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Patriot Viper V770 Mechanical RGB Keyboard Review 7

Patriot Viper V770 Mechanical RGB Keyboard Review

Disassembly »

Closer Examination


More plastic wrap, this time around on the keyboard itself. Patriot is making sure you get the product clean and without a speck of dust. The Viper V770 has an interesting mix of clean and aggressive design throughout, and a lot of this has to do with them cramming in as many things as they could think of as possible. On the sides, we have a diffused light bar with an audio pass-through port on the right side joining in. This is where the provided adapter comes into play if your headset needs separate 3.5 mm jacks. In the top-right corner, as seen from the front, is a bright red Viper, written out instead of being the snake head logo we saw on the wrist rest. It feels out of place in my opinion. The keyboard section above it is bent inward and houses a volume scroll wheel and three 2-way toggle switches that allow six functions in a smaller space than having six separate buttons. These travel ~2 mm in either direction before coming to a complete stop wherein there is a small tactile feeling that also actuates any assigned functionality. It would be cool to see an analog version as it would allow you to use one of these instead of a large wheel for volume control, and there are endless other possibilities. In the other corner are more buttons, and these control some of the available lighting modes and also change overall brightness. The left side has a USB pass-through port, which completes this keyboard's hardware-dedicated feature set.

The legends on the keycaps are fairly clean, but positioning of the primary and secondary legends is all over the place. Some have the secondary legends treated as a superscript to the primary ones, and others have it below the primary legends. It does not help either that the primary legends themselves occupy a small part of the keycap's top surface with a high, central position and a small font size to ensure the LED immediately underneath illuminates them fully; this confused mix needs to go; Patriot need to be uniform one way or the other.


Turning the keyboard around, we see that the aggressive part of the design has carried over here, but it does fit the overall ID well. There are plenty of rubber pads all around the periphery of the keyboard, and these alone will keep the keyboard from sliding around on your desk with the wrist rest adding on more friction when in use. There are two feet to help elevate the keyboard, and these too have thick, long rubber pads on the bottom. This is a hefty keyboard to begin with, and now, there is simply no way it will ever move on a desk's surface. A non-detachable cable with no cable-routing options comes out from the top, but it is braided in a red and black color to go with the red and black color scheme we have been seeing throughout. It is also a thin cable considering it terminates in not just the keyboard's male USB Type-A connector, but the USB pass-through port and pass-through audio jacks. There is a lot going on here, and everything is marked clearly to make sure you only use and connect those you will end up using. USB 3.0 is recommended to fully power all the RGB LEDs on the keyboard and wrist rest.

There is one final feature here which I initially dismissed as a useless gimmick but later found myself using more and more - a slide-out tray in the middle of the keyboard with an elevated end for your phone or even a tablet. Combined with some third-party apps that remotely read your PC hardware's status, this is a nice option to have. At the very least, you will know when someone calls you if you are in the middle of a frantic gaming session - for better or worse.


The Viper V770 keycaps have an OEM profile, as I expected, with the different rows being sculpted at the top for better support when typing. If this is not your first Cherry MX style mechanical keyboard, chances are high you have used keycaps of this very profile already. They are also staggered, which I also expected, so there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The lack of a top case panel means these are floating in design, and this helps when it comes to either removing or installing them for cleaning or modding, while allowing for some light bleed at the edges. Here, we also see the 5-pin receptacles that make contact with the pins on the wrist rest. The keycaps themselves are about average for stock keycaps out of ABS plastic (average wall thickness is 1.08 mm) and with laser etched primary and secondary legends. Those keycaps that have the secondary legends placed below the primary ones end up with non-uniform backlighting since the LED is right under the keycap's upper portion.


The Viper V770 uses Kailh Red RGB mechanical switches. Kailh has probably been the company who has improved the most this year in terms of consistency and production yields, and they have also used their increasing customer base to justify the development of over ten new switches in the past few months alone. While the Kailh Red is not a new switch, these are from their updated production facility using updated molds for the switch housing and stem, right to where these feel better and quite different from the Kailh switches of old. No complaints here from me for not going with Cherry, although time will tell how reliable these end up being. The larger keycaps have a costar stabilizer with a wire each that does add some work to their removal or installation, but these do prevent that mushy feeling when typing on the large keycaps using Cherry stabilizers - especially for the space bar.


Finally, a look at the keyboard with the wrist rest connected. There are indeed multiple magnets on either side of the pin connectors that help keep the wrist rest in place, and there is no give when pressing down hard as the wrist rest completely rests on the desk's surface.
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