Software

Sometime last year, MSI decided Dragon Center needed a re-haul. That was the company's universal software driver suite for pretty much everything it made and sold with software control, including PC DIY components, such as motherboards and GPUs. I had Dragon Center installed on my PC too, and wasn't really a fan of it. MSI Center, as it is now called, is a fairly fresh take on the concept and goes the modular route. The installer is hosted on the Microsoft Store, which I detest a lot for various reasons beyond the scope of this review, but thankfully, it is still available on the MSI website under the Support->Utility tabs of the product pages for, say, the GK50 Low Profile here since the GK50 Low Profile TKL hadn't yet been announced when this was written. The latest version at the time of testing was 1.0.38.0 from earlier this month, which should be the public release on launch. It downloaded as an archived ~450 MB file, and the installation is quite terrible for how little control you have over the install location, any EULA/permissions you may have inadvertently agreed to, and any desktop/start menu shortcuts it decides to install. The final size and system resource utilization depends wholly on the modules and features installed.


When you do open the program for the first time, MSI at least does make you go through its privacy policy and agree to it before using it, so that does address one of my complaints. There is also a summary of various features and the bloatware available with MSI Center, so I leave whether you want to indulge in any of these up to you.


Since MSI Center was downloaded as a utility for an MSI gaming peripheral, the "Gaming Gear" feature comes pre-installed. There are plenty other such features available to choose from, which are effectively modules, but partitioned by functionality rather than individual products. This is the most universal of software drivers I have used for a keyboard review thus, and the first tab up top being all about system monitoring says as much. It's worth exploring MSI Center slowly to make sure you don't just add a bunch of things you will never use, especially when there are some that come off as extremely unnecessary, if not outright probing your local files.

Here is a quick look at MSI Center as it pertains to the Vigor GK50 Low Profile TKL keyboard, including the settings menu where you may want to pay extra attention to the data being collected by default. You should also install MSI Mystic Light for RGB lighting customization since that feature is otherwise not present at all in Gaming Gear. This is a poor user interface for many who have already dealt with keyboard software drivers, but it gets better once you do understand what to do, and quick-switching between various features is done at the top. The software itself thankfully remains snappy even if it's not the most feature-rich. The Gaming Gear feature, for example, allows the editing of profiles and key assignment via macros only. There is no handy drop-down menu of various key assignment options, and even changing the typing layout necessitates macro recording and editing every single time. Come on, MSI!

Mystic Light is a more mature feature, having been adopted for other MSI products and built upon with user feedback for years. There is a global tab to choose from specific lighting effects which are then sent to all compatible products in the system, but note that there is no way to coordinate lighting from one product to another in series, so they may thus all display the effect differently depending on the number of LEDs, and complexity of said effect. The keyboard-specific tab is likely where you will spend most of your time—it allows for finer customization on a per-key basis among the usual 16.8 M colors on offer (256 brightness steps per R/G/B channel). There are plenty of static, dynamic, and reactive lighting effects on offer, along with effect-specific sub-options, including brightness level, speed, direction, and whether to go with a single color or an RGB mix. Many of these could admittedly do with finer steps, and even adding custom colors is not as simple—I still don't know how to replace an added color with another one.