Driver

This was by far the most frustrating part of the review as I could have easily skipped it entirely and dismissed the MX Board 3.0 as a keyboard without a software driver from Cherry. There is zero mention of this on the product packaging or the product pages on both the Cherry Americas and Cherry (Germany) websites. The only reason I found out about it was because it is mentioned on a small note in the provided manual. Let's face it - hardly anyone goes through product manuals, and luckily, I happen to be among the few who do more often than not. There are a few other reviews that I saw, after catching this, who also noticed the presence of a driver, but the vast majority of coverage on the keyboard omitted it. Cherry's driver for the MX Board 3.0, as well as a few other Cherry peripherals, is called KeyMan (Key Manager, not to be confused with another general keyboard tool of the same name), a driver tool made for the MX Board 3.0, the installer of which can be downloaded over this link by entering the product name in the search bar. The installer is in German, so just follow through on what I did above (mostly picked the default options) and make sure to enable the English-language option in the download section if you do not speak German. There are other languages to choose from as well, as seen in the installation GIF above, so only select one language if that is all you want, which will make things easier for you later on. The installer and installed driver both are very lightweight on storage and CPU/RAM resources.


Once installed, I recommend heading directly to the install directory to open the "keymanconfig" application - not "keyman", which is just a background process that runs after installation and does not need to be re-initiated, as warnings in German will tell you each time. The driver has not been updated in two years, but supports Win 8 64-bit, and there is no issue with running it in Win 10 64-bit. It scales well with OS-level display scaling, so those with a high resolution monitor should not have an issue making out what is being displayed, which is unlike some company solutions we have seen before.

Here is a look at the driver's functionality in action, as I go through the available options in the menu, key assignment for the function keys, and the four extra buttons on the keyboard (volume control + home/Win lock). The driver saves the key assignment functionality to the device from what I can tell, but I do not know yet if there is a limit on how much can be stored - the length of a macro recording, for example. Regardless, the addition of this driver increases the keyboard's functionality tremendously for office work and beyond, and I really do not know why Cherry did not market this as a big feature for the keyboard.