The screen on the right side is convenient and practical. I appreciate the gimmick of the actuation visualizer, which is a little line of dots that light up from left to right as you push a key. It helps determine and set an ideal range of motion, but more than that, it’s almost entirely aesthetic. Some of the indicators on the keyboard are nice, but they are not good compared to full OLED screens many gaming keyboards is there now.

The rarely used group of keys above the arrow keys now has a secondary purpose, where each of them can be used in the Function layer to select one of five preset profiles. Four of them are customizable, but the first one, called “Factory Default,” seems to act as a fail-safe if you can royally mess up another profile map (like remaping your space bar to the “A” button on your controller — something the software warns you about when you try).

With these profiles, you can do all the basics Hall effect adjustment. The individual movement distance of each key can be adjusted, Rapid Trigger allows you to customize the reset point of the key (so you can immediately press the key again instead of waiting for it to return past the initial actuation point), and Razer’s SOCD (Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Direction) setting, called Snap Tap, works like any other, allowing one key to override another.

Photo: Henry Robbins

Synapse also allows for minute customization, with adjustments to shifting dead zones, rapid trigger sensitivity, and “Continuous Rapid Trigger,” which keeps the Rapid Trigger active above the default trigger point until a key is fully released.

During my time with this keyboard, I struggled quite a bit with the RGB lighting. It often stops working altogether during use, requiring me to unplug the keyboard to reset something internally. At one point, the main RGB layer stopped lighting completely, with only the OLED display and the illuminated Function layer (showing which keys have a function when Fn is pressed) maintaining their light. The strangest part is that the RGB lighting reverts to the default setting when my computer is locked, indicating some sort of issue with the Synapse software. Finally, after troubleshooting a bit, I had to completely uninstall and reinstall Synapse and Chroma to get it working again.