Corsair is announcing an upgraded version of its K70 mechanical keyboard today that comes with more responsive OPX optical-mechanical switches. It costs $149.99, $10 more than the same old K70 launched last year with extra traditional Cherry mechanical switches. Aside from the switch alternate, the brand new K70 is broadly the same as last year’s model, with a detachable USB-C cable, RGB lighting fixtures, and a tenkeyless format.
The motive you might want a gaming keyboard with optical switches comes down to debounce postpone, which commonly impacts keyboards with traditional mechanical switches. When you press a mechanical transfer, there may be a brief period while its metal contacts clatter together earlier than eventually settling, and this indicates the keyboard can take a moment to register a keypress. Optical switches interrupt a beam of infrared light while pressed and don’t suffer from this delay by using the default, making them a good preference for gaming.
But, the benefits of optical switches on Corsair’s keyboards are a little greater complex. Spokesperson Justin Ocbina tells me the company’s Axon technology can already avoid any debounce put-off incurred when you first press a mechanical switch. The advantages of an optical switch on Corsair’s keyboard come when you, again and again, press the same transfer. There’s no 5ms length when a key can’t sign in a second press after a first it’s ready to be pressed again immediately — accessible for any games wherein speed is of the essence.
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Obama declined to proportion who’s producing Corsair’s OPX optical-mechanical switches but said it’s a linear switch with a 1mm actuation distance. That compares to a 2mm actuation distance for Cherry’s MX red transfer or 1.2mm for its speed-focused Silver switch. The K70 scans for keypresses at 4,000Hz internally (4 times quicker than many mechanical keyboards) and reports them to a linked computer at up to 8,000Hz (eight instances quicker than maximum). Corsair says this keeps median latency beneath 0.25ms.
Other capabilities of the K70 include durable PBT double-shot keycaps, a hardware tournament transfer to disable macros all through competitive play, media keys, an extent curler, and the capability to coordinate the keyboard’s lights effects via Corsair’s iCUE software program. For a concept of the way the non-transfer parts of the keyboard perform in exercise, check out our evaluation of the Corsair K70 from last year.
