Corsair K70 RGB TKL Review – Fake 8000Hz???
Late last year Corsair launched their K100 RGB, the first 4000Hz peripheral on the market, 4 times faster polling than ‘conventional’ gaming peripherals. It was only a few days later when Razer unveiled their prototype Viper 8KHz – a launch I was a part of, video(s) in the cards above – which is an 8000Hz mouse. So, for their new K70 TKL, Corsair decided to step it up offering the same 8000Hz polling rate as Razer, but on this, a Cherry MX based TKL keyboard. But, this thing has a rather dark secret, one you’ll have to stick around to find out! As always, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
So, Corsair’s new TKL version of the K70. It’s going to be listed for around £140, and offers pretty much the exact same layout as the K65, save for a few more media keys up at the top, and a new knurled metal volume wheel that was so sharp it scrapped the skin off my thumb when using it. The key caps are double shot PBT, and offer a nice fine grained texture making them pretty comfortable, but grippy too. It’s still got a brushed aluminium base plate, and even has some pretty large rubber pads on the bottom to help it grip, with sturdy flip out feet too.
It connects via a detachable USB C cable. The port is recessed in a fair bit, although should be big enough to use a different cable should you lose, break or forget the one that comes in the box – try not to though as it’s a nice braided one. Next to the USB port you’ll see a bit of a weird contraption. That’s the “tournament mode” switch, which you can set, then flip up the little plate to lock it in place and reveal a little LED to let you know it’s enabled. Seems a little redundant, but hey it’s fancy. Tournament mode disables RGB lighting, instead setting it to a fixed colour (by default it’s red). It disables all custom keybinds and macros, but leaves media keys and the Windows key enabled, bit of a strange choice if you ask me.
The K70 TKL uses Cherry MX switches, specifically either reds, speeds, or silents, with my model using reds. For me personally, these aren’t my favourite, although for gaming I can understand why people like them. Because of the metal backplate, there is a bit of ringing when you are spamming keys, it’s worst on the arrow keys though, have a listen.
Typing in general on them is fine, although the space bar has a distinctly muted and mushy feel and sound, here’s what it sounds like typing on it.
Ok, so I think you’ve waited long enough, what about the main headline feature, “8000Hz”? Well, as I argued in my K100 review, high polling rates on keyboards generally don’t matter all that much. On a mouse, the game registering a left click 2ms faster than someone else’s can be the difference between you winning a gunfight and losing, hell even winning or losing the game. But on a keyboard? There aren’t many, if any, actions that you can do that would benefit from registering 1 or 2ms faster – of course, reducing input lag is always good but as a selling point, it’s not a big one.
The other thing to note is, Corsair isn’t using their fancy optical “OPX” switches here, like they did on their K100. Nope, it’s standard Cherry MX keys, so won’t actuate quite as fast. Now Corsair has told me they’ve changed how they do debouncing – but a quick refresher on debouncing for those that don’t know, mechanical switches that use springy bits of metal to actuate tend to bounce just a little when they make contact. If you registered every bounce, you’d end up actuating keys a load of times every key press, or risk it not registering at all. So, you ‘debounce’ it. Basically delay the input until you are certain it’s been actuated. Now apparently the way Corsair is now doing it is registering the very first keypress signal, then ignoring anything else from that switch for a few milliseconds, basically swap the delay from frontloaded to backloaded. I can’t be sure if that will lead to erroneous key presses or missed actuations, but from my experience with it that didn’t seem to happen.
So, it’s 8000Hz that you don’t really get any benefit from. But that’s not the truly dark secret. That’s not what makes it “Fake 8000Hz”. No, what makes it fake is written right on the spec sheet. Here it is, as you can see, “USB Report Rate”, “Up to 8,000Hz hyper-polling”. All good then, right? Let me just move this up here and… ah. “Keyscan”. “4,000Hz”. Oh boy. So, it’s scanning the key switches every 250µs, but reporting to the computer every 125µs. So it’s a 4000Hz keyboard.
So to clarify, this keyboard features “8000Hz” polling, which I’d argue doesn’t really matter on a keyboard, uses slower to actuate switches than the K100 and to top it off, it isn’t even 8000Hz, it’s 4000Hz doubled.
To make it clear, gaming on this is still fine. Like I said, anything over 1,000Hz doesn’t make much of a difference to keyboards anyway, so beyond the mushy spacebar that did throw me off a little it’s fine. If you have one of these you’ll still likely enjoy it plenty, especially if you prefer fairly light linear switches. You won’t really notice the noise or ringing when playing either and I do really like the keycap feel.
My final problem with the K70 TKL is, why buy this when you can buy a K65 with the same layout, for £20 less, and it comes with a wrist rest in the box? Or, if you want the “tournament mode”, buy the even cheaper K63 for £75, which still comes with Cherry MX Reds, and red LED backlighting. Or for a touch more than this, you can buy the Roccat Vulkan TKL Pro which uses optical switches meaning it’s likely to actuate faster than this will despite that only offering 1000Hz. Review of that one in the cards above by the way.
Overall, I can’t say I’m a massive fan of this. It’s not dreadful, it’s definitely adequate especially for gaming, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it when there are a number of other good options – even from Corsair themselves – that don’t have such misleading marketing.
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TechteamGB Score
