Driver

There is a software driver for the Tecware Phantom RGB keyboard, and the installer can be downloaded from this page. The driver is product-specific, as the name suggests, and Tecware has similar software drivers for their other peripherals. A unified driver would be good here, although there are other, more pressing matters at hand as we shall see shortly. The installer is just 6.4 MB in size, and as seen above, its installation is fairly straightforward. There is no option to choose whether or not to have shortcuts on the desktop or task menu, but those are no dealbreakers by any means. The final package takes up approximately 12 MB on your storage drive. Once installed, it will prompt you to open the program. It is best to have the keyboard connected before opening it, and the driver is light on system resources as well.


Opening it for the first time with the keyboard connected does not make for a great start as the program opens in a tiny window even at 1080p display resolution. To make things worse, it does not respond well to display scaling in Windows, which leads to many text items jutting out of their boxes or simply being cut off abruptly. The drop-down menu for lighting controls is a nice example of this, and it makes for a less than satisfactory user experience.

The software driver allows for different software profiles to be edited, with associated lighting for each. We can also change the USB polling rate set to 125 Hz by default for some reason, and there is a macro editor thrown in. This macro editor is especially reminiscent of other such software drivers I have used in the past—it is barely usable at high display resolutions. Most people will likely use the driver to better customize the backlighting on the keyboard, and there are plenty of lighting options to choose from. These include a series of static and dynamic lighting effects, including reactive typing effects with sub-options for effects, including brightness, speed, and direction. There are also custom and zone lighting effects which make use of per-key RGB backlighting, of which we get a full 16.8 M colors to choose from, something you can't do via any onboard controls. I would have liked to see finer steps of control for brightness in particular; however, there are critical user experience issues to resolve first.

Let's cut right to it—this is a reskinned version of the same base driver program Glorious PC Gaming used with the GMMK. The PCB is nearly identical there, with the same USB microcontroller, so the same issues I had there remain here. This is the biggest drawback of going with companies that end up having to adopt a common platform for their products, as opposed to larger companies that can afford to have their own software development team.