The gasket mounting system is optimized to slightly soften the typing without feeling overly flexible, and works with the switches to create a solid, slightly bouncy key press with a great, bassier, quieter sound without feeling dull or muffled. If switches aren’t your thing, the Pro also features hot-swappable sockets, meaning you can change switches without a soldering iron. While they no longer have it Kailh brandthe new sockets appear almost identical to those of the BlackWidow V4 75% and still feel solid when replacing the switches.
Beyond that, the new printed circuit board (PCB)-mounted stabilizers don’t vibrate or make noise when typing, and are a much-appreciated improvement over the base model’s plate-mounted stabilizers. The keycaps are impressive with bright keycaps and play well with the rest of the keyboard. You can replace them if you want – there are no oddly shaped keys, so any set of full-size keycaps can get full coverage.
The keyboard can be adjusted between 4, 6 and 9 degrees of typing angle and the 75% layout is ideal for most uses. Compared to a full-size keyboard or even a keyless keyboard (TKL), this layout saves a lot of space on your desk. But unlike 65%, 60% or smaller keyboards, you don’t need to memorize function levels and keystrokes for everyday use.
Photography: Henri Robbins
Slim, simple and elegant
With an intuitive layout and incredibly soft palm rest, the Pro’s ergonomics hold up even during long-term use and extended typing sessions. One of my favorite functional improvements over the original model is the new dial on the keyboard, which Razer now calls the Command Dial. Along with the OLED display, it can be configured to control multiple different functions, which can be activated by pressing a button on the side of the keyboard. These range from volume controls to OLED, RGB and display brightness. You can also use it to switch between open windows and browse videos.
Customizing the OLED screen is simple and streamlined, and you don’t need to do any extra work to load GIFs or images to display on this small screen: Razer’s Synapse software can automatically convert them to the correct size and format. The display’s other uses include displaying system information (e.g., GPU and CPU temperature and load, date and time, etc.) and an audio visualizer, all of which were easy to set up and worked well in my testing. The system usage data was accurate enough to be useful, but tended to be 3 to 5 percent off Windows Task Manager (and at one point showed my system had 115 percent CPU usage ).
