Performance

The Patriot Viper V770 supports 109-key rollover USB, which is basically NKRO in this case, and this tested successfully using Aqua's test. Switch Hitter confirmed no chatter with these keys during the testing period.





The two videos above show the keyboard on its own and with its wrist rest, when first connected to the PC. Both light up in Wave mode from left to right, and I will say right away that the wrist rest looks a lot better in person than in that video above, where the video exposure was lowered to account for the higher number of LEDs on the keyboard.









Here are a few more examples to demonstrate some of the many combinations possible with the keyboard and wrist rest. The on-board lighting control buttons on the keyboard affect only the keyboard as expected, and these go through the various lighting options we saw earlier, thus allowing for a good amount of control without needing a software driver. Each button toggles through a specific set of options; one that controls breathing mode and toggles through individual colors, for example, and there are multi-colored breathing modes and so on. Fn + F1 through F5 activate the five lighting profiles, and once in one of these, Fn + F12 initiates backlight recording mode wherein per-key lighting can be performed as well for that color. Pressing Fn + F12 again saves the updated lighting profile and stops backlight recording mode. There is also onboard brightness and speed control, but we only have four steps of control for each (0/33/67/100 %), so the driver is recommended for finer control.


In order to test the lighting color, I set all the LEDs on the keyboard to a static white. We see that the secondary legends are placed below the primary ones, which end up not as well backlit as expected, and the LEDs are not as bright as those on some other RGB keyboards, which only emphasizes this situation. The white is also not a true white, and there is a light blue hue here.



The side light bars participate in every lighting mode on the keyboard to where the left to right, or vice versa, begins and ends with them. In a dark environment, they create a side glow, but will otherwise end up being mostly for show to others around you.

There is no on-board macro recording as a result of the driver being necessary to have the macros recorded and activated. As such, you will need to keep the driver in the system tray.


Kailh Red mechanical switches are designed to be as much of a Cherry MX Red switch clone as possible. With the same 45 cN actuation force at 2 mm actuation distance and 4 mm of total travel, currently manufactured Kailh Red switches are near impossible to distinguish from the originals in a blind test. Indeed, as measured by a Haldex tension force meter, twenty of these switches chosen at random presented an average actuation force of 44.87 cN with a standard deviation of 0.06 cN. Bottoming out was uniform as well and, as with Cherry themselves, Kailh has improved the molds and production QC of their linear switches recently to where these feel very smooth compared to the same Kailh Red RGB switches from another keyboard I tested early last year.


As always, the sound of a keyboard is based on more than just the switch type. So when comparing sound clips, consider the keyboard as a whole. In this case, I have provided above an example sound clip of me typing on the Patriot Viper V770 sample at ~90 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with linear switches. I did bottom out here, as I anticipate most will with 45 cN linear switch keyboards anyway.