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 1.0.2.77, and the installer downloads as an archive folder that is ~27.5 MB in size. As seen above, installation is quite simple and requires just 41.5 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 here, 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 already, 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 software home page, and also see where other connected peripherals would show up for selection of their respective pages. As it is now, this review will only cover the software experience with the EVGA Z20, and it is one with room for improvement still. There is 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.

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 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, but the last part covered in the video above was definitely one that had peaked my interest. We saw before that EVGA added a Time-of-Flight sensor to the Z20, and here, we have actually useful options. Indeed, the ability to unlock and lock the keyboard, and indirectly also your PC if in sleep mode, by simply approaching or leaving the keyboard respectively provides for a similar experience as the Gateway Halberd we saw before, but as part of your keyboard as opposed to an optional paid kit except of course without the actual security aspect since anyone can approach the keyboard and unlock it. You can also associate lighting effects with specific actions, in addition to completely turning the lighting off and setting the sensitivity in terms of the distance for the trigger, the latter of which points towards the strength of the light source with distance measurement capping out at 120 cm.

This video goes over the final three tabs, which are also among the more common findings for gaming RGB keyboards today. This is where some features are missing compared to some competing offerings, especially when it comes to preset configurations for lighting and key mapping. I do appreciate that there is a custom mode for per-key lighting, as well as zones to choose from should you want to associate certain keys to profiles for specific games, for example. Key mapping also allows 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.

Given this is only the second EVGA keyboard I have tested, and the third peripheral in total, EVGA Unleash does seem promising but still has ways to go before I can truly consider it to be a selling point for their peripherals. It does complement the hardware, especially with finer controls compared to onboard options, while allowing for the configuration and use of the TOF sensor you would otherwise not be able to do much with. What is missing, however, is the ability to change the polling rate of the keyboard. There are legacy devices that do not play well with 4000 Hz polling, especially if you want to get to the UEFI at booting time, so I encourage EVGA to add this option to their general settings tab sooner rather than later. Oh, and did I mention the part where this is Windows 10 only? Congrats EVGA, you were the one to finally get me to update my Win 7 laptop.