Steelseries APEX PRO Gen 3 Review – Premium Hall Effect Gaming Keyboard

This is the Steelseries APEX PRO Gen 3 – specifically the full size version, although it does come in TKL and 60% options too – a supposedly new generation of hall effect gaming keyboards. This is one hell of a premium board though, so is it worth the accompanying price tag? Let’s take a look and find out! First, a tour. With this being the full size board, we have the full complement of keys, although the thing that both this and the TKL (but not the 60%) get is this, the OLED display, scroll wheel and button. These three combine to offer some on-board customisation – by default the scroll wheel just acts as a volume wheel, and the button is a play/pause button, but if you hold the button down for three seconds, the display changes to the menu system, with the scroll wheel (with integrated button) act as up/down and select, and the button acts as back. From here you can change lighting, macros, actuation, configs and display settings. The options you have in here are pretty limited, for example with the actuation menu you can change the global actuation point and enable “Rapid Tap” (Steelseries’ version of Snap-Tap), and rapid trigger but you can’t adjust per-key actuation points, for example.

The layout is pretty standard, with only four labelled action keys, for lighting and macros – seemingly not useful when you have the display and I’d much rather have more media controls but still. One little quirk you might not have noticed is that Steelseries has kinda short-changed you with this keyboard (and pulled a Corsair). If I pop the keycap off of the pipe key and escape, you might notice a little difference here… Yeah, only the main section of the board has HE switches. All the F keys, numpad, AND EVEN THE ARROW KEYS, are all mechanical switches. I’m really not a fan of this cost-cutting approach, especially on this expensive of a board. There is a feeling difference to them, and while it’s hardly the end of the world, I do feel sorry for arrow key gamers who were hoping to have all the fancy HE features available to them. 

One other thing you might have noticed here too is that, despite Steelseries making a really big point of these switches being their own “OmniPoint 3.0 Switches”, both the mechanical red switches, and the hall effect white switches pretty distinctly say “GATERON”. As best as I can tell, these HE switches are GATERON’s KS-20 switches, and the mechanical ones are GATERON G Pro 3.0 reds. While GATERON will charge you and me a little over twice for these pre-lubed KS-20’s as they will the G Pro 3.0 Red’s, I can’t help but feeling like on a £225 board, Steelseries can afford a few quid extra for a full complement of HE switches. 

As for feel, the HE switches are really, really light. While I’m used to my tactile bump HE switches in the form of the Glorious Silent Panda HE switches on my GMMK 3 HE board, these are just… so soft. This is actually too light for my preferences, so my view of the board is definitely skewed by that, but my god it’s so light. If these are, in fact, KS-20’s, you’re looking at just 30 grams of force required to actuate them. That just isn’t enough for me. I’m sure some people will like this, but I’m afraid that ain’t me. I’ve written the majority of this video’s script on this, and I can’t say I’ve enjoyed it. I genuinely can’t wait to swap back to my GMMK 3 HE after this. As I said, that is my personal preference, and technically speaking the switches aren’t soldered to the board or anything, so you could swap them, although Steelseries’ software doesn’t offer any customisation for other switch types. In other words it doesn’t officially support any other style. 

One thing you’ll likely notice when using this though is that the actuation points are nowhere near where you’ve set them to. While I’m still working on my own open source peripheral testing tool that’ll let me (and you) test keyboards like this for both force and actuation points, RTINGS has some excellent data from their own tester which echos what I’m feeling by hand. Setting the actuation point to just 0.1mm – you should only need to breathe on it to trigger it – you need to press it a good millimetre or so to get anything to happen. The default 1.8mm of travel needed is likely more like 2.2mm, with only the deepest settings around 3.8 to 4mm being within 0.1mm of the set target. Yikes. I’m also somewhat convinced that slowly pressing the keys gives you a slightly different actuation point, but that might be mind games from me. What this means is that the minimum actuation point is actually 1mm, which to be fair is still very high, but nowhere near as high as the setting suggests.

As for the sound, well have a listen… To me this sounds a lot less refined than the “Triple Layer Foam” internals would suggest. This feels just a little cheap and clacky for me, especially compared to my GMMK 3 and the Silent Panda HE switches. This doesn’t scream ‘premium’ and ‘refined’ to me, which is a shame.

When it comes to gaming on it, in short, it’s fine. As I mentioned you’ve got rapid-tap for CS and Valorant, rapid trigger for basically any game, and a reasonably adjustable actuation point. You’ve also got dual actions (rather than the quad actions most other HE boards offer), should you want them. For me, I tend to keep it simple. The linear switches and a higher actuation point do make this feel pretty fast and responsive – I used my latency tool to test the latency, and depending on where the actuation point is set to, you’ll get between 7 and 10 milliseconds of latency, which isn’t bad for a 1000Hz keyboard. For gaming, the ridiculously light switches do make a little more sense, as does the higher actuation point settings, but it’s still not exactly my favourite. 

I should also note the full size board comes with this pretty low profile wrist rest. It has magnets embedded to pull it to the metal base plate on the board, and it’s a semi-firm rubber feel. It’s nice enough, although I prefer it further back than the magnets would have it. It does have rubber feet on the bottom to stop it moving though so it’s nice enough. Actually, the keyboard itself has rubber feet, and a one-stage height adjustment. One thing I’m a little confused by here is all this cable routing on the bottom of the board. See, the USB C port is up here, on top, so to use this cable routing you’d have to have the cable poke out, then wrap under, and THEN come back out. Is this just an old molding for the board that hasn’t been updated, or does it serve some purpose I can’t quite figure out? 

That, plus the half-HE switches, the poor accuracy and for me personally the ultra-light switches makes this thing’s £225 price tag just unfathomable. That’s an awful lot to spend on a keyboard outright, let alone for one that cheats you out of half the damn switches. Much like Corsair’s K70 MAX RGB (which does the same thing), this feels like a very corporate shareholder driven product. Having reviewed a bunch of smaller companies’ HE board, you very much get more for your money elsewhere. For a full size board like this, the GMMK 3 HE is £25 less in stock form (although my god you can spend a lot using their customiser, or just buying extras like other switches, knobs and so much more), and if you don’t mind a smaller form factor, boards from Keychron, Endgame Gear, AKKO, nuphy and more offer more features and quality for a lot, lot less money. Hell, the FUN60 Ultra board from Monsgeek is like £60 and is damn TMR, wireless and 8KHz! C’mon Steelseries, you can do better.