Driver

This page will be a touch weird because MSI has two separate software drivers (at least on 64-bit Windows 10) that effectively do the same thing as far as the Vigor GK60 is concerned. The manual and product page talk only about MSI Gaming Center, which we will go through first. The installer can be found on the utility tab of the product page, and the latest version was 1.0.0.52 released earlier this year. It downloads as an archive, taking up 44.5 MB, and is fairly simple to install. The installed version takes up 175 MB on your storage drive and is a unified driver for all supported MSI keyboards, mice, and headsets. For those wondering, the driver is light on system resources.


Despite the installer suggesting a system reboot is needed first, it wasn't necessary with Windows 10. Opening the driver for the first time with the keyboard connected, it is recognized immediately as a keyboard, and a large render shows up alongside the product name. This is a hub to select the product of interest, which then takes you to the product-specific functions. MSI Gaming Center has a clean look and scales well with high display resolutions.

There is not much to do here as it pertains to MSI Gaming Center with the Vigor GK60 keyboard. There is a global LED on/off toggle on the homepage, and the settings menu pulls up information on the driver, confirming it is indeed the latest version. We can also check on the firmware for the keyboard, for which there were no available updates. Clicking on the keyboard takes us to the lighting controls for the LEDs, with a drop-down menu for the various supported effects. Effect-specific options come up as relevant to the right, including brightness (in five steps), speed, and direction. There are many static, dynamic, and type-responsive effects to choose from, as well as a custom mode to enable per-key lighting in the five brightness options for the red color we get here. You can also change the language layout for the onscreen keyboard here, and saving effects takes a few seconds at most. There are no other options here, including key-mapping or macros, which may be because of the USB microcontroller on this keyboard rather than the driver itself.


The second driver, only available on 64-bit Windows 10, is the more popular MSI Mystic Light. It is a unified driver across not only MSI peripherals, but their other compatible DIY product categories, including graphics cards and motherboards. The latest version is Mystic Light 3 (3.0.0.35, to be more precise), and the installer can be found in the same place as MSI Gaming Center. It also downloads as an archived file, ~40 MB in size, and installation is extremely similar to MSI Gaming Center. Mystic Light takes up less space, though, because it adds support to recognized devices, and is equally light on system resources as it pertains to the Vigor GK60.


MSI Mystic Light 3 with the Vigor GK60 keyboard delivers a more modern user experience, though it does no more than MSI Gaming Center and with the options available on the same homepage. It arguably scales even better with high DPI/scaling displays, generally taking up more real estate at the same display settings than MSI Gaming Center. Here, we get a large render of the product of interest as well, and a global brightness control in the same five steps.

There is not much more to say that has not already been said before with MSI Gaming Center. We get a settings menu, albeit of course for the different driver, which does not have built-in firmware support here. The lighting controls are also available in two columns, laid out as pages on the left, and the RGB control wheel at the bottom is grayed out, reminding us that the Vigor GK60 can't do any of that. The effect names are different here, and the effects are actually previewed onscreen, which is nice to see. There are fewer effect-specific options, however, which hints towards why MSI is marketing the use of Gaming Center with the keyboard. Mystic Light 3 is best used for simple effects running across the MSI product portfolio you have.

I do wish we had more functionality options for the keyboard, especially as this is a key feature used by competitors in the price range the MSI Vigor GK60 finds itself in, but I always appreciate a bug-free software user experience that also works well.