Driver

The driver for the NEON K85 RGB is aptly named the NEON K85 Engine Suite and was specifically created just for this keyboard. It can be downloaded here, and the installer takes up 22.6 MB as an archived file. Installation is straightforward, and the final install takes up 47.2 MB. It is lightweight as a result of this product specificity and barely registers in task manager when looking at resource consumption.


When I first looked, the driver was not even up, and I had to ask Rosewill about it. They then uploaded version 0.9.8.1, so presumably version 1.x is coming soon as well. Regardless, they assured me that it was functionally complete already, so I began taking a look at it. The driver does not have a maximize window option and does not take up the entirety of my 4K display, although it did scale very well with native Windows 10 OS scaling. The user interface is quite simple with a single window and a few tabs on the left with presumably more option sets. The default skin is also the only one and employs a predominantly black color scheme with some white headers and the Rosewill logo in red.

Here, we can take a look at the global settings available in the driver, which only supports English as of the date of this article. The help icon reveals the current device's serial number as well as the firmware and driver version, and also reveals who helped make this driver a reality. The settings tab has more options as seen in the video.

There are eight software profiles you can create and select, and each has its own set of options on the left side and can be linked to a program of your choosing. Key assignment is the main feature in this first tab, and you can use the virtual keyboard to set up the keyboard as you desire - say, if QWERTY is not to your liking, for example. The various key assignment options include disable, a new keyboard function, mouse function, macro, multimedia function, Windows shortcut, and program launcher, which also includes the option to open specific websites if used with a browser. When using the macro option, you automatically get directed to the next tab, which is aptly for macros. If you have no macro created and saved, you can record and edit new ones that can then be assigned to the key. Rosewill provides the option to control the delay between keystrokes as well, and the entire operation is fairly user friendly, although the manual does a good job of explaining everything here too if you are new to keyboard drivers.

Lighting is a big part of the keyboard as well, so I dedicated an entire video to going over the lighting options in the driver. This is really where the available 16.8 M RGB per-key backlighting shines, even though the onboard controls are good for a pinch. The various effects can be associated with profiles, and there is an option to also have the lighting turn off when the computer is in sleep mode or shut down. The effects are static, breathing, streamer, rain, horse race lamp, twinkling stars, reactive, waterdrop, cross, ripple, aurora, and heatmap. These names may sound weird, and it would have been nice to get a virtual preview of the effect on the driver, although you can quickly apply these to see how things look on the device itself. The various effects also have specific options, including brightness, duration, and the color palette, of course, where you can set the individual R/G/B channel values (256 x 256 x 256 levels per color). There is finally a custom option, which is essentially where you set per-key lighting, and you can use the keyboard and/or mouse to select specific keys or regions. Rosewill even has some preset options based on some popular games as a starting point you can go with.

Overall, the driver is decent for what it is, but there is one thing I have not yet mentioned. The keyboard has side plates that light up as well, and there is no option in the driver to control them at all or even turn them off. This can get annoying in that you have so many animation effects for the keyboard, and then the side plates are in a completely different color. Similarly, with no option to turn them off, the keyboard will be lit on the sides no matter what.