Driver

The driver for the Cooler Master SK630 can be downloaded on the product page. It is called Cooler Master Portal, and my thoughts on it remain the same as when I last checked it out even though there has been a slight update from v1.00 to v1.01. The installer downloads as an archive and is 8.6 MB in size. Installation is pretty straightforward, as seen above, and light on system resources, taking up 32.5 MB on your storage drive. However, Cooler Master Portal is not actually the driver for the keyboard and serves more as a unifying hub to then build upon based on the supported peripherals you have.


With the keyboard connected, Cooler Master Portal opens and recognizes it immediately as a device it also displays on the left with some more options available once selected. However, you can initially only select "install" to actually install the driver. Cooler Master Portal then downloads the keyboard installer, which is the second software installer we saw on the product page and initiates the installation process as seen above. This is a further 32.5 MB in size and opens up a second window, and launch options in Cooler Master Portal.



But no, you are not done yet. The SK630 driver prompts you to check for firmware updates and install them. This takes another minute or two and allows you to update the keyboard to the latest firmware even if it is already on it. Indeed, Cooler Master even has a specific notification at the end for.. special.. cases such as this. It is now that you can go further and explore the SK630 driver, and there is a lot to see here. You can close Cooler Master Portal completely while dealing with this driver, although you can only launch it from within the former.

In this video, I go through the settings, which just alert you to the software version, 2.14 in this case, and provide another option to update the keyboard firmware. There is also a drop-down menu to quickly toggle between the profiles for the keyboard. The first tab in the driver is named "LED" and is all about lighting. The virtual keyboard on screen shows some of the effects to give you an idea, but most are not seen or reflected, especially for the dynamic effects, which is a bit of a shame since they have this very thing integrated in their product page already. There are multiple effects to choose from on the left, with each mode having further customization options, including color, direction of the effect, and speed of transition (in five steps). You have individual R/G/B channel control for 256 brightness steps each, which thus gives you the promised 16.8 M colors available. Custom mode is where you go for per-key static lighting, multi-zone mode is where you can assign multiple different effects to the same profile (four slots available here), and system status mode has two cool effects, including an equalizer, and a CPU utilization visualizer. At the same time, I do not recall specifically granting permission for the driver to get that information from my system either. For those who care, no data was transferred out of my system due to the driver, if such is a concern. The final tab is on the profiles themselves, and knowing these four are saved on the device means you do not have to worry about the absence of the driver once you set it up to your desire. This also goes well with Cooler Master adding in features to help with taking the keyboard from one place to another. One neat thing I noticed here was that the 1-4 keys on the actual keyboard (those with hotkeys assigned to profile switching) light up in order to indicate a driver-loading process visually.

The second tab is for creating and allocating macros, and it is as complete as I could have asked for. You can record long macros, edit keystrokes, edit the delay between keystrokes, and allocate them to specific keys. No complaints here, but if there was something I would like to see, it would be the ability to add missed keystrokes post-recording. The Key Map tab is even simpler since all you can do is disable or re-assign keys to another function on the keyboard. The previous tab allowed for the assignment of macros, so here, I would have liked to see the option to assign keys to other things, including computer tasks; opening a specific application, for example. As it is, the tab's name quite literally describes the scope of functionality available here.

It is a bit disappointing to see that the key-mapping feature, or really anything at all, has not changed in the long time since I last used Cooler Master Portal's keyboard-specific drivers. All they seem to have done is add support for newer products released since, and going through redundant drivers is also not a great sight to see again and again.