There are a lot of mechanical keyboards on the market today. They’re often quite similar too, with only a few notable differences. The Corsair K70 PRO TKL looks like many other keyboards, but sets itself apart with a wide array of excellent features and an awesome volume control setup.
Corsair K70 PRO TKL
$150 $180 Save
$30
This mechanical keyboard from Corsair includes a suite of advanced options that will help take your gaming experience to the next level, optimizing your performance and allowing for a full range of customization.
- Vast suite of advanced features to optimize competitive gaming
- Almost every feature is customizable
- Comes with wrist pad
- Compact, tenkeyless design
- Dedicated media control and mode switching buttons
- Large gaps between keycaps and keyboard
- Wired connection only
Price and Availability
If you want to buy the Corsair K70 PRO TKL directly from Corsair, it’ll cost you $180. You can choose between two color options, white and black. You can also choose what types of keycaps you want the keyboard to have. By default, the keyboard comes with ABS Double-Shot keycaps, but you can also choose PBT Double-Shot keycaps instead. If you do want that option, you’ll have to pay $190 instead.
Functional Modern Design, With a Few Key Standouts
The Corsair K70 PRO TKL isn’t revolutionary as far as its visual design is concerned. It looks like most other modern mechanical keyboards, which isn’t a bad thing. Being a tenkeyless keyboard, it’s about the width of your average laptop at 18.25u. So there’s no number pad, but it still has complete keyboard functionality. The function keys are also separate from the number keys, which is a nice addition for gaming.
It’s almost identical to every other tenkeyless keyboard in terms of layout. However, it does have a notable difference in the form of three unique buttons on the top right of the device—a game mode button, a media button, and a rotary dial. More on these later, just know that they are very convenient and I’m glad to have them around.
My only gripe with the look of this keyboard is the fact that there’s a big gap between the keycaps and the actual surface of it, which is personally not my perference. Overall, though, it looks great, and of course, you can customize the color background to match the rest of your gaming battle station. It’s also got that satisfying clacking sound you’d expect from a mechanical keyboard.
An Excellent Array of Features For a Competitive Edge
You can absolutely use this keyboard for regular computer use. But make no mistake: The K70 PRO TKL is primarily designed for gaming, and it comes with a slew of features designed for that specialty. Among these are rapid trigger switches, adjustable per-key actuation points, dual activation, 8,000Hz hyper-polling, and a dedicated gaming mode that optimizes the keyboard for high-performance gaming in just one click.
If you’re already an experienced PC gamer, you probably don’t need me to tell you why these are helpful. If this is your first time buying a keyboard for your setup, allow me to explain why you want these things, and assure you that the K7O PRO TKL delivers in all of these areas.
Rapid triggers means key activations and resets are instant. There’s no delay between an activation, even if you rapidly tap a key eight times in a row to juke your enemy in a close FPS deathmatch. Adjustable actuation means you can control how far down you have to press a key before that press is registered. With this keyboard, you can set the actuation to as little as 0.1mm, allowing for lightning-quick key presses when every microsecond counts.
Personally, that’s a little too sensitive for me, but you can adjust the actuation distance up to 4mm instead, and you can make these adjustments in increments as exact as 0.1mm. If 2.6mm is too much but 2.5mm is just right, you can get that exact with the adjustments on this keyboard.
With dual actuation, you can assign two separate actions to one key press, allowing you to set up instant combos in your favorite game. Cast two spells at once in a MOBA, jump and throw a grenade simultaneously in Halo, you name it. This feature alone has been a life-saver for me in War Thunder and its two hundred functions, since I can press just one button instead of inputting a Mortal Kombat combo for some of these actions.
The 8,000Hz hyper-polling means this keyboard picks up your inputs and translates them to the game at extremely high speeds, minimizing the delay between input and in-game action. This is not exactly a necessary benefit when playing Civilization, but it could be the difference between life and death in a match of Marvel Rivals or Tekken 7.
The best thing about K70 PRO TKL is its customization, and the “game mode” button allows you to quickly change the keyboard from a default state to a mode with all of these options optimized for your gaming experience. When not in Game Mode, most of the features mentioned above are off. Simply press this button in the top-right corner, and the K70 PRO TKL will turn on the rapid trigger, increase the polling rate, and adjust any other settings you made for the mode.
Ultimately, this isn’t even the full breadth of what this keyboard has to offer. The K70 PRO TKL also has a customizable media button, a dial that can control volume, scrolling, zoom, and backlights, and Corsair’s new FlashTap technology. It has a software and hardware memory mode for when you’re programming it, can do macro recording, and a lot more. Even the small features, like backlights turning off for keys without secondary functions when you hold the FN key, are great.
I can’t cover every single thing this keyboard is capable of here, but I can say that I couldn’t find a single feature that I felt was lacking, both when I was gaming with it and when I used it for mundane tasks.
Comprehensive Customization Makes it Personal
Honestly, I’m impressed with how much you can customize the Corsair K70 PRO TKL and how easy it is to do it. Of course, you can use Corsair’s iCUE software to customize, and it’s required for most things, like programming lighting effects and key assignments. But there are many things you can customize directly from the keyboard, like actuation distance, rapid trigger sensitivity, and the rotary dial function.
You can ultimately customize just about every aspect of this keyboard’s functionality. You can remap almost all the keys, alter specific light indicators, set several profiles, make your own lighting effects, and more. You can even set the actuation values for individual keys, meaning you can have your gaming keys set to 0.1mm and the keys you don’t want to press by accident set to 4mm at the same time.
Frankly, I’m not even a hardcore enough gamer to fully utilize everything this keyboard has to offer, and that’s a little humbling.
Should You Buy the Corsair K70 PRO TKL?
Simply put, the Corsair K70 PRO TKL is an amazing keyboard. But obviously, all the things that make it amazing are limited to gaming and, even then, to specific types of competitive gaming. You don’t need rapid triggers, 8,000Hz hyper-polling, or 0.1mm actuation to type or check your email. Even if you are a gamer, you don’t need any of that for RTS, simulation, puzzle games, or any other genre of game that doesn’t get your palms sweating.
You are paying $170-$180 for the features of this keyboard, and that’s only worth it if you are playing highly competitive games where a few milliseconds of reaction time is the difference between victory and defeat, such as competitive shooters or fighting games. If you are that type of gamer, this keyboard is absolutely worth it. If you aren’t, then there are plenty of more affordable backlit mechanical keyboards out there.
Corsair K70 PRO TKL
$150 $180 Save
$30
This mechanical keyboard from Corsair includes a suite of advanced options that will help take your gaming experience to the next level, optimizing your performance and allowing for a full range of customization.
