Corsair K100 RGB Review – 4000Hz + Optical Switches!

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Corsair’s new K100 is jam packed full of new features, and for £230 it damn well better be! This is a flagship keyboard, at a flashship price, so lets see what it has to offer and decide if it’s worth your money or not. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

So, what’s new? Well, it’s got optical key switches, has a new AXON controller built by Corsair that allows for a 4000Hz polling rate, a new iCUE control wheel, the macro “G KEYS” can now be Elgato Stream Deck hotkeys – just not in the way you are hoping for – and it’s got way, way more RGB. Sound interesting? Alright, lets start with those key switches.

Corsair called these OPX, basically Cherry MX Speed Silvers with even less travel distance, a higher actuation point, and yeah, laser beams. Ok so it’s more like an infrared beam that the switch breaks when you press it, but laser beams sounds more fun. Now the way they’ve done it is effectively the “basic” option. It’s a horizontal beam that the switch drops down onto, breaking the beam – unlike the Wooting switches which while more complicated, using a set of mirrors, have much more functionality available in the switches themselves like analogue input, and having multiple actions per key press. That means we can’t expect firmware updates to unlock features like adjustable action points, instead think of this as a fancier version of a standard switch.

And that’s fine, except personally I already didn’t like Cherry Speed Silvers, so making them shorter with a higher actuation point, on top of the already painfully light feel, makes me really dislike using this. I really can’t stand typing on these switches, and while gaming is a little better, I’d still rather be playing on my 5 year old Cherry MX Browns instead. That’s down the personal preference though, so if you like MX Speed’s, you’ll like these even more.

Moving onto their new controller, it’s based on Corsair’s own “AXON Hyper-processing Technology”. Basically it’s an SoC (System on Chip) with “it’s own real-time operating system”.
I confirmed with Corsair that it’s an ARM chip that’s not designed by Corsair, and is running a highly customised fork of an existing real time operating system. It sounds fancy and for a keyboard controller it sort of is, but basically that means it’s an off the shelf chip with a semi-customised OS. That makes sense as Razer are already offering 8000Hz in a mouse.. Which reminds me, go check out that video as I explain why you’d want high polling rate peripherals, what polling rates even are and more, link in the cards above!

Anyway, the main reason you’d care about having 4,000Hz vs the standard 1,000 is a reduced input lag – the less time it takes from you pressing a key to the system getting your action and doing something with it, the better. Corsair claims “performance” gaming keyboards take 2-3 milliseconds to register a key press with your system, which is about right. With AXON, they claim 0.5-0.75ms, which again makes sense, although the argument I made about wanting that reduction on a mouse doesn’t stand up quite as well with a keyboard – it’s pretty rare a keyboard key press registering 1ms faster makes a difference in games. But still, lower input lag is always better.

So that’s the revolutionary stuff, what about the evolutionary? The new iCUE control wheel is pretty straight forward. It’s a notched rotary dial that has different functions depending on what colour the LED is on the ring and button in the middle. You can customise what functions are enabled in iCUE, and even map custom macros if you want to. The only feature I found really useful was track jogging, skipping around a song on spotify, but even then I’m not sure how often I’d actually use that – although it’s a nice to have. You do have to memorise what colours mean what action which is a bit of a pain, so having a little stream deck display button in the middle instead would have been a nice touch.

The feature I’m most excited about though is the ability to map the extra macro keys on the left of the keyboard to Elgato Stream Deck functions. Sadly they aren’t Stream Deck keys, that’d be too good, but still the integration to have even just like scene switching or audio toggles is really nice. Sure, if you can afford a £230 keyboard you can probably afford a proper Stream Deck too, but more functionality is always better.

With that said, when the functionality ends up costing you a fair bit more money and seems more on the gimmicky side, it does become hard to recommend. Don’t get me wrong, this is probably the fanciest gaming keyboard you can buy right now – custom ones notwithstanding – and if you do buy it you will be very pleased with your purchase, but I can’t help but feeling it could have been better, with Wooting style switches, actual streamdeck keys, or even their iCUE nexus built in, rather than a £90 optional extra. Personally I’m still not budging from my old Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro L, and if I was it’d be to the Wooting Two, but that’s me and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.