pretty functional as a lot of macro recording utilities are you can also do text macros as well so if you just want to punch a button to type in some text you can do that too moving on to the lighting profiles area here's where we have access to kind of the special lighting features if you don't just want like standard lighting to be on all the time you have a wave option a ripple option a reactive option which means as you hit a button it's going to spread out from there and a breathing option but bear in mind that as you're over here when you're messing with these and doing them and stuff it's saving these to the software but then these bub buttons up here customize settings and lighting or where you actually go to implement them so just bear that in mind so for instance if we wanted to create a wave setting we'd hit + create wave - and then we could go in here and mess around with the colors if we wanted you can like add other areas to the wave and drag them around with this little guy here or change the level of brightness and that kind of thing so it's pretty I mean it's pretty functional you can you can move stuff around a lot so like here let's make a wave that goes from red to white to yellow to green to blue wave to and after you do everything it saves it immediately that's another thing that I think g.skill could help themselves out with here is doing something that like says apply or okay or something like that anyway it works the same way with ripples or reactive typing all the reactive typing you only get choose one color and then breathing and you can have it breathe between multiple colors as well so we've just done that wave thing so let's go over here to lighting and once we're on any of the lighting setting or customize you'll see the actual profiles over here on the left side and different modes you can choose so we're in mode two we want to do effect lighting so we click effect lighting and then it asks us which of the effects we want to do so I'm going to choose that wave two that I just created and hit OK and then it should it should immediately pop up there if I did it right but maybe I'd maybe I didn't do it right this is a bug that I have encountered once or twice and I seem to be able to bypass it by clicking disabled lighting and then we enable in lighting again and then it pops up okay so as already kind of alluded to this software it still seems like it needs a little bit of work from g.skill but you can't get it to work sorry there there's a little wave function if you wanted to just individually assign the different keys you can do that as well so you can like choose a color down here and just start plugging away at whatever you want to do oh right now I have it to set to also all our single not set to single so I can choose specific keys that I want to light up that color choose them here or you can even drag get a grouping of them scatter some blue in here as well there's some blue and now we want pink this is a very specific keyboard layout that's designed for people who switch between mmo's MOBAs and flight Sims and this is very very popular layout and as you can see selecting keys all that kind of stuff to just light stuff up the way the way that you would assume it would light it up apart from that let's look at the other lighting effects that are available so back over here profiles you got your ripple so there's ripple one right there let's go back to lighting and check out what that looks like we go to effect lighting and we choose the ripple and then there's our ripple one in the mid okay and it's dark again I'm gonna disable and re-enable and there it is what does the ripple do oh look at that it's kind of fun you got a type a key and then it and then it ripple expands out from where you type that's interesting I'm kind of curious if you're typing fast I must confuse it a little bit that's that's still kind of fun anyway moving back to reactive is a pretty pretty pretty standard reactive typing but let's check that out real quick moving to reactive try reactive one do that disable one read re-enable thing again and then whenever you type whenever you hit a key it gives you a little yeah it expands out from there a pretty cool effect there as well and then one last lighting thing that you can do just show ya is breathing breathing effect and that's a that's very popular so let's choose that and there now it's breathing all in color and of course in the lighting lighting profiles you can adjust different things like the breathing for how long the duration is and what colors it breathes between and all that good stuff so a pretty good amount of customization you can do in here for sure there's just some quirks here and there you can kind of tell the software is still in its earlier stages but I like the different modes you can assign you can also do a bunch of different profiles you can create more profiles here than actually available in the different modes but the modes you can do one two and three and then those are specifically matched up with the mode keys at the top so jumping to mode 3 right there you can see immediately reflects in the software and I'm owed three is is popping up as well this is my lightning ripple effect by the way it says this is the arm side of the wave if my wave effect with a one second thing which is very very fast very frenetic but there's a quick run down guys of the software again functional but could use a little bit of updating maybe oh and then I can't forget the settings menu as well where you can just your more our basic stuff that you might expect such as polling rate and key rollover alert mode sleep mode repeat rate acceleration and repeat delay so to wrap this review up let's compare the km 782 offerings from Corsair the competition offerings from the competition Corsair being primary among the competitors of course since up through last year they had an exclusive deal with cherry and were the only providers of RGB backlit cherry MX keyboards as of the making of this video you could get the corsair k70 for a hundred and seventy dollars the g.skill km 780 for 160 or the new corsair strafe for 150 all mechanical Cherry MX RGB backlit keyboards the K 70 has media controls but it does not have a USB or audio pass-through whereas the strafe does have that USB pass-through but no dedicated media controls so it's a trade-off then there's the design which is subject to your preference and finally the software comparison between Corsair would win in my opinion the Corsair software versus the G scale the Corsair software is just been around a lot longer it's more developed even though it's got a learning curve there's just more you can do with it so the final verdict is that the km 780 provides excellent build quality a great feature set and capable if not ideal software with some rough edges that G scale could work to improve over time it's great to see some more competition for the likes of Corsair and razer in the high-end keyboard space and who knows maybe we'll even see the pricing drop a bit over time probably not but who knows if you're in the market for a premium mechanical RGB keyboard the km 780 warrants serious consideration and hopefully this video helps you make your choice if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit that like button feel free to visit my store at store dot Pallas hardware net where you can support me by picking up a shirt or a mug or a pint glass also don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more tech videos and as always thank you for watching