 Well, you guys asked for it, and this is the Big Brother to the K60, the Corsair Vengeance K90 keyboard. Now, I made a mistake, I would say a fairly, fairly large mistake when I was doing my unboxing of the K60, and I said at the time, although I corrected it by the end of the video, I said at the time that I thought the K60 had blue backlighting. I was wrong, because I thought both the K60 and the K90 had blue backlighting, and my only experience with these keyboards at all up to that time had been with the K90. So now, when I talk about the wicked awesome individually backlit keys, I would be correct, because the K90 is a gorgeous looking keyboard in the dark with its beautifully individually backlit keys. So something else to bear in mind about the backlight is that it does shine through these laser etched numbers, which are not printed, that's right, they are etched, so that means that no matter what, no matter how many times you press on any key on this keyboard, it will always stay well illuminated and distinctly numbered or lettered according to how the manufacturer intended. Okay, so let's get the keyboard out, we got a warranty guide here, which is going to tell us a little something about our probably two year warranty, I believe. Yeah, okay, you know what, I think the packaging for Corsair usually, yeah there we go, it's a two year warranty. Okay, so two year warranty, we've got a quick start guide, which probably pretty much, yeah, that's great, full color illustration of plug the things into the thing, also download the software for managing your macro profiles and what nots from corsair.com slash vengeance K90. Alright, so that's all pretty self explanatory, what else we got in here, we have a wrist rest. Wrist rests can make or break a keyboard. And one of the ways they make a keyboard is by being shaped and well and supporting your wrist in a fashion that is, you know, good. And one of my favorite wrist rests of all time is actually on the SteelSeries 7G, which is also a mechanical keyboard like this one, more on mechanical in a bit. And the way that they can usually break a keyboard is by breaking. And that often comes down to the mechanism employed by the manufacturer to attach the wrist rest to the keyboard, which is usually just, you know, a couple of little metal tabs, although these ones seem to be fairly well built, I can put a lot of pressure on them, they're not going anywhere. So Corsair has sort of seen that probably in action, I mean their guys are, I've met a lot of the Corsair team and they're total enthusiasts, so they've probably encountered wrist rest breakage in the past, actually my own G15 has a broken wrist rest, which is one of the reasons that it's no longer in service. So what they did is they went, okay, let's one up the rest of the industry and let's put, check this out, thumb screws, which you can also screw in with a Phillips head screwdriver, which might actually be easier based on my experience with my fingers here, thumb screws in the sides to make sure, also, oh look at this, look at this, so it keeps it from going too far here, okay, with the shape of this lip, and then keeps it from coming up too far once again with this, rather than putting all the pressure on these little plastic clips, which no matter how well you build them are prone to breaking. So way to go Corsair for seeing what everyone else is doing and seeing why it was wrong and fixing it with a, you know, three cent piece of metal. Excellent, love it. Okay, well actually, you know what, why don't we finish up on the bottom here before we go in. See, look at that, I accidentally like went too far and it's fine. We've got a couple of these little height adjust, tilt adjust-y dudes. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven rubber non-slip grippy feet. Some experts believe that the use of any keyboard may cause serious injuries, so like be careful and stuff. All right, let's flip this back over. So I think we're done with the underside of the keyboard. Why don't we go ahead and I'll show you guys the pass-through here. So this be, okay here. So it's labeled with two arrows, that means pass-through, that's the one that actually runs the keyboard. So it's a pass-through, which means that this is a fully powered and fully speeded USB 2.0 port because there's no actual hub splitting going on inside the keyboard. So you go ahead, you plug your mouse in there or you plug your mouse directly into the back, you plug a USB key in there. It's all gonna work just fine. So yes, mechanical keyboards. This is a mechanical keyboard. At least most of the keys commonly used for typing are mechanical. So the only keys on this keyboard that are not mechanical are these ones right here, the macro keys. Part of the reason that Corsair opted to go with a regular, well now these days it's a regular dome switch key for these guys is because they wanted them on a different plane than the main keyboard. So see how these are quite a bit lower down than the rest of the keyboard? This is actually for a very interesting reason. Now if you've ever owned a G15, I have a G15 Gen 1, which was kind of the first keyboard to really do the whole matrix of programmable keys over here, you've probably pressed this key instead of your escape any number of times. So you go for escape, you go, oh why isn't escape working? So that was why they went and they put these down lower so that you can easily tell when you're operating the keyboard when you reach the edge of the real keyboard and the beginning of the macro keys. So that's very cool. You've got three profiles for these, so you've got 18 keys times three profiles right there and you can manage that using the Corsair software. You know what actually another thing we haven't quite finished up with yet is the wrist rest. So it uses like a rubberized, dimpled feel, actually feels very nice. It's like a soft touch type material. Yeah, yeah quite nice and should be fairly durable just based on how deep the dimples are. So it should maintain that textured surface, which I think is great for gaming gear because if you're going to sit there and use it for a long time, a lot of the time you can get sweat on it, which means that if it has those recesses then you'll still maintain that slight grippiness even in the presence of palm moisture. So yeah, that's good. What else? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, mechanical. So mechanical keys, everything but these guys, the F keys all along the top here and then this block of keys right here. These are mechanical, these are all mechanical. Can you hear the difference? Okay, so the reason Corsair opted for partially mechanical is because all of the typing, all of the actual typing surfaces are going to give you that typing feedback that a lot of people do desire and then the other ones that are very much less frequently used, things like you know, Escape and F9 and Page Up and Page Down are not mechanical. The number pad is, the arrow keys are, let's have a look at some of the other functionality here. So we've got our media keys, so there's your volume scroll wheel. This is one of the better implemented volume scroll wheels I've seen in the past. This is not a sticker, this is an actual texture to the wheel so it's very nice. Two button, stop, back, pause, forward. There are your LED indicators of your number lock, caps lock and scroll lock. You got a windows disable key and backlight control. Yes, this one actually does have a backlight. Mechanical keys, let's see if I can take one of these off fairly easily. How about this one? No? Okay. There we go. Okay, so these are Cherry MX Red keys. The actual preferences vary dramatically from person to person, what kind of keys they prefer. So really the solution is probably to try them. Very shortly we're actually going to have Corsair keyboards in pretty much every NCIX store for you guys to just sit in front of them and play around with them a little bit because all mechanical keys, whether they're browns, blacks, blues, reds, I think there's even a clear one but those are a lot less common, do have a slightly different feel, a slightly different sound. Corsair determined that for their purposes the reds were the most desirable as a balance between gaming and typing. Another thing that you're going to see here next to the red mechanical switch right there is actually one of the things that I do like about them though is they're fairly quiet compared to some of the other mechanical keys. That is your blue light and so every single key has one of those lights and it not only illuminates the key but also kind of the area around it on the aluminum backboard that is part of this keyboard. So one of the things you might notice about it if you see here is there's actually quite a bit of space under the keys between the actual, the rigid backplane and the keys themselves. This makes it a little bit easier to clean and it also gives it kind of a unique look. I've never seen a keyboard where they've done this before because every keyboard does have a backplane like this. Sorry, I'm still a little sick. That the keys are attached to but most of them cover it up with something which often leads to the accumulation of dust and dirt and doesn't really serve any other real purpose. A couple things I haven't talked about yet although I did talk about them in my K60 overview are the full key matrix anti-ghosting which basically means no matter how fast you type, no matter what combinations of letters you press you're not going to accidentally register any additional letters or anything like that. This is more of a software feature. It's built into the software, the keyboard to make sure that everything is registered correctly over USB because USB does on some keyboards that don't implement these features, USB does have some limitations. Another one of the limitations of USB is that typically you can only press I believe it's six keys at a time. So one, two, three, four, five, six and the last one will not be registered at all. What Corsair has done is they've given you up to 20 keys so that's a 20 key rollover where you can actually, yes, press five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. You can press 20 keys before it will actually stop registering keystrokes which is pretty much the practical limit of, actually I'd say that's above the practical limit of how many keys most people can press at a given time. I just want to make sure there's nothing I've missed here. You guys can actually, I never even showed you guys the box really so there's Corsair's look at it. Fully customizable profiles, 36 kilobytes of onboard memory. Sounds like a really old computer, hey? I bet if you showed this to someone you'd be like, yeah it's got 36k of memory on a keyboard. They'd be like, oh that's crazy. Sorry I digress. Yeah, last thing I want to do is I do want to plug this in for you guys and I'm going to turn off the lights in here so I'm just going to go ahead and run this around to the back of my test bench here and we're going to plug that into a USB 3 port just for giggles so you guys, so I can say it's USB 3 compatible, woo! Okay and then, you know what, here I'll show you guys in the light first, there you go. Has just a beautiful, beautiful backlit look because not only are the keys illuminated but you also see a very distinct glow behind the keys themselves. So guys, here, let's pan around and have a look at the lights we've got in here. So yeah, and the other side, so this is in my little tech tips filming room here and that is how much you can still see the blue. So I'm going to go ahead and turn these lights off, one, two, three, and you'll see how much that's going to stand out in the dark. This is one of the strongest backlights that I've seen on a gaming keyboard yet and as I said before, one of the most striking looking because of the individually backlit keys and the way that the backboard for the keyboard itself is a little bit further away so it gives it a bit more room for the glow to spread out, just looks outstanding in the dark. So I think that pretty much covers it. Here, I'll turn one of these back on just so you can see me again. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Corsair Vengeance K90. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other great content. Thanks for watching.