Gadgetory

excellent keyboards are ubiquitous which is probably why some people are just so damn particular about theirs we've gone from the $15 rubber dome keyboard days 10 plus years ago to the landscape we have now with a dizzying array of mechanical switch keyboards the promise increased durability slightly faster actuation time and a range of color-coded click enos options that segments everyone's preferences even further most will agree though that cherry makes the best mass-produced traditional mechanical switches and the well expensive typing away on a full mechanical keyboard with your switches of choice I happen to like browns is a deeply satisfying feeling today we're going to take a look at two brand-new keyboards from cooler master this is the master keys Pro L and s combining the long-awaited features of a cooler master design keyboard genuine Cherry MX switches and the near-infinite customizability of perky RGB backlighting so these boards are both pretty similar apart from their size the pro S & L means small and large as far as I can tell with the s being 10 keyless and the L being full-sized packaging is very well done in each board comes with a manual a nice little key cat puller and a braided 1.5 meter micro USB to USB type a cable I can't say I'm loving the decision to stick with micro USB here on the keyboard side though it's just not as sturdy of a connector but the pro s does get an angled plug to keep it from sticking out too much and the pro L has under board cable routing channels so you can make that cable come out either in the middle or on the left or the right side the keyboards themselves are simple and straightforward design wise in the best sort of way Coolermaster gets a ton of credit for this already and rightfully so and that the boards don't seem to have more Flair than they need they are simple rectangles built around the keys with subtly rounded edges a nice finish on the housing and the weight and build quality of a freaking tank the weight of these boards is an indication of Coolermaster continuing to do keyboards write much as I did with the quick-fire series it's got a metal internal frame and a very solid feeling sitting on the desk as you type actually the housing appears to be the exact same design that they use for the quick fire rapid rapid eye at least for the master keys s here so fans of the rapid I can now get it an RGB trim so let's talk features before I dive into an LED lighting demo starting with the RGB LEDs themselves of course which like all RGB LEDs that I've seen advertised can do sixteen point seven million colors I was not able to independently verify this color range as I do not have a spectrophotometer also now I have looked up and found out what a spectrophotometer is let's just say I was not unsatisfied with the variety of color combinations or brightness options available and I think you will be able to get it to represent any color you're damn well pleased with the possible exception of pure white all RGB LED solutions I have seen have trouble recreating pure white with a slight bluish tint that's perceptible and mostly only noticeable if you compare it to a pure white LED side-by-side as for switch options though I have cherry MX reds and browns both represented here and I'm told the cooler master will have MX blue versions available in the future as well the boards feature 100% anti-ghosting with n key rollover and you don't even have to use a switch to go between six key or n key rollover modes as the board will automatically detect when you press more than six keys at once and switch on the fly for you this function as well as the robust on-the-fly programming capabilities for the RGB LEDs are handled by the embedded 72 megahertz arm cortex-m 3 processor which Coolermaster says is 25% faster than that stupid old cortex m0 that they used to use the key caps themselves have a UV coating to keep them looking new and shiny as long as possible and the text on most of the key caps is up at the top so that the RGB LEDs behind them can shine through the function keys and number keys along the top row do have an upper and lower character on each key cap so the lower character is noticeably dimmer due to the proximity of the RGB LEDs the LEDs themselves though are bigger than other Cherry MX RGB LED switches because Coolermaster redesigned to the housing around each switch to provide more space for the three LED array that goes beneath each one I compared this to the single LED solution on my quick fire rapid eye and the area of illumination is definitely much larger on the pro LM Pro s this combined with cooler masters continued use of a white base board beneath the keys makes those colors really pop it's not just the keycap characters that are lit up but you also get sort of a nice aura lighting effect beneath all the keys and everything pretty cool rounding out functions and transitioning to that LED lighting demo the top row of function keys gives you on-the-fly access to RGB lighting you also get 10 levels of brightness to cycle through for each one the mode button next to that switches between color wave breathing and different typing effects that are available f5 to f8 can help you adjust your repeat rate which you didn't even know you needed until now f9 lets you lock your windows key which is super helpful if you're going to be doing some PC gaming f10 engages LED programming mode f11 and f12 are for recording and deleting macros and then to the right of those are function keys for toggling synchro macros macro on/off or macro looping function plus escape if you hit those together will dis quickly disable all the macros on the keyboard so if you need to get some work done they won't be a distraction for you and then there's also a grouping of 6 media control keys right below those finally on the top right of the pro lr4 profile keys so you can save and switch between four profiles on the pro s those four profile keys are and the number keys one through four finally if you hold down the function key you'll get a little bit of a flash that shows you really quickly which profile you're currently using and once you're in LED mode you can use these LED switch buttons tapping them each to cycle through each brightness level so 0 through 9 basically goes brighter and brighter and brighter and then resets you can even tap them individually to sort of combine different brightness levels of red green and blue to get yourself orange or purple or yellow for example there's a bit of a learning curve to this on-the-fly recording but once you kind of figure it out it is a very robust means of controlling RGB lighting without needing any software you probably will want to try out the cooler master software though as it is a little bit more user-friendly so let's take a look at that next so I don't have the cooler master software loaded up it installed fairly quickly it was able to recognize my attached master keys keyboard and it quickly updated the firmware as well which is also nice to have so on the bottom what you're looking at here is the actual keyboard and on the top is a software I have compressed it down a little bit so you can see everything but as you can see there's two main tabs up at the top we got le and we got library so um library is just a library of profiles so if you create a profile and you really like it you can just hit over to there and you can save it can even import or export them so you can save them to a file or something like that over the led side is where we can actually manipulate stuff so obviously at the bottom you got four profiles I I'm just gonna be working with profile one and then we have the whole keyboard up here if you mouse over any of the keys it will give you an RGB indicator of what color it's currently set to and then LED mode down here we have different options so right now it's on static all white of course we have the color wave option which I've been using a lot during the course of this demonstration cross mode just is a reactive typing mode so as you hit a key it will give you I'll give me a little error first because doesn't like what I'm pushing but gives you the cross mode across all the keys which is kind of cool single key is just a single key reactive typing so it'll light up each key as you type it great for letting people know what your password is so in the customize area you can of course customize you can choose any color you want from the color grid over here the slider you can just indicate RGB values and this is kind of fun because you can either indicate individual keys that you want to change color and they should light up as you click them or if you want to be super fancy you can click and drag and you can get like whole banks of colors all at the same time so what you want to do I'm gonna I'm gonna do like a but what country's flag is this I have no idea it's probably some country's flag look there it's beautiful okay moving on we have a star effect that we can enable which will do like a field of stars it's just kind of a an effect that'll be there all the time even while you're not typing we have raindrop effect which will rain rain drops down oh it's coming down rains coming down pretty hard right now that's kind of nice too color cycle will just automatically cycle between a bunch of different colors very slowly as you can see and you can adjust the speed with which it does that over here so faster or slower of course and then of course we have breathes which will just breathe on and off super nice ripple effects which will do an outward Ripple wherever you type which is also one of those kind of cool typing effects that you can do and then multi layer which I haven't quite figured out this appears to allow you to integrate multiple effects with a single setting so I was able to set all these up you can click on this and then change it over here I'm guessing this will allow you to quickly cycle between the different modes if you put a multi layer on you just do your favorite modes in there you have the snake game which is super fun so here I'm actually going to use the the keyboard up and down arrows to play snake you can see the snake has a red head and you're trying to go after the green apples once you eat the green apples and they reappear and then the more you eat the longer the snake gets you guys have played this game right you guys have Nokia phones I imagine this game you could play even without it being connected to a computer if you just had like USB power so you know bring this to an airport and then you have loads of fun just playing snake anyway end of that okay system status is kind of fun this will give you a visual representation of your cpu load I'm using about 10 to 30% so it's giving me all numbers down here at the bottom if I put a full load on it you get more indicators of stuff higher up it's kind of fun and then finally we have oh wait no for system status we also have equalizer so you can combine this with like music playing which I can maybe do over here really quick yeah so now I got some music playing all of you guys probably can't hear it but yeah now as the music plays you get a little equalizer effect that goes on the keyboard too and then of course lastly we have off if you just if you hate your RGB LEDs turn them off so overall I think Coolermaster has given fans exactly what they wanted with the master keys Pro series you've got 10 keyless and full-size options available they both use genuine Cherry MX keys and they have a design that's clean and I'll Eliot's with very solid build quality which is what coolermaster is really known for I like the option to control the RGB LEDs via software or use the on-the-fly built-in control options and I think color master has the right switch options available at launch with MX browns right out of the gates reds and blues also coming soon my complaints would start with the micro USB plug as a type-c connector I think would have been a better choice here the pricing is also a little tough to swallow with the pro L costing 170 US dollars and the pro s coming at 140 this isn't too far out of line with other Cherry MX RGB keyboards in this class but it is a premium price points finally if there was a feature I could add it would be a USB pass-through that is a feature that I have just found infinitely useful in keyboards that have it in fact that is how this keyboard is plugged in right now via that keyboard over there anyway the master keys Pro L should be available right now and I will link this one down in the video description I'm also told the master keys Pro S will be available in three to four weeks so if you're a 10 kilos fan you do have to wait just a little bit longer and again brown switches available right now with reds and blues still to come that's all for this review though thank you guys so much for watching and if you enjoyed it don't forget 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