Manyak

The US distributor for iRocks, PCUSA Corp, sent me their mechanical gaming keyboard this week to write a review on. So here it is

Unboxing

Here's the box the keyboard comes in.


Inside the box you'll find everything you should get when you buy a keyboard: nothing but the keyboard itself. No bloated drivers or anything.


The keyboard itself is nice and compact. Most compact keyboards simply get rid of the number pad on the right, or completely rearrange the keys to fit around the letter keys in an unusual manner like you might find on a laptop. iRocks took a different path with this board and it came out pretty good. But we'll get into the layout later.


The cable comes with a velcro tie strapped right onto it. It's a nice touch for a compact keyboard, especially for those who game on a Laptop or take their PC to LAN parties.


Two USB ports are located on the back. They are fully USB 2.0 compatible, and benchmarking a 20MB/s flash drive yielded no loss in speed over connecting it directly to the PC. It would have been nice if one had been placed on the side, since that makes it easier to quickly connect flash drives to.


On the back of the keyboard you can see the groove for the cable as well as plenty of feet to keep it steady.


Another nice touch they added is rubber feet on the keyboard's stands. This helps keep the keyboard steady on your desk. Weather you use the stands or not you'll find that the keyboard is actually very stable and doesn't move around at all.



Layout



The first thing you'll notice about the board is the large enter key and small backspace key. You'll find this on many keyboards, including the one I'm typing on right now. But it's a bit surprising to see it on a compact board, considering the real estate wasted on a single key.

You'll also see that the Numlock, Caps Lock, and Scroll Lock LEDs are embedded into the respective keys themselves. A pretty slick way of saving space. If your desk or keyboard tray is pretty low they shine directly into your eyes and can be bothersome with how bright they are. But thankfully you probably won't be keeping any of them switched on for long. The Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys were removed from the keyboard, so using those keys will have to be done through the numpad. But because of how close the pad is to the letter keys you won't be moving your hands any farther than on a standard keyboard.

Another nice thing about having the numpad so close is that the backspace and delete keys are within quick reach when using it. It makes things a bit easier if you make a mistake entering numbers.


The arrow key cluster is positioned very well - within reach of your pinky while typing. And if you use the arrow keys instead of the WASD cluster while gaming you get several more keys within your immediate reach than on a standard keyboard. However - to fit them there and still have a larger shift key the slash/question mark key had to be moved to the very right. It's still very easy to get to with your pinky while typing, but may take a while to get used to.


On the other side of the board you can see a giant Ctrl key but no meta (Windows) key. Since this board is advertised as a gaming keyboard I'm guessing they eliminated that key so you wouldn't hit it accidentally. If you find that you can't live without it you can always program it to one of the Ctrl or Alt keys using Autohotkey.



Internals

This keyboard uses Cherry MX Brown switches. They are very light and have a slight tactile feel to them. Here you can see the switches both with and without an LED.


To take the keyboard apart you have to get to the screws underneath each of the 8 feet.


You can see here that the switches are mounted to a metal plate on top of the PCB. This makes the keyboard feel very solid. It also protects the PCB in case you spill anything on it.


However, they did leave two holes in the plate for electrical components. So do watch out for where you spilled something, just in case. These should have definitely been placed on the back instead, so that the plate could protect it a bit better.


Upon unscrewing and lifting up the metal plate you'll find all the guts of the keyboard. The wires connecting the big PCB are soldered on, so be sure not to put too much stress on them unless you're prepared to replace them yourself.


Looking closely at the PCB you can see exactly where the switch and LEDs are mounted. As you can see, it's not that hard to replace these switches with Blues, Blacks, or whatever other Cherry MX switch suits your taste if you like. But if you want to install LEDs on all the switches you'll need to wire them up separately since only 3 keys on the board have spots to solder them.


Rollover and Delay

These are the two most important things to consider when looking at a keyboard for gaming. Without decent rollover you won't be able to press many keys at once, and too much lag when you press a key will ruin the gameplay. Now, being that this keyboard is USB and not PS/2, the highest possible rollover that should be possible is 6 standard keys plus 4 modifiers (shift, alt, etc). But iRocks is advertising this board as full n-key, meaning that even if you press all the keys on the keyboard they should all go through. And surprisingly enough, they actually did manage to do this - although not in the way you might think.

Testing this keyboard showed that the full USB spec 6+4 key rollover is there in the exact way you'd expect. Unless you're some mutant that has more than this many fingers on each of your hands, you'll be perfectly fine in games. It's only when trying to go over the USB limit that the board runs into some problems.

What they have done is included some sort of onboard memory that keeps track of all the keys you press and sticks them in a queue, then spits them back out over the USB connection to your PC. So say you have 6 keys pressed and you try to press a 7th, instead of blocking that key it blocks the first one you pressed instead. And if you mash the entire keyboard at once, it'll run a sequence of all the keys you pressed, 6 keys at a time. You can see both of these situations happening in the video below.


Another thing you might have noticed in that video is the key delay. While within USB spec the lowest delay I could achieve was 6ms. This is excellent. However, while it was sequencing the keys that were over the spec the delay was significantly high at ~200ms. But I don't think that should ever be a serious problem because you won't be reaching that number of keypresses at once.


Conclusion

Keyboards are tough to give a definitive rating because each and every person can have a different opinion about them. But as far as this keyboard goes, there are only a few things I would have changed on it:
- The Backspace, Enter, and Backslash key are easier to use in the standard ANSI layout.
- The LEDs could be a bit dimmer, even though they will be off most of the time.
- The delay on sequencing excess rollover keys is a bit high.


But all in all this is a great keyboard, and I have no trouble recommending it to anyone looking for a less than full-sized board with Cherry MX Browns.

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