Rosewill Helios RK-9200 Gaming Keyboard

The Helios can also disable the windows key with the Function key, gamers rejoice!  Gone are the days of having to take a flathead screwdriver to your keyboard in order to keep from accidently dropping yourself out of your game.  The Helios will deactivate the illumination to the Windows key when it’s disabled, so at a glance you can tell immediately if the key is turned off or not.  If the Helios is not backlit and you disable the windows key, it will flash red at you three times to show it’s disabled, and flash green three times when you switch it back on.    

The 12-key rollover anti-ghosting feature is another benefit added to this keyboard, allowing up to twelve select keys to be pressed and held simultaneously and registering all of them.  So if you have any plans to pull off that sick signature side-strafing, crouch-jumping, grenade-throwing all while quick-drawing your secondary move, anti-ghosting is a feature you should look into.

I tested out the 12-key Rollover feature with a Microsoft Applied Sciences program to detect active key presses, and from the detail on the box, it appears that the 12-key anti-ghosting is active only for the primary gaming control keys (WASD, Arrows, Shift, Ctrl, Alt, and Space).  Using keys outside that range, my PC only detected six keys before it started dropping key-strokes.  Once I used just the keys defined in the advertised range, I was able to register up to nine keys, but it was quickly becoming more keys then I could either comfortably press, or ever have a need to use at once.  In short, there is enough rollover to comfortably pull off anything you may need to in game.  During my time testing, I did not find myself dropping any keystrokes.

Having not used a mechanical switch keyboard since my middle-school days of learning keyboarding on an old IIc, it’s taken me a little time to get used to the feel of the switches over my standard membrane keyboard.  Since I use my home keyboard for both gaming and office work, after a week working on the Helios, I definitely felt it in the fingers.  The more I used it however, the more I realized how trained I was to operating a membrane keyboard, and making sure the key was pressed all the way to the bottom to register.  With the MX Black switches, the key triggers about halfway through its press, so once I started realizing that I didn’t have to waste energy smashing each key into the base to get it to fire, I started seeing immediate improvement, both in my typing, and the responsiveness in my gaming using lighter and quicker keystrokes.