Corsair K70 Pro TKL Gaming Keyboard Review – Corsair Does Hall Effect!

Corsair’s latest gaming keyboard is this, the K70 Pro TKL, and it’s a rather unique take on a hall effect keyboard. I should start off by making it clear that this is not entirely a hall effect keyboard. These switches – admittedly the ones you are more likely to want all the fancy features to work on – are Corsair’s MGX Hyperdrive magnetic pre-lubed switches, whereas these – the arrow keys, function row and home/end/delete etc are actually Corsair’s MLX Plasma linear mechanical pre-lubed switches. Yeah, Corsair opted to give you similar but not identical feeling mechanical switches where they think you won’t care to have the fancy features, and only give you the good stuff in the middle. Interesting choice. I have to assume this is for both cost – Corsair ships millions, possibly even billions, of those red style switches, versus tens to hundreds of thousands of the magnetic ones so economies of scale alone likely save them a pretty penny here – and complexity, as the magnetic switches require a lot more than just an on/off signal sent to the microcontroller, which adds complexity, and again, cost. 

Those magnetic switches themselves are pretty interesting. They do the usual 0.1-4 mm of actuation distance, with 4.1mm of total travel, but interestingly Corsair claims they are the most accurate adjustable actuation point on the market, with the K70 Pro TKL’s switches only deviating by 0.18 mm maximum, at least when tested within their own limited range anyway. While the switches – and iCUE – can do between 0.1mm and 4mm, Corsair recommends you only actually use 0.4mm to 3.6mm for the best accuracy. Unfortunately I don’t have any test equipment to see how the other HE boards I’ve got can do, but I’ve got some ideas for the peripheral testing latency tool for sure… Anyway, at least to my hands anyway, they do feel really nice. They are buttery smooth, obviously, and Corsair has upped the internal sound deadening to give it a more premium thock – have a listen.

The mechanical keys do feel different, although save for maybe the handful of arrow key gamers, I don’t think the majority of people who buy this will notice nor care much. It is pretty funny though – it’s the sort of corporate penny-pinching I’d expect from Corsair for sure. Of course, the magnetic switches do have a bunch of fancy features. Adjustable actuation point, as I’ve mentioned, but also rapid trigger, which I think is just a straight rip of Razer’s rapid trigger feature which dynamically changes the actuation point, meaning if you lift a little it’ll set the new actuation point a little further down no matter how far down the travel you are, making it easier to strafe in games like CS2, plus they have “FlashTap”, which is an SOCD (that’s simultaneous opposing cardinal directions) feature that sure sounds like Razer’s SnapTap feature I covered in my Huntsman V3 Pro TKL review – link in the cards to that one. Basically that lets instantly snap from one direction to another as the keyboard cuts the signal from an opposing key as soon as you start pressing the opposing one – so if you were moving left with A, then you start pressing D, it’ll cut the A signal even if you are still pressing A. Again, handy for movement sensitive games like CS and Valorant. It’s worth noting that that feature isn’t available through iCUE yet – you have to hit FN and Right Shift to enable it on the board itself for now, and it’s limited to A and D only with last priority mode only. Apparently iCUE will add more configurability, but we will have to wait until that is updated to find out!

I must admit that Corsair’s implementation of these HE features is a little confusing and overwhelming. In theory you can do multiple actions per stroke like a bunch of these HE boards, but I couldn’t quite figure out how. In the actuation point settings there’s an option for dual actuation points, and in the key remapping section I think you can do multi-actions, but it looked more like regular remapping. It’s all a little small and bereft of explanations or instructions for my smooth brain. I might have just missed the option amongst the litany of VoiceMod controls – something I don’t even have installed – but the UI in general isn’t as clear or easy to use as I’d like it to be personally. 

Let’s get back to the board itself. It’s a TKL layout, with a couple little additions at the top right – that’d be the rather nice clicky control dial, which depending on the FN + F12 mode you choose, will either control the system volume, keyboard backlight brightness, vertical scrolling, horizontal scrolling, or zoom. It does have a nice click to it, although they have committed the cardinal sin of knobs on keyboards – there isn’t enough room to really grip and twist your knob. That’s a problem. It is nicely knurled though… Next to the much less humorously named “Control Dial” are the game mode and “customised media” buttons. Game modes locks the RGB to your set colour, enables rapid trigger, locks the Windows key, and enables or at least prefers up to 8,000 hertz polling. Apparently in the next iCUE update you’ll be able to customise more of the game mode settings, as currently the actuation point is fixed at 1mm and 0.1mm for rapid trigger, and FlashTap isn’t available, but it apparently will be. As for the media button, that’s customisable – by default it’s set to play/pause. 

It’s worth adding that the board does come with a fairly nice, lightly magnetic wrist rest. It’s nice enough, with a little padding, and a decent feeling fabric on top. As for the board itself, that has a brushed aluminium base plate, and a nice plastic shell with integrated fully rubber feet – so whether it’s flat or tilted up you’ve got good grip on the desk. The board has a detachable USB C cable – with the port at the top left – and the cable itself being a basic rubber affair. Nothing too special there, but long enough at least. 

As you might expect, I did use my open source latency testing tool – available at OSRTT.com, linked in the description if you want one – to test the latency, and unsurprisingly especially at 8,000 hertz it’s pretty fast. With the actuation point set at the default 2mm it took around 5.5 ms to register a key-press, although it’s worth noting that as you can see from the pretty wild variation on the graph, depending on how hard and fast you’re hitting it will change the latency a fair bit. With game mode enabled, which sets the actuation point to 1mm, you get much more consistent and faster results. That averaged 4.5 ms – a full millisecond faster, and on par with the nuphy Air60 HE I reviewed recently too, which is equally an 8 kilohertz hall effect keyboard, with 1.2mm of default actuation point travel. 

As for actually gaming on it, well pretty obviously that’s a good time. The smooth, linear switches with that rapid trigger mode make it feel snappy and responsive, and very much puts you at a competitive advantage – especially in those movement sensitive games for sure. As with all good tech, it becomes clear that you are the bottleneck, not the tech, which I suppose is exactly what you’re looking for. I do like the sound, although the Air60 HE definitely has it pipped, although honestly rather surprisingly for Corsair, this thing isn’t a million pounds – it’s £170 in the UK, or either $180 or $190 in the US depending on if you get the PBT double shot keycaps or not – an option also available in europe, but not in the UK, Nordics or Canada apparently! 

Overall then, the K70 Pro TKL is definitely an interesting choice. It is still considerably more expensive than the more indie brands by comparison – something like the Nuphy Air60 HE – which I do appreciate is in a bit of a different class so it’s a completely fair comparison, but still – is more like £100, versus this being closer to £200, but compared to Razer’s TKL HE board this looks like an absolute bargain – and it has a nicer typing feel and sound in my opinion. The UI definitely needs work to make it more user friendly, and half of the features aren’t even here yet (at least properly) so it’s hard to render a final verdict if the board is scheduled to change, and so close to the launch too… like why not just wait a few more weeks until you’ve got everything ready? Black Friday I guess? But anyway, it’s a decent board with a definitive corporate feel. It’s a good choice, in an already crowded market. If you want one, I’ll leave a link in the description for you to check out.