Gaming: Upcoming Corsair Galleon 100 Sd Review

Corsair has put a lot of effort into making a keyboard that will have limited appeal, but for the right person this will be the perfect board. Anyone can appreciate the appeal of being able to customise the Galleon’s light-up keys, and it doesn’t have to be used for streaming, but at this price enormous popularity is going to be a bit of an ask.

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The best mechanical gaming keyboards are often those that offer a kind of purity. They have a focus, and that’s to provide the perfect interstitial layer between game and player, offering as little friction as possible so that your keypresses are swift and smooth.

Corsair has taken the mechanical keyboard—basically a metal frame full of switches plus some way of connecting it to a computer—and complicated it in the Galleon 100 SD. This mechanical keyboard has had a 12-key Stream Deck (and it’s important to notice that ‘r’—it’s Stream Deck and not Steam Deck) welded to its right-hand side.

It’s an expensive and specialised device that’s probably not going to find its way onto too many desktops, but it does have applications with applications that aren’t streaming applications. Do you need one? Probably not, but it’s fun to muck about with all the same.

The software does its best but is a bit fiddly. The Galleon shows up in Windows Settings as two different keyboards, and the bit that’s not a Stream Deck—looking rather like a K70 Core that’s received a cybernetic implant—is controlled by Corsair’s Web Hub rather than iCUE (the latter app wouldn’t recognise it).

Size: FullConnectivity: WiredOn-board memory: 8 MBSwitches: Corsair MLX PulsePolling rate: Up to 8,000 HzUSB ports: Three, USB 2.0 Type-CWeight: 1.4 kgPrice: $350/£310

Here you can choose colour layers, pick the polling speed (up to 8,000 Hz) and update the firmware. At one point, when switching between polling rates, the keyboard lost its connection to Web Hub and stopped working altogether until it was unplugged and reattached.

While I was testing, the keyboard was still only available for preorder, so it’s possible a launch-day firmware update will iron out any glitches.

There's full-key rollover and Corsair’s FlashTap SOCD, just like its high-end gaming keyboards, too.

Source: PC Gamer