HyperX carved out a decent little piece of the mechanical/gaming keyboard market with the Alloy FPS, and that was when the market was already established. As such, expectations were fairly high on my part for the Alloy Elite that decided to step it up and go higher into the $100-$120 price range. As it is today, the Alloy Elite comes in at $10 more than the older Alloy FPS strictly by numbers, and HyperX seems to have done a good job. However, the devil is in the details and adding them all up shows it is not really a fair comparison.

The Alloy FPS is a minimalist mechanical keyboard with portability in mind. It does comes with a carrying case and detachable cable as opposed to the Alloy Elite that is all about taking up a big portion of your desk and not even pretending otherwise. It replaces the case and removable cable with a wrist rest, adds in dedicated media and lighting controls and, despite HyperX trying to justify this as a higher-end version, caters to a different subset of customers. It is a different feature set, not necessarily an upgraded feature set throughout, so the $10 price increase is even more important in this extremely crowded and competitive market.

I would have been more impressed had all the implementations been perfect, but there are multiple instances where things are less than that. The wrist rest, for example, takes form over function with the surface having two different textures that will always be on the back of your mind as a small point of distraction when having both hands on the keyboard. When using the keyboard and a mouse, it should be mostly okay, especially for right-handed people. The USB pass-through port could have supported USB 3.0 (now known as USB 3.1 Gen 1). The lack of macro support hurts compared to competitors offering a similar feature set for less, and the limited brightness control does not help either when there are some secondary legends below the primary ones. Oh, and the stock keycaps are average at best as with just about every large brand in the market, so that continues to be a con.

Perhaps a price cut as supply and demand take up their natural course will help; as it is now, the Alloy Elite at $110 is not for everyone.