Review - SteelSeries Apex Gaming Keyboard

Established back in 2001, SteelSeries has steadily built up a reputation for delivering high quality PC gaming peripherals built to the very highest standards. Through the company’s relationships with many of the top gaming teams, it has gained a level of trust reserved for the very best hardware manufacturers on the scene, and with its SteelSeries Apex gaming keyboard, it’s looking to extent that trust even further, delivering a top quality, robust keyboard for the most demanding of PC gamers.

Like the SteelSeries Apex Raw, the Apex is built like a fortified outhouse. Everything about this behemoth screams “built to last”, from its bigger-than-normal footprint, monstrous spacebar and premium heft to its choice of rubber dome switches for each of the keys instead of the more traditional mechanical keys – and although that might prove a little controversial with some purists, the results simply cannot be argued with.

Offering tremendous responsiveness while still retaining a satisfying tactile feel on button presses (albeit without that familiar clunky-click), it’s a decision that has paid off for us. With the reduced resistance offered by the rubber dome switches, the Apex is fast, responsive and particularly enjoyable to use.

Traditional functionality aside, the Apex excels thanks to its more forward thinking technology, offering a number of bells and whistles you won’t find elsewhere that make the user experience all the more pleasing. For example, those of you who like a bit of bling in your rig will likely get off on the fact that the keyboard offers five separate backlit colour zones, each of which can be customized to display any one of just under 17 million shades through the downloadable SteelSeries Engine software, allowing for complete personalization.

Then there are the more functional features of the keyboard, most notably the 22 macro keys , fully programmable within the SteelSeries Engine to do just about anything you fancy. To expand upon this even more, each of these keys can also hold four independent layers of information, offering a staggering 88 keys worth of potentially programmable functionality. To push the numbers even higher, most of the rest of the keyboard can be programmed, too, raising the figures to an almost ridiculous 504, and making this one of the most customizable and user friendly keyboards ever created.

Interestingly, the Apex also comes with two USB ports at its rear, allowing the user to connect portable hard drives, mice, controllers and just about anything else with ease – although it comes at the expense of the Apex requiring 2 USB ports itself, but the trade-off is well worth it. Additionally, something that might rankle some, the keyboard doesn’t come with a typical height adjuster, but rather users can swap out the rubber feet to raise or lower the profile of the board ever so slightly.

All in all, the Apex is a monster of a keyboard, offering more features than we could possibly mention here, a seriously robust build and world-class responsiveness at a great price. It’s highly recommended and well worth picking up.

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