Software

Mountain. Everest. Anyone sense a theme? I chuckled when I saw that the software drivers were called Base Camp, which is trademarked as well. The installer can be found on this page, and I was given a preview version of Base Camp version 1.0.36 that adds a nice feature drop coming in today, when this review goes live. The installer downloads as a compressed archive, with the actual file ~126 MB in size. While you are at it, go ahead and download the icon pack on that page if it does not already come with it like mine did. The install process is self-explanatory, and I will give props to Mountain for giving more options than most others, including the preferred language retained for the program later on and an option to run it with system boot-up or not. It does not tell you how much space the installation needs, but mine took up 296 MB once done, which is reasonable considering it is otherwise light on system resources.


Base Camp is clearly a universal driver for Mountain products, as evidenced by its support of the Makalu mouse. For a new brand, the user experience is much better than you would think. All compatible products would be clearly listed with thumbnails and names, with the option to go to the device-specific page either by hitting customize underneath or clicking on the product name on top, next to the logo in the left corner. At the bottom are more generic links, including for customer support, a survey, and of course the shop followed by even more links underneath. The device-specific page for the Everest will look slightly different depending on whether you have the Everest Core (just the TKL keyboard) or Everest Max with the numpad and media dock modules, especially when it comes to the menus laid out on the left in a single column. The UI scales nicely with display resolution and OS scaling, and the text uses a good balance of colors, font, and font sizes.

The default menu covers profiles, and a pop-up tells you which profile is active. You can create, edit, and associate profiles with programs as well, so, say, a game-specific profile with key bindings and lighting effects comes up when the game launches. Speaking of which, lighting is the next menu, and it is definitely lacking compared to the mainstream competition. There are far fewer effects to choose from, and the effects are weirdly enough not even set to maximum brightness, either. There are also fewer discrete steps for speed and brightness control, although you do have the full 16.8 M colors to choose from. A custom effect allows per-key lighting as well, but static only. I did like that the custom effect option removes the media dock from the virtual keyboard so you can also access the side lighting with its 36 zones on this Everest Max (TKL Core + numpad) unit. The virtual keyboard also at times struggles to reflect the chosen lighting effect, especially with the highest speed setting, where it seems like a frame drop but otherwise works fine in complementing the actual change on your physical keyboard.

Key binding takes advantage of the same virtual keyboard and allows you to choose between preset options, including OS shortcuts, media controls, volume control, macros, etc. There is a macro recorder and editor that works nicely, and you may also record mouse strokes. The four display keys on the numpad make things more interesting, as you have the same options but may change the icon to something fitting. This is where the icon pack comes in handy, but feel free to chose your own as well. Somewhat annoying was that the delete option for custom images is right next to where you would click for assignment, so I would rather see this option moved further towards the top-right corner.

So what big feature drop is coming today? That would be OBS Studio integration, which is a listed option in the key bindings menu. You need to download the OBS Websocket plugin first and give it access, but are then able to create custom key bindings to easily access OBS Studio functions. This should appeal to content creators similar to macros and other key bindings for gamers. The display dial is where you will spend some time to make the most of the dial, as there are quite a few options to choose from for the display. You can de-select some, and note that several have more integrated options, such as the PC info set going through CPU load, RAM utilization, GPU load, and even internet speed. There are a lot of items here Mountain is accessing your system for, so I definitely made sure no data was being sent out at the router level, even with the anonymous data option being selected by default, which I turned off right away.