Corsair has been making gaming gear for years: mice and keyboards, headsets and mousepads. Now they're uniting their various gaming lines under one Corsair Gaming banner, and to mark the occasion they're updating one of our favorite gaming keyboards, the Corsair Vengance K70. The new Corsair Gaming K70 RGB is still a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX switches, but it replaces the old red LEDs with full-color RGB backlighting under every key. We tested out the K70 RGB with Corsair's new customization software to see how flashy the lighting can get.
The K70 RGB pairs with Corsair's CUE software, which controls everything from shortcuts and key macros to light programming. The lighting system is powerful, but not immediately intuitive. It's easy enough to create a lighting pattern, like a gradient or wave of various colors, but it's initially overwhelming how many options there are—the speed at which lights change, duration of an effect, brightness, even what groups of keys or individual keys the effect applies to.
Figuring out how to apply a lighting pattern to activate based on a command or keypress involves jumping around the software a bit. Spend long enough with it, though, and you can have keys breathe or change colors when pressed, or organize your keyboard by different lighting zones. We played around with a simple wave pattern to take full advantage of the RGB spectrum.
It's pretty.
Aside from its new per-key lighting, the K70 RGB isn't very different from the Vengeance K70 of the past. Corsair is offering it with three different types of Cherry MX switches: Reds, ideal for gaming, Blues, ideal for typing, and Browns, which sit right in the middle.
Each model costs $170, which is a lot of money, even for a gaming keyboard. Full RGB lighting doesn't come cheap. If you plan on grabbing a K70 RGB, we recommend the Red Cherry MX switches for games. The keyboard is already available on Amazon . If you just want the functionality without the fancy RGB lighting, you can grab the older Vengeance K70 for a much more affordable $110.
Be sure to check out our list of the best gaming keyboards.
