Keyboard + Controller = Perfection? Cooler Master MK850 Review

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Cooler Master says they’ve just made all of these (xbox controller, steering wheel and flight stick) obsolete with this, their new mk850 with aimpad™ technology. Let’s find out if that’s true.

So we’ve all been there, playing a racing game on your high spec gaming PC, using a keyboard and mouse, and been frustrated at the lack of control you get with the on/off nature of a mechanical – or really any – key switch. Well, the new MK850 from Cooler Master has some tech from a company called AimPad – which essentially adds an analogue element to your rather digital keyboard.

With the AimPad keys, those being QWER, ASDF, you can use Cooler Master’s software to map those keys to functions of an Xbox controller like the left joystick and left and right triggers, as the key switches can output how far down their travel they are.

It does this by firing an infrared beam to a mirror inside the switch housing, then measuring the amount of time it took for the beam to return to the sensor. The further down the key travel, the less time it’ll take to reflect back. This means, in theory, you get the benefits of a controller, without having to give up your keyboard.

So, does it work? Well, sort of. Once you follow the overly complicated process to “calibrate” all 8 keys, and use the M2-4 keys to select your desired mode, 2 being “FPS mode”, 3 being “driving” and 4 being “flight”, you’ll then be able to have some amount of analogue control over quite a select number of games – the list is scrolling on screen here.

I gave it a shot in Project Cars 2 and found it to be a welcome addition, but really just left me wondering why I wouldn’t just pick up my controller, or better yet, plug in my steering wheel. Even when calibrated multiple times, the keys only ever started registering movement about halfway down the travel, which made it pretty difficult to get the sort of granular control that even a controller offers.

I also tried it in CS:GO, a supposedly fully supported game, but couldn’t get it to work at all – controller support enabled or not. I know it can work, but these kind of bugs are a bit too common in my even limited experience with it – for example project cars 2 had it’s camera being constantly adjusted because despite the WASD keys supposedly being disabled while in AimPad mode, they were being pressed about once per second moving the camera literally though my player’s back and into the boot of the car.

As a standard keyboard though, it’s… fine. The cherry mx red switches are alright, although not my personal favourite, the keyboard has some nice features, like two programmable metal knurled wheels at the top along with dedicated media keys, lots of RGB options and a pretty nice typing feel – even has a removable USB type C cable and 2 USB 3 ports on the top – but for £200 it doesn’t really live up to the Corsair K95 platinums of the world it’s trying to compete against.

Build quality isn’t fantastic, it’s got a lot of side to side flex – much more than my now older MasterKeys Pro L which has a thick metal plate inside – and the plastics don’t exactly scream high quality. It’d fit well in the £100-150 price bracket, but up here in the big leagues, it fits about as well as a child in it’s dad’s suit.

So, would I buy one? Probably not. I’ve thought about having controller like features on a keyboard, but always come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty niche use case and that I’d probably much rather have a more specialised tool, be that a controller, wheel or flight stick.