Driver

There is no software driver support for the MK Fission, with all functionality and programming being hardware based. As such, I have chosen to combine the Driver and Performance pages into one here.

Performance

There is full N-key rollover USB here, as Aqua's test confirmed this. Similarly, no key chatter was detected using Switch Hitter.


The MK Fission does not support any macros or key rebinding, it is as they advertised- a minimalist keyboard targeting good build quality at a good price point. There is lighting, and two different types. The primary lighting is the keyboard backlighting, and all versions of the keyboard support only white color in four steps of brightness including 0% (off) which can be toggled using Fn + up/down arrow keys. The three steps of usable backlighting are 33%, 67% 100% thus, and the difference is fairly big as can be seen above comparing 66% and 100% with the white keycaps. I personally felt the 66% brightness was just right and left it so.


As you can see, the seamless doubleshot keycaps work better with the white keycaps than the black ones. The secondary legends on the numpad, while appreciated, do not get illuminated well owing to their placement here and this is also where the plastic bars underneath have the strongest effect. The secondary legends on the number keys in the second row do not have this issue as they are located horizontally next to the primary legends and not below them. The takeaway here is that the seamless doubleshot keycaps are great when not backlit, and when they are, the higher the amount of light passing through the better. Good placement of legends and choice of keycap material will help here, and hopefully Ducky will improve on this in future iterations.


The next lighting option is via the accent bar, and this has RGB LEDs so you can not only change the brightness of the LEDs here (Fn + left/right arrow keys and again in four total steps as before), but also the color itself via Fn + 9 (not numpad 9).








There are also some animation modes for the primary and secondary accent lighting as seen above. I have only demonstrated a few, and the manual included covers all of them. These are toggled by using Fn + number keys from 1 through 0. You can thus have just the primary lighting, just the secondary lighting, or both in static or animated modes. There are options to control the speed of these animation modes as well. Overall, I find this a good compromise of lighting without going into more complicated/feature rich hardware or software based solutions. The accent bar may show up on your monitor depending on the location of the two items, so be aware of that. The settings are saved on the keyboard so the next time you plug it in, the lighting options from last time are activated.

The function keys also provide secondary functions, as listed in the manual again, ranging from multimedia functions to executing common applications (My Computer, web browser, calculator etc). Again, these are set in place and can not be changed. These secondary legends are laser etched on, and will not be illuminated.



As always, the sound of a keyboard is based on more than just the switch type. So when comparing sound clips, consider the keyboard as a whole. In this case, I have provided above two example sound clips of me typing on the MK Fission samples at ~95 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here including those with clicky and tactile switches. I did bottom out both although it is definitely possible to not do so- especially with the Cherry MX Blue switches if you practice. In terms of actuation and bottoming out, there is not much to say here except that the usual Cherry high QC carries over with an average actuation force of 45.10 cN for the MX Brown and 49.80 cN for the MX Blue switches averaged across 20 keys on the two samples provided. Bottoming out seemed regular too, and nothing jumped out that was different than the rest.