Driver

The installer for the Cooler Master SK621 software driver can be found on the downloads page. It is called Cooler Master Portal, and the latest compatible version is v1.01. The installer downloads as an archive and is 8.6 MB in size. Installation is pretty straightforward, as seen above, and light on system resources, taking up 32.5 MB on your storage drive. However, Cooler Master Portal is not actually the driver for the keyboard and serves more as a unifying hub to then build upon based on the supported peripherals you have. I gave them a pass with the SK630 on this, but a newer unified version v1.5x was released between the SK630 and SK621, which was used to good effect on their MK850 keyboard. This just reeks of laziness, and let me also point out that the installer still says it is for the MasterKeys Pro L keyboard that came out way before. Cooler Master has not only decided to re-use the older version of the driver, which now means there are two separate versions, but has not even bothered to update it aside from adding the bare minimum compatibility to the SK621.


With the keyboard connected, Cooler Master Portal opens and recognizes it immediately as a device it also displays on the left with some more options available once selected. However, you can initially only select "install" to actually install the driver. Cooler Master Portal then downloads the keyboard installer, which is the second software installer we saw on the product page, and initiates the installation process as seen above. It is a further 32.5 MB in size and opens up a second window, and launch options in Cooler Master Portal.


But no, you are not done yet. The driver now prompts you to check for firmware updates and install them. This takes another minute or two and allows you to update the keyboard to the latest firmware even if it is already on it. It is now that you can go further and explore the SK621 driver, and there is a lot to see here. You can close Cooler Master Portal completely while dealing with this driver, but can only launch it from within the former.

In this video, I go through the settings, which just alert you to the software version, 2.27 in this case, and provide another option to update the keyboard firmware. There is also a drop-down menu to quickly toggle between the profiles for the keyboard, and the final tab is also about the four profiles that can be imported or exported if needed. They are saved onboard and can be switched on the fly as well. The first tab is called "Wireless" and, as the name suggests, pertains more to the wireless connectivity options on the SK621. There is not much to see here, though, with the ability to change the keyboard sleep time from 5 to 40 minutes in intervals of 5 minutes or turn it off entirely. This will dictate battery life if you idle the keyboard a lot, so choose according to your lifestyle. There are also six LED brightness intervals (0/20/40/60/80/100 %) for the RGB switches, as well as an on/off toggle for ring brightness that is on the periphery of the keyboard.

The second tab in the driver is named "LED" and 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 since they have this very thing integrated in their product page already. There are multiple effects to choose from on the left, with each mode having further customization options, including color, direction of the effect, and speed of transition (in five steps). You have individual R/G/B channel control for 256 brightness steps each, which thus gives you the promised 16.8 M colors available. 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 (four slots available here), and system status mode has two cool effects, including an equalizer and a CPU utilization visualizer. At the same time, I do not recall specifically granting permission for the driver to get that information from my system either. For those who care, no data was transferred out of my system due to the driver, if such is a concern.

The third 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 Key Map tab is even simpler since all you can do is disable or re-assign keys to another function on the keyboard. The previous tab allowed for the assignment of macros, so here, I would have liked to see the option to assign keys to other things, including computer tasks; opening a specific application, for example. This is especially found wanting on this $60 form factor keyboard where end users would want to customize the keys to their needs and wants to make the most of the keyboard. As it is, the tab name quite literally describes the scope of functionality available here.

Overall, this is a poor showing knowing there is a better, future-proof version of the Cooler Master Portal software driver out already. There is no guarantee that the SK621 will get ported over to the newer version at all, and it is a shame in more ways than one. Also, I found that the keyboard has to be wired to get Portal to see it, but this by itself is not as big an issue.