Software
Similarly to other RGB products this keyboard has its own software to control everything from the lighting to macro keys to completely remapping what each key does. It is really powerful and lets you customize pretty much every aspect of this keyboard.
Macros
Creating macros is very straightforward. You start recording the macro then as you type the keys you’ve pressed and the delay between them will show up in real-time. Once you’ve recorded the macros you can save it and assign the macro to a specific key. This lets you accomplish a large number of key presses with one key press. I tried testing this by pressing a ton of random keys and testing the macro by making sure all of the keys were typed out again. This worked well with every key in the macro being typed out at the press of a button.
Depending on what games you play this could be a lifesaver when tons of keys need to be pressed quickly.
Key customization
Using the customize tab you can remap pretty much every single key on this keyboard and make it do something else. You can do a simple key swap where you type A when you press the F key or having a specific key open a certain program and just about everything in between. Any changes you make are saved to the gaming mode that can be switched to using the game controller button at the top of the keyboard. This let’s keep the keyboard with normal key mappings while also having each key customized for gaming (I personally use this to remap a button to shut down my PC).
This is super helpful and a great feature to have!
Lighting
In the gallery above you can see all of the software pages for each of the standard lighting option. Some options let you change tons of stuff while others only let you change the color, but overall this software lets you change a ton about the looks.
A few select lighting options give you seriously fine-grained control over how the lights look. Using the rainbow bar you can either select from one of the pre-made options or add specific colors to each square which changes what colors are used in the color cycle. Using this you have a ton of customizability over how these select lighting options look.
MISC Issues
Overall my experience with this software was quite pleasant but I did run into a couple of issues worth noting.
One issue is every time I logged out of my user on windows 10 the keyboard becomes completely unresponsive until I physically unplugged the keyboard and plugged it back in again. I thought this was an issue with the keyboard itself but when the software was uninstalled I never had this issue, it seems to be caused by the fact that the software is still running in the background causing the keyboard itself to my user.
Another error seems to be caused by making macros that are too large or involve key presses that happen too rapidly. I made a macro that was the same key is pressed 10 times in a row with a delay of 50ms between presses and every time I tried to save this macro the entire software would freeze up. Even after force closing the software every time I opened it the software would freeze again, the only fix was a full system restart and avoiding saving any macros that large.
Overall these are fairly minor issues and luckily could be fixed through a future update. hopefully, these issues won’t even exist by the time you pick up this keyboard.
I really love what Thermaltake has done here with the software. It’s relatively straightforward and easy to use while giving users a ton of power over how exactly their keyboard looks and acts. But the overall experience can be somewhat held back by a couple of annoying issues.
Now onto lighting!
You can buy the Thermaltake PREMIUM X1 RGB gaming keyboard
