CMStorm QuickFire TK Review, Or How to Combine Two Products To Make One Great One - Performance

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When Cooler Master Launched their new QuickFire Line of gaming keyboards with Mechanical switched they were very well received. We have had the chance to test out all of the models even though we have not always been able to try out the different Cherry MX Switch types (we have gone through Red, Brown and Blue). Now while all of the models were well received there were complaints about more than a few of the features that were built in. One of the most common complaints that we have heard about the QuickFire line up is that the QuickFire Pro did not have full back lighting. Instead Cooler Master chose to only light up a small selection of keys that they called the gaming cluster. Still this keyboard has been bought by many gamers because it is one of the only mechanical keyboards that supports NKRO over USB. As an added bonus the QuickFire Pro has two modes of NKRO; Full and 6-Key. Well for those of you that have wished for a mechanical keyboard with full NKRO over USB and full back lighting your wait is over. Cooler Master has taken some of the best features of the QuickFire Pro and put them in a smaller version named the QuickFire TK and the best part,… it has full backlighting. Read on to find out all of the nice details.

Performance -
We put the CM Storm QuickFire Pro through about 10 hours of gaming. This was with a variety of games from Alan Wake to Mass Effect 3 and through some older (but no less fun) games like Bioshock 2 and HalfLife 2. We also spent a little time using the QuickFire TK in day to day use. This gave us a good overview of how well it will perform for you once you get it home.

After more than a few hours of gaming I can say that the QuickFire TK performs just as well as the QuickFire Pro or Rapid.  We tested it with both the 6KRO and NKRO just to see if we could see any difference in performance and we did not. In both modes it worked without issue. We also found the QuickFire TK to be very stable on the desktop; it did not slide around or even move thanks to the weight and also the rubber feet underneath.  The size of the TK was not an issue at all during our gaming, but it did popup as you will see when we stared using it for more common tasks.

When we broke out the TK for daily use we ran into a couple of,… not really issues, but more hurdles. As the 10-key number pad also doubles as the home key section (not to be confused with the Home Row) we found ourselves needing to turn number lock on and off regularly even for simple tasks like deleting a file or character in a document. This could have been avoided by another “top” row of keys in the same way that new laptop/ultrabook keyboards are designed.  The good news is that Cooler Master does appear to listen to their users so we will probably see this pop-up in a future model in the same way that we are seeing a small fully backlit mechanical keyboard after people asked for it from both the Pro and the Rapid. Overall, if you do not mind losing the 10-key number pad then this is not a problem, for us and the way we work it was.

 

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