Driver

The driver for the Patriot Viper V770 is specifically for this keyboard alone rather than being a unified program for all Patriot Viper peripherals. While unusual, it can mean that it is a lightweight, specialized driver. The installer can be downloaded from the downloads tab on the product page. As can be seen in the GIF above, installation is fairly straightforward. The installed program takes up a meager 7 MB of space on your hard drive and is very low on CPU usage as well, which truly makes it a lightweight driver.


If you have the keyboard not connected to the PC, you can still use the driver to get familiar with it. I did like that it scales fairly well with high resolution displays, although there is only one fixed size and no full screen/minimize option - sort this out soon, Patriot. With the keyboard connected, the only thing that changes on the home screen is that you can see any changes done via the program before, and the current lighting modes get highlighted instead.


The settings menu allows one to reset the keyboard to factory settings and update the firmware if it isn't current. This process also revealed that the MCU, and thus likely also the LED drivers, are made by Holtek, and HWInfo confirmed this via its device ID recognition. Key assignment is straightforward in that you select a key and choose between one of several assignment/re-assignment options. You can set it to actuate two keystrokes with the "Combine" option, activate a macro (if previously recorded) and more, as seen above. The keyboard is thus fully programmable, and those preferring Dvorak, Colemak, etc., over QWERTY now have another option to consider.


When first connected, the keyboard lights up in Wave (RGB only) mode from left to right. Animated lighting effects have brightness (in 50 steps) and speed (in 10 steps) controls, and the color options above will indicate if you can choose individual colors or just an RGB mixture. Some lighting modes that do allow individual color selection will then present some preset options to choose from, and you can always modify these from the full 16.8 M spectrum of colors available by using the sliders or setting the individual R/G/B channels as well. This allows you to also customize the preset color options, and you can of course simply reset the keyboard, which also resets the driver if you feel you messed up somewhere. There are a total of sixteen options here, including some reactive typing modes and five preset lighting profiles that allow per key(s) lighting control as well. No option to combine effects or do gradients, but this is not bad at all for a first start to an RGB keyboard driver. Another small issue I have is that the lighting profiles are the only ones that get visualized on the screen, so you can not tell what any of the previous effects really mean without looking at the keyboard.


Underneath the keyboard's lighting menu is the wrist rest's lighting menu. That's right, you can control the wrist rest separately if you need, and I like that. There are less options here, with a grand total of four, but I think those four will cover most people as it is. In order to sync the keyboard's and wrist rest's lighting if using one of the three animated modes, hit apply and both should initiate the new lighting modes together. Speed and brightness control will have to be identical or near-about for the best sync effect. You have similar controls as before, but each effect's speed is now limited to five steps instead of ten.

We also see here two performance sliders for the keyboard - Response time and Polling rate. The former can be selected from a range of 2-20 ms, in increments of 2 ms, and the latter from among four options; 125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz. Most end users of this keyboard will likely have no issues selecting 2 ms and 1000 Hz respectively, although you may want to tinker with this if the keyboard does not show up in the UEFI.


The Macro menu is easy to use as well, and this ends up being the general impression I get with this driver. There is an online manual which does a good job of explaining the keyboard and driver functionality for those interested. Create a macro, rename it if need be, and start recording. Once done, stop recording and you can now edit the recording in the middle third of the window that originally popped up. You can delete keystrokes, add new recordings before or after, or even include some otherwise not possible on a keyboard, including mouse clicks. You can also choose to have delays between keystrokes be part of the macro, and not shown in the video is that you can even edit the delay times by double clicking the delay segment(s) of the recording and entering the desired value in ms. Once done, the recorded macros show up in the key assignment window under, well, Macros. Up to 32 macros can be created and saved in the driver folder, with each macro allowing for up to 47 characters. Every key except the Windows key can be assigned as a macro.

Not everything is flawless though. Notice the "Profiles" option next to the Macro one? It currently does nothing functional and the keyboard manual linked above has no mention of it either. It opens up a new window that has the profile name as well as import and export options, but there is nothing else to choose from or really do at this point. When I contacted Patriot about this, I was informed that the feature did not meet their satisfaction yet, and instead of enabling it with a poor user experience, they chose to omit functionality to it instead. They also mentioned they are working on a new driver that will contain this feature among other things, but I think this feature should have been completely removed from the driver until ready as it is a potential source of confusion and frustration to end users.

Overall, the driver impressed me more than first impressions indicated, with per-key lighting and full macro controls available to choose from. This helps justify the dedicated macro buttons further. There are still things that competitors with more established drivers and more experience with peripherals have, such as more lighting control, creating profiles for both lighting and performance/macros alike, having said profiles be associated with specific applications so they active when the application is open and so on. But considering the light weight, low resource, and bug-free experience I have had during the course of testing, I am eager to see where Patriot goes from here.