Lighting and Performance

The ASUS ROG Falchion Ace HFX supports N-key rollover USB, which tested successfully using Aqua's test. Switch Hitter confirmed no chatter with these keys either, and seen above are all the functions with dedicated keys on the base layer. You can of course use Armoury Crate to remap the keys as desired, but this is a pretty good base layer for a 65% keyboard. I do have a nitpick with keeping R. Control as a Microsoft Copilot key though, which we saw with the ROG Azoth Extreme earlier too, although again it's easy to remap and ASUS also provides a 1u Ctrl keycap to help.


You can do a lot without ever installing Armoury Crate, as ASUS has a good amount of onboard controls pre-programmed on the keyboard. This includes on-the-fly macro recording and lighting controls, as well as getting back some of the missing keys compared to a TKL keyboard via the Fn layer. The slider touch panel is also very handy, giving you not only volume control but media playback, LED brightness, and even actuation point customization. It is not trivial though, especially in the absence of any numbers to help confirm what position the slider is on. There's also a lag in terms of where you are on the physical slider and where the display above the keys will indicate the position to be. I would not lie if I said a simple rocker switch would be less frustrating here. At least the indicators on the sides all work as expected!


I mentioned before how the keycap legends are mostly backlit here, which will no doubt please many who find the current trend of opaque keycaps not to their liking. That said, there are still multiple keycap legends here which are not backlit, as mentioned on page three. Seen above is the ROG Falchion Ace HFX lit up in a few different effects, and here we can also see what the top panel looks like when connected. The ROG branding is strong here, and it temporarily converts to slider marks when you use the touch panel on the side. I'd say the LEDs are bright enough to allow you to use the keyboard even in a completely dark room, however bad it may be for your eyes, although it's less in-your-face compared to some keyboards that go for ambient lighting too, such as the HYTE Keeb TKL we recently saw. Color fidelity is excellent here, and even light bleed is kept fairly controlled despite the floating keycaps in use.


The ROG Falchion Ace HFX is a Hall effect keyboard using magnetic switches, and thus we also get some further options beyond your everyday mechanical keyboard. The use of a magnet in the stem with a Hall sensor to read its position accurately in 0.1 mm steps means we have per-key control over the actuation distance. Typically, a full-size mechanical switch actuates around 2.0 mm of travel, compared to total travel of 4.0 mm. This works plenty fine for daily use and even gaming, although it wasn't long before we saw the rise of "speed" switches that cut down the actuation distance to ~1.0-1.2 mm, purely to say there was now that extra bit of time savings before the keystroke was registered. Optical switches and magnetic switches came thereafter, with the latter being far more popular now, allowing for the Falchion Ace HFX to offer a wide actuation range based on how you prefer it. This also makes the switch be lighter or heavier for actuation, which again can be a typing preference. You also get rapid trigger, allowing the switch to reset immediately when the onboard controller detects the switch is traveling back up. This allows for a dynamic actuation point, which can be quite handy in games necessitating quick time events or even smoother strafing movements.


What's made Hall effect keyboards somewhat notorious over the last few months has been SOCD (Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions). We've seen many brands take this up, only for several games to ban the feature citing it provides an extreme competitive advantage. This is usually the case with online games, especially those with some form of ranking or competitive play involved, but that has not stopped customers from wanting this feature in their keyboard and from brands to offer it, lest they come off being not competing hard enough with others in the market. ASUS is already late to this market in the first place, so I wasn't surprised to see a "Speed Tap" mode in Armoury Crate for the Falchion Ace HFX. The way it works is you select two keys and the keyboard will continuously monitor them across the entire 0.1-4.0 mm range such that which key is pressed further down gets immediately activated for that time period. This allows you to, say, have left and right moving directions monitored for some of the more precise strafing/crosshair movement in games. It's turned off by default, and you need to press Fn + Tab to activate this mode.


As mentioned before, the Falchion Ace HFX comes with a single switch in the form of ASUS's own brand new HFX magnetic switch. It's not a rebranded Gateron switch that most others use, as evident by the Hall sensor on the top of the PCB and the stem having an offset magnet to the side. This is a linear switch with 4.0 mm total travel, and the actuation distance/force is dependent on where you set it up in the drivers, with the likes of DKS/Mod Tap/Speed Tap/Rapid Trigger all changing it too. ASUS does rate the switch to have an initial force—the minimum force required to press the switch down—at 40 gf, with peak force of 55 gf when bottomed out. This means you have a narrow 15 gf window for all these Hall effect features to be used in, which honestly isn't a lot. You can train yourself to hold position mid-way instead of purely relying on resistance from the spring, although I suspect most people are likely to bottom out these switches past actuation. I do feel ASUS could have gone with a different spring which results in a higher peak force to make this easier, albeit then people may complain the switches were too heavy and fatiguing to type on. Going with an extremely smooth stem is also somewhat counteractive when you want more deliberate actions, whereas it does feel nice to just type on. I'll also mention these feel more stable compared to the usual magnetic switches that also don't have guide pins, perhaps from the tighter manufacturing tolerances and the larger contact area for the stem in the bottom housing.


As always, the sound of a keyboard is based on more than just the switch type. So when comparing sound clips, consider the keyboard as a whole. In this case, I have provided above an example sound clip of me typing on the ROG Falchion Ace HFX keyboard sample at ~85 WPM as it comes out of the box with these ROG HFX magnetic switches. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with linear switches. I did bottom out constantly here for reasons aforementioned, and this also helps demonstrate how well damped this keyboard is. These are extremely smooth switches which helps of course, but they are complemented well by the 5-layer dampening system used which make for a decidedly damped sound. The switches are sealed in the middle of the bottom housing where the stem travels down, yet have cutouts in two other places to where there is still some switch chatter here—it prevents the typing sound from being fully uniform and more crisp as a result. The stabilizers feel fairly uniform, albeit there is room for improvement in how they sound.