Driver

The i-Rocks K70E keyboard has a dedicated driver you can be download here. The installer is 2.22 MB in size, and its installation process is simple, as seen above. One thing missing is a notice to the terms of service, which should have been added here, but is also low on the complaints list. I would have also liked to have the option to add the shortcuts to the start bar menu and desktop at my own choosing. For what it is worth, by default, the former is done while the latter is not. Once installed, the driver takes up 10.4 MB and is very light on system resources.


With the keyboard connected, the driver recognizes it immediately and opens up a simple 3-tab driver. It does not take up all the real estate available on a 4K display and does not have a fullscreen option available. Minimizing it defaults to it going to the system tray, and it is configured to autostart after boot-up by default as well.

With driver installation done, I wanted to check for firmware updates, and there were none to be had. This was expected given the K70E is a very new keyboard, so I moved on to the driver interface. In the video above, I go through the first tab titled "Performance" and also the general settings in the menu. The latter is limited to a switch between three languages the keyboard supports, so it remained on English throughout for me. The Performance tab allows one to toggle between 6/30-key rollover, change the keystroke repeat delay from anywhere between 1 s to 0.25 s (increments of 0.25 s with the default being 0.5 s), and also change the repeat speed of keystrokes along a slider. There is also support for five profiles that are saved onboard, with all five being the same out of the box. You can also import/export profiles if there is an active userbase, though that remains to be seen.

"Backlight" is the tab open by default when the driver is installed and run the first time, and we see there are four preset lighting options, L1 through L4, that are configured and assigned to hotkeys on the keyboard. There are plenty of lighting effects to choose from and assign to these four quick presets or simply the keyboard. These include static lighting, both for the entire keyboard or on a customizable per-key basis, with individual R/G/B channel controls with 256 brightness levels each for a total of 16.8 M RGB colors. You can also control the brightness and speed for the various effects, which makes more sense for the animated ones, and even here are some that are responsive to keystrokes and others that are not. The on-screen preview helps a lot, although do note that the colors you see do not necessarily reflect the ones on the actual keyboard.

The final tab is titled "Assignment", and there are some options here that really feel as though they should have been in the performance tab instead, which is especially so with the set of quick options on the right. There are options for four profiles to where you can have a key do four different things if need be, and note that these need the driver to be open. The options here are quite extensive, although a simple key assignment to another keystroke requires either a macro or a string instead. Ignoring the obvious typo in "combination", everything works as expected when using the macro recorder, which is really all I can ask for here. I also tested some of the other options available, including launching programs, which did make me miss the option to have profiles activate when specific programs are open rather than having to manually switch between profiles with hotkeys.

Overall, the driver is solid and free of bugs, which is more than I could say for most keyboard drivers. The options available are also on the higher side of average, which is good news for i-Rocks. However, it lacks finesse and focus throughout, and while the user experience is not bad at all, there are many things that need to be done to make this look better and on par with offerings from more established companies.