SteelSeries Apex M750 Keyboard Review 1

SteelSeries Apex M750 Keyboard Review

Performance »

Driver


The driver for the Apex M750 and other recent SteelSeries peripherals is aptly named the SteelSeries Engine, and the latest version, 3.11.4 at the time of the review, can be downloaded here. The installer is 104 MB in size, and the installed driver takes up slightly less than 200 MB. System utilization is minimal, and it is fairly obvious that the software has matured to its current stable state.


The first time you open up SteelSeries Engine 3, you get what is essentially an ad, which is not the best start, but thankfully is just a click away from being closed. With the keyboard plugged in, I was prompted to update the firmware of the device.


Firmware updating is just as simple as the driver installation itself and took less than a minute in total, from downloading the firmware to updating it. It did ask me to manually disconnect and reconnect the keyboard to my computer after I had, which is a minor pain, especially since some competitors have managed to devise a way to do so while the keyboard remains plugged in. Still, for something you will do very rarely over the course of using the keyboard, I am not as bothered.


Now that everything is good to go, there are two aspects to the driver. SteelSeries Engine 3 is more akin to a set of organs somehow functioning together rather than being contained in a body since several functional ends and pieces open up in different windows. The bulk functionality pertaining to the keyboard comes up when you click on the header for the keyboard, which in turn opens up a new window as seen above. I do wish SteelSeries would somehow manage to make everything cohesive by putting everything into the same window, so add this to the list of minor complaints that are now beginning to stack up on this page.




Despite the window opening with the illumination tab by default, I wanted to cover the items here from the left to the right in order. This means working on the key-bindings tab first, and I am left impressed with the functionality it offers. As you can see in the first video above, you have a lot of options as far as key bindings go, all of which are laid out in a logical manner. So if QWERTY is not to your liking, this allows you to use Dvorak, Coleman, or other typing layouts easily. The UX design is very good here, and that's coming from someone who has seen his share of the best and worst in this category. The macro editor opens up when needed, even though it has a dedicated place already, and live preview works as intended in that any change done but not saved is still in effect when used on the keyboard (which of course does not translate to the footage captured). There are also multiple configurations, which some others refer to as profiles that can be associated with applications such that you have a set of software configurations that are active when said application opens up. You thus don't have to worry about manually setting up and activating configurations, but also note that these are not saved to the device; you need to have the driver up and running.


Backlighting is a big part of the keyboard, and the software control offered by the Illumination tab does not disappoint either. I dare say the options here are excellent and second only to Corsair's CUE 2.x, which is really something to be proud of. I do wish these effects were shown on-screen, but since there is no real library of lighting profiles to create and download as with Corsair at this time, you can just set it to live preview to see it on the actual keyboard in front of you. The various effects are separated as active and reactive, and you can have one of each be saved and running. These are saved to the device, which is partly also why SteelSeries Engine 3 does not have the higher degree of freedom CUE offers.


The Settings tab is very straightforward, but I still appreciate the help cues with their question mark icons in various locations. You can change the layout via the driver to quickly access keystrokes without going through the key bindings, change the polling rate, change the brightness of the entire keyboard quickly, and also assign a skin color to the driver's home page for some extra customization.






Thus far, we were accessing the control options specific to the Apex M750, which were just a part of the global options available. In fact, everything we saw was a result of clicking on the product in the "My Gear" tab of the driver, and we see that it has its own set of settings and other options. SteelSeries has global customization and integration in the "Engine Apps" tab, which in turn has three different options within itself. The first, PrismSync, has all to do with syncing lighting across compatible devices, the second with excellent Discord integration to where you can visualize Discord communication alerts on your keyboard, and the third is an audio visualizer app that turns your devices into, well, an audio visualizer - more on that on the next page. Unfortunately, I only have one compatible SteelSeries peripheral here, which happens to be this very keyboard, so hopefully the videos will further help explain what I am trying to convey by using words alone.

There are a few other things I will touch on briefly, which are still very interesting, and I will leave it to users to decide whether they are at all interested. You can, for instance, create an online account and have configurations saved there to later download and use across multiple computers, but you do not need to do so at all if you do not want to (Razer, are you listening?). As it is, armed with live preview, what is going on is very easy to figure out. There are even options to upload a GIF and have it be a new lighting effect, for example, called ImageSync. There are even more apps that can be found here, including specific game apps that bring with them lighting effects that correspond to in-game activity. All these apps are thanks to their GameSense SDK, and this is very promising for the driver's future functionality and integration. Overall, SteelSeries Engine 3 is very powerful, but the more they go for this discrete app-based control, the more they risk alienating features and users alike. I urge them to figure out a better way to get everything together, even if the individual parts themselves are well designed.
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Dec 23rd, 2024 07:55 EST change timezone

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