Audio/Peripherals Keyboard Reviews

Steelseries Apex 5 in review: mechanical gaming keyboard with many features

Switches

The switches installed here are Steelseries' own "Hybrid Mechanical Gaming Switches". In this case, I received the Blue Switches, which, like the blue equivalent of Cherry, have tactile feedback and give a click when activated. Personally, I have been using the Cherry MX Brown for years now, which also have tactile feedback, and I have to say that I really like the Steelseries switches. Especially when writing long texts – like this one – this feedback is particularly pleasant. The restraining position is a little stronger and the progression when pressing the switch feels more precise than cherry brown or blue. 

But clicking on it is a little too loud for me. I can hear this clicking while writing through my closed headphones. In an office with several colleagues, this keyboard would certainly not be very well received, but if you sit alone in your office or study and like a very "clicky" keyboard, you will love these switches. Tactile switches.

But the right party trick of the Apex 5 is that the switches can be easily removed from the keyboard and replaced quite fixed. The version that Steelseries used here is actually also Cherry MX compatible and thus allows pretty much all possible configurations. And that's where the Apex stands out from other mechanical keyboards in this price range, because this feature is usually only found with the right high-end keyboards.

Other features

If you haven't had enough of the previous features and possibilities, you will definitely find some suggestions in this section, because the Apex is far from finished. As already mentioned, the Apex 5 has a small 40×128 pixel OLED display on the top right side. This can be personalized almost to infinity, you can paint a picture yourself, you can import pictures or even GIFs, you can view the current track from apps like Tidal and Spotify and you can display in-game information such as life, money, mana or the like for a huge selection of games.

A multifunctional controller and a media button are positioned right next to this small display. The slider is mainly used as a volume control, but once you hold down the media button you get into a menu where you can adjust the lighting of the keyboard, change profiles and, among other things, perform a factory reset. The operation here is quite intuitive, and easy to learn.

At the bottom of the keyboard you can find another small feature, because the cable, which usually comes in the middle of the back of the keyboard, can be routed to one of three possible places by means of channels under the keyboard. This may be completely unnecessary for some users, but I really like the Steelseries here gives the user the opportunity to make the choice.

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