Performance

There is full N-key rollover USB here out of the box, as Aqua's test confirms. Similarly, no key chatter was detected on all the keys using Switch Hitter. The key not lit up here is Fn, not a second Win key.

When you first connect the keyboard to your computer, it powers on with the "Streamer" lighting effect, which is effectively a rainbow wave that moves from left to right. At the same time, the side plates light up in a static bright orange as well.


Here is a better view of the side plates lit up, and note that you can only cycle through the ten available static color options using Fn + Pg Dn. There is no option to turn them off at all thus, as mentioned earlier. I then used the driver to set up a random per-key custom lighting effect as seen above, with said lighting on the keyboard next to it. Some keys were, on purpose, a different color compared to the adjacent ones to test the effect of any light bleed, and there is some visible bleeding here, especially when a darker color is next to a lighter one. The floating keycaps are a contributor here, as are the glossy sides on the keycaps. Finally, I set all the LEDs to a static white to see how true to color the keyboard could display it, and it was better than most with a white that had a slight shade of blue on the keyboard's front, though it did stay more true to color on the side plates.






Here are some of the possible lighting effects as demonstrated, with details in the title naming the effect option. Hopefully, this helps illustrate what is possible with the keyboard, and I will note that the transition animations are very good here as well.

As for the other keyboard-specific functions programmed in, there are dedicated volume control buttons as well as one for the calculator built into Windows. Fn + these buttons provides playback control as explained in the manual and also depicted via secondary legends on the keycaps. The onboard backlighting and side lighting controls use fourteen keys in combination with Fn, so I will not go ahead and list every single combination here, and refer you to the manual instead. Finally, in case you made an error somewhere and wanted to start from scratch, Fn + Esc for ~3 s restores the keyboard to its default settings.



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 two Rosewill NEON K85 RGB samples at ~105 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with tactile and clicky switches. I did bottom out here, although you can definitely stop at the point of actuation if you practice on either switch. In terms of actuation and typing, both were excellent and essentially as good a clone to the Cherry MX Brown and Blue as any. If anything, I would say the tactile feedback is more noticeable here too. I did find that the Kailh Brown switches were scratchier than other Kailh Brown switch keyboards I have used before, so much so that I pulled out a couple of others to make sure I was not just imagining it. Indeed, more often than not, the switches here were not as satisfactory to type on, so perhaps Rosewill got a bad batch and did not do rigorous QC here. No such problem with the Kailh Blue switches, though, as they were a pleasure to use.