RGB Aura Lighting
The Claymore Core is one of ASUS’ AURA range, and thus is said to sync with your existing AURA hardwares’ RGB colors. I was unable to test this out fully at the time of writing as the software required was not yet available. In the instructions pamphlet that you get with the Claymore Core, you are instructed to go to a link of ASUS’ website to download Armoury to control the RGB colours but navigated back to ASUS’ main page.
I then tried to download an existing version of Armoury, and after installation the program could not recognize the keyboard. I then tried my AURA program which is used to control the lighting on my ASUS Z170 Pro-Gaming/AURA motherboard, but no good there as well.
Thus I was left to just to admire the forever changing RGB colors of the Claymore Core:
The RGB illumination is subtle yet vivid; the illumination of the characters on the keys does not glare, whilst the RGB colours are stark contrasts to the black keyboard itself.
Game On!
I was provided with the blue cherry version of the Claymore Core, and boy did I enjoy using it! The blue cherry keys on the Claymore Core is just light enough to provide you with a tactile feel. Many gaming keyboards I have tried tend to have ‘deep’ keys; from the surface of the key you need to press quite a long way down for the key to respond, making every typing quite a tiring process. On the Claymore Core, you only need to light press the keys for them to respond, making it enjoyable to use even as I write this review.
With the polling rate of 1000Hz, equating to 1 millisecond, the keystroke response is very fast, crucial for the games I tested it out on. Even for everyday typing, keys registered on the screen without any lag.
The shortness of the Claymore Core gave me more room to maneuver on my cluttered desktop. Without the extra length I found plenty of room to angle the keyboard to suit the natural angle my left hand would press the keys. I thought I’d miss having the number pad, but in all honesty I haven’t pressed a key on one in years, and if one day I do want it back I can always get the number pad addon.
A quick blast on the latest version of Doom, and it was obvious that the combination of the light blue cherry keys and fast response rate meant I zipped around effortlessly. With that in mind I popped over to my old favourite, CS:GO, and thoroughly enjoyed the added response I was getting. With my existing keyboard my left hand would tire if I had a long gaming session, but with the Claymore Core’s light keys I did not experience the same problem.
Without the Armoury program I was not able to test out some of the extra features of the Claymore Core such as programming and using macros, using keys to adjust fan speeds, or try out the CPU temperature monitoring via the backlight. If you use an ASUS motherboard, the Claymore Core allows tight integration with the BIOS, allowing on the fly CPU and RAM overclocks!
