Corsair K100 RGB Gaming Keyboard Review

Software & Lighting

Like any Corsair product these days in order to do any customization you’ll need to install Corsair’s iCUE software. Now do keep in mind that the keyboard will operate no problem without the software, but you do need it to make customizations.

Opening up iCUE you’ll see the K100 RGB listed under your devices. If for some reason it does not appear here either restart or iCUE or install the latest version. Clicking on the K100 RGB icon you’ll be brought into its customization options.

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On the left you’ll see a number of tabs, the first one is Actions. Here you can create specific actions, the can be a macro, text, media control, launch an application, a timer, profile switch, any keystroke or mouse button, or you can create an action to simply disable a key. All of these actions can be applied to any key on the keyboard. You can also create an Actions Library to save actions and apply them to other Corsair products.

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The next tab is Lighting Effects. Here you can create and set different lighting effects for the keyboard. Corsair has quite a few predefined and custom effects you can choose from. You can also link all of your Corsair RGB products together so they display the same effect. Every key on the keyboard houses an individually addressable RGB LED and you also have 44 around the edge of the keyboard so you can really customize the keyboard to your liking.

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You also have Hardware Actions and Hardware Lighting tabs. These are actions and lighting effects that you can actually save to the keyboard itself. So say if you didn’t want to run iCUE or took your keyboard to a friends house all of your actions and RGB effects would be on the keyboard and you wouldn’t have to install iUE.

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A new tab we have here is Dial Control, which allows you to customize the actions of the new iCUE Control Wheel. You can set rotation the wheel left or right to any of your created actions. Corsair also has a few built in actions. You can select a different color for each dial control so you know which one you are interacting with.

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Under Performance there really is not a whole lot of “Performance” settings. All we have is which buttons will be disabled if you hit the Windows lock button and indicator colors.

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Next is onboard profiles, which I really think you should take advantage of. You can actually save up to 200 profiles on the keyboard!

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If we click on the main settings tab at the top of iCUE we get more into the settings on the keyboard itself. We can set our polling rate (up to 4000 Hz), brightness of the LEDs, current layout, have the ability to clear onboard storage, and update the keyboard’s firmware.

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The lighting on this keyboard is excellent. Corsair has always done a good job with RGB lighting and the K100 RGB is no different. The addition of RGB all around the keyboard is nice, but when using the keyboard you really don’t notice it all that much. It would have been cool if they were able to bring the RGB lighting around to the front of the keyboard like we saw on the Razer Huntsman Elite.

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