The screen on the right side is convenient and practical. I appreciate the gimmick of the actuation visualizer, which is a small line of dots that illuminates from left to right as you push down a key. It can help with determining and setting an ideal actuation distance, but beyond that, it’s almost entirely aesthetic. The rest of the indicators on the keyboard are nice, but they are underwhelming compared to the full OLED screens that many gaming keyboards have today.
The rarely used cluster of keys above the arrow keys now has a secondary purpose, where each of them can be used with the Function layer to select one of five preset profiles. Four of them are customizable, but the first, called “Factory Default,” seemingly functions as a fail-safe in case you royally mess up another profile map (such as remapping your space bar to your controller’s “A” button—something the software actually warns you against if you attempt it).
Across these profiles, you can make all of the standard Hall effect adjustments. Each key’s individual actuation distance can be adjusted, Rapid Trigger allows you to customize the key’s reset point (so you can immediately press the key down 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, letting one key override another for rapid strafing.
Photograph: Henri Robbins
Synapse also allows for more minute customizations, with adjustments to switch dead zones, rapid trigger sensitivity, and “Continuous Rapid Trigger,” which keeps Rapid Trigger active above the default actuation point until a key is fully released.
During my time with this keyboard, I struggled quite a bit with the RGB lighting. It would regularly stop functioning at all during use, requiring me to unplug the keyboard to reset something internally. At one point, the main RGB layer stopped illuminating entirely, with only the OLED display and the illuminated Function layer (displaying which keys have functionality when Fn is pressed) maintaining their lighting. The strangest part was that the RGB lighting would return to the default setting when my computer was locked, indicating some kind of issue with the Synapse software. Ultimately, after troubleshooting quite a bit, I had to completely uninstall and reinstall both Synapse and Chroma for it to work again.
