Software

The software driver for the Thermaltake Level 20 GT RGB keyboard is TT iTAKE Engine and can be downloaded from their downloads page. The latest public version at the time of testing was 1.4.2009, and the installer is 36.7 MB in size. As seen above, installation is fairly straightforward, and the final package takes up approximately 63 MB. The package is fairly light on system resources. When you do open the program, it is best to have the keyboard connected, although you can still play around and get familiar with the program without any hardware connected.


Opening it for the first time with the keyboard connected, we see a homepage that is well laid out. Note, however, that I have cropped part of the bottom slightly because the program displays your desktop name and IP address there for some reason. At the top is a keyboard tab, so other product categories presumably come up there depending on what you have compatible with TT iTAKE.

There is not a lot to see in the settings menu, except for all that advertisement of what else you can do outside of TT iTAKE. It comes off a bit obnoxious, but is at least kept away from the user experience as a whole. There is a mobile app, there are other desktop programs, and there is Amazon Alexa integration, just in case this interests you. I have none primarily because I have no other device compatible with these, so I moved on. You can also see in the video above how there is software control over the six onboard profiles, which can be associated with programs and renamed too.

A large virtual keyboard is the base for the customization menu, including selecting a key and remapping it to a plethora of options, such as assigning a macro, game shortcut, opening a program or URL, and disabling it altogether. The tab alongside allows for the creation of new macros, recording and editing them, including moving keystrokes up and down, and changing delays between keystrokes, which ties back into the key mapping as well.

The third tab is titled "Lighting" and works just as the name suggests. There is a good set of functionality and customization here, including static, dynamic, and reactive effects. These are available on a per-key basis with 256 steps of brightness control per R/G/B channel for a total of 16.8 M colors for each key. Each effect also has sub-menus for more options, although there are only two control steps for most with speed and direction. The final tab is TT Sync. While I have no other compatible device, it presumably works as expected—I can't test it at all.

As mentioned before, there is also an iOS and Android companion app for TT iTAKE, which requires you to have the app installed on a device that is on the same Wi-Fi network as the PC with the full drivers installed. In theory, you are then able to pair the app device for control over lighting effects as well as the creation of simple macros, in addition to actually playing PC games from your smartphone as a controller. Unfortunately, the app just kept crashing every single time I tried to pair it, and it appears that this is more common than not at this time. The Level 20 GT RGB is also part of a product lineup supported by Tt's RGB PLUS unifying software for lighting and can be synchronized with other compatible products of which I have none here to test. Rounding off this disappointment is a lack of Razer products as well, since this particular Razer version is also compatible with Razer Synapse for even more unified software control. Take it for what you will as I could not test any of these extra control options.