Driver

Well, well, well. When this very MK850 keyboard arrived alongside the Cooler Master SK630, I anticipated both to share the same driver interface, which was, to put it bluntly, not the best. Cooler Master decided that they needed a better, unified software driver—one of my biggest complaints for the older version of Portal—and has introduced a re-worked driver with a lot of changes. Indeed, as I am writing this, there are two versions of Portal available for download on the Cooler Master Downloads page. The older version is not to be used with the MK850 since it does not support it at all as I found out myself, and version 1.5.5 is the latest version at the time of release. The installer downloads as an archive measuring 56.3 MB in size, and the installed version takes up 257 MB. Installation is smooth, and there is no add-on module to install as before. Thanks for listening, Cooler Master!


With the keyboard connected, Cooler Master Portal opens and recognizes it immediately. It prompts a firmware update check, and definitely do follow through on it since it can include significant updates, especially for the Aimpad implementation. Indeed, even though my keyboard arrived mere days before release, there were already firmware updates available, and the update was simple and short.


The driver is reminiscent of the older versions, with a darker skin using the black and purple color scheme Cooler Master has been using with the MK850 and other MK series keyboards. I am definitely curious if this will change with the SK series when support is added, or whether we get customizable skins/backgrounds as with a few of their competitor's software drivers. User experience is definitely an improvement here, with presumably a list of connected devices in a column on the left and device-specific content laid out in organized tabs on the right. There is one drawback, however, in the reduced support for high resolution/scaling displays. It is actually worse than the older version in that regard, which makes me think this was a bit of a rush job to have it ready for the MK850 release, and hopefully, Cooler Master's software team figures this out sooner rather than later. It is nowhere near as bad as some other such experiences I have had even recently, with 4K doable if you push scaling more than usual in Windows 10.

The first tab in the driver is for the Aimpad technology as implemented in the MK850, and we will cover it separately on the next page. The next tab, which is going to be more universal in scope, is all about lighting. The virtual keyboard on screen shows some of the effects to give you an idea, but most are not seen or reflected, especially for the dynamic effects, which is a bit of a shame and was the case with the older driver as well. There are multiple effects to choose from, with each mode having further customization options, including color, direction of the effect, and transition speed. You have individual R/G/B channel control for 256 brightness steps each, which gives you the promised 16.8 M colors. Custom mode is where you go for per-key static lighting, multi-zone mode is where you can assign multiple different effects to the same profile, and there is a new multi-layer option to stack as many as four different effects at the same time, which has been used to good effect in competing products recently. Gone is the system status mode from before, however, which had two cool effects, including an equalizer and a CPU utilization visualizer. There are also separate foreground and background color selection options for applicable lighting effects, and a global brightness slider that allows fine control over the intensity of the backlighting (and side lighting). Cooler Master says the driver will be updated to control the light bar on the sides prior to launch, but my review was written up before this update hit.

It gets better: We have actual configurable key-mapping functionality now. The previous versions only had the most rudimentary option of changing one key to another, or a recorded macro. Now, however, there is a drop-down list of options to choose from, which includes just about everything you might want. There are two sets of scroll wheels, which Cooler Master calls precision wheels, on the MK850, as seen before, and each wheel can be individually configured for a different action in either scrolling direction. So, you can have one be a volume wheel and the other pull up two programs or macros depending on which way you turn it, for example. By default, the left wheel controls lighting brightness and the right wheel volume control. I would have liked to see mouse mapping as well, if only because profiles are supported, and we could have the two wheels work as a basic trackball, but with finer (X,Y) coordinate control for programs, such as a plotting tool. This is something Cooler Master actually advertises on their product sheet, so it is all the more disappointing to see a marketed feature absent, at least at the time of launch. Also, those five M keys on the left are not actually configurable and have pre-assigned functions tied to the Aimpad technology.

The penultimate tab is for creating and allocating macros, and it is as complete as I could have asked for. You can record long macros, edit keystrokes, edit the delay between keystrokes, and allocate them to specific keys. No complaints here, but if there were something I would like to see, it would be the ability to add missed keystrokes post-recording. The last tab is for the profiles themselves, and knowing these four are saved on the device means you do not have to worry about the absence of the driver once you set it up to your needs. This also goes well with Cooler Master adding in features to help with taking the keyboard from one place to another. One neat thing I noticed here is that the 1–4 keys on the actual keyboard (those with hotkeys assigned to profile switching) light up in order to indicate a driver-loading process visually.