Software

EVGA Unleash is the name of the dedicated software suite for EVGA peripherals, and you can download the installer on this page. The latest version at the time of testing was provided separately, which was 1.0.6.0, newer from the launch version used alongside the EVGA Z20 review. The installer downloads as an archive folder that is ~29.3 MB. As seen above, installation is quite simple and requires just 43.4 MB for the installed version, which is a far cry from the hundreds of megabytes taken up by competing solutions. Having far fewer products to support does help, but let's take a look at the user experience before drawing any conclusions.


Running the drivers with the keyboard installed prompted me to update the keyboard firmware, which is strange for a brand-new device that just launched. Either way, updating the firmware was trivial and took less than a minute. I always recommend updating the firmware of any device if an update is available, especially if new to the market.


We finally get to the home page, and also see where other connected peripherals would show up for selection. As it is now, this review will only cover the software experience with the EVGA Z15, and it is one with room for improvement still. There is still no maximize button, for example, and the real estate taken up by the program is small on a high-resolution display. The shape of the GUI also is more aggressive than the keyboard design would suggest, and there are simple things, such as drop-down menus extending past the bottom of the GUI, which comes off amateurish. What has changed from the previous version are simple things, including having the default polling rate be 1000 Hz, N-key rollover be default, enabling a zero-delay macro recording between strokes, and a longer timer option for the TOF sensor on the Z20.

I will happily say, however, that the user experience has been bug-free and fairly easy. This is not to say that things can't be improved with so much on the main page that the user is blasted with a lot of information the tabs don't do enough to separate. There is no language barrier in play, however, so I will say that EVGA Unleash RGB is one of the better overall keyboard software experiences I have had to date. There are settings and profiles to choose from, the latter of which allow for nine onboard profiles to be saved on the keyboard. General Settings is self-explanatory, and the Lighting Effect tab goes over all the possible backlighting options with the 16.8 M RGB colors on offer. I do appreciate the custom mode for per-key lighting, as well as zones should you want to associate certain keys to profiles for specific games, for example. Custom mode allows for up to five layers simultaneously, which does seem like a software limitation, but the absence of dedicated hardware LED drivers may suggest otherwise.

Key mapping allows for not only the base layer on each profile to be edited, but also for a Shift+ layer map for every single key, which can be handy when adding macros to the same key. Speaking of which, the macro editor is on par with just about everything else I have seen, so I have no complaints there. There are some options in competing solutions, but EVGA Unleash RGB does seem promising nonetheless. It still has ways to go before I can truly consider it to be a selling point for their peripherals, and yet It does complement the hardware, especially with finer controls compared to onboard options. We can now also change the polling rate, so good on EVGA for quickly addressing that.