 Want a portable power bank, wireless AP, SD card and USB reader for your mobile devices? Check the link in the video description to learn more about the Adata Dash Drive Air AE400. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of whoa what the gandias? Who's even heard of that before? The answer is probably not you because they are a brand new gaming peripheral company and usually when you know some random gaming peripheral company reaches out to me and says hey we'd like you to check out our products I kind of look at their website and I'm just like ah really? I don't know what you bring to the table but in this case they've actually innovated which is pretty cool. So they're like I said brand new company that has brought some interesting things to the table with the Hermes mechanical gaming keyboard. So first and foremost it's a mechanical gaming keyboard which of course you've seen that before. Next up it is LED backlight but if you check out their packaging they hardly even make mention of the LED backlighting because the sort of sad simple truth is nobody cares anymore because every gaming mechanical keyboard is LED backlit so this particular one uses a red LED backlight. Okay so that's all fine and interesting so let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. This is where they really got my attention because ergonomically there's not much that you can change about the layout of a keyboard for gaming without messing it up for typing which is why companies like Razer have introduced products like the Orbweaver which is like a keyboard replacement for gaming. So Gamdias' edition of gaming optimized keys hasn't managed to bung up the typing experience so we've still got long shifts long enter and long backspace and then we've got a bank of macro keys over here on the left hand side. It should be noted that while I'm pointing at particular macro keys the buttons are fully reprogrammable on this keyboard you just have to use the included software. So they've added five here and instead of banks upon banks of them they've actually added the other keys in places that make a lot of sense to me. So under the space bar is somewhere where you could actually conceivably reach and then under the arrow keys if you use your right hand on the arrow keys and your left hand with your mouse you can actually use that as jump and then you've got a couple more functions right here and then they've added a couple more keys above the right and left arrow keys which I think is really smart. Very very cool. So the included cord is using a braided design that might feel a little bit thin and that might give it a bit of a sort of cheap feel compared to some of the I think Thermaltake's branding is military grade cable and it's like this thick around but I like the fact that you can actually route it around things and it's kind of difficult to do when you have not only the keyboard plug as well as a USB pass through but also two audio pass throughs for your headphone and microphone as well. So let's go ahead and have a look at where those go. So there's your pass through USB port you'll usually plug your mouse into there as well as your pass through microphone and headphone ports. The overall build quality of the keyboard feels extremely solid especially considering these guys are a newcomer so there's really not much flex to it at all. I'm like wrenching on it in order to make it flex that much. You've got two little feet down here that ah yes I haven't seen this in a while I like this so you can see the entire tops of these are rubber that means that it is still non-slip even when they are raised so that you have a higher inclination to the keyboard. Love to see that. These are some of my personal little things that I like. So anyway you've got a ton of function key implementation things on here so for example your media keys are accessible using function so right there is your back and forward as well as play pause mute volume down and volume up. You can also enable game mode which will disable your windows key and then there's a whole bunch of other stuff over here including brightness up and brightness down so there are six different brightness settings to this keyboard. So we're going to go ahead and plug it in we'll be back in a moment. A few other things to talk about for the Hermes are the integration with your system as well as with other Gamdias peripherals. So for example when you have multiple peripherals you can actually have them interact with each other and as it detects supported peripherals it kind of like gears up your little guy within the software which is kind of cool but not as cool I think as the on-screen timers that you can enable. Now it should be noted that for any kind of serious eSports competition having an on-screen timer would not really be approved but when you're sitting at home playing or when you're practicing for example you would certainly be able to use that functionality and you can also set up voice alerts which is kind of neat as well so you could actually bind any key you wanted to set up any timer you wanted or any voice alert you wanted and you could switch between them with your profiles for example on the fly which I think is incredibly cool. So they've managed to deviate from an all black and red color scheme without it looking gaudy so the Gamdias logo which is actually Zeus if you look closely at it which happens to be their gaming mouse as well we'll be checking that out soon is yellow but it contrasts nicely with the rest of the keyboard and the whole thing actually looks very very good. So the other function functionality that you have is you can switch between 1 to 10 gaming profiles up here there's actually 512 kilobytes of onboard memory that allows the keyboard to save your onboard profiles although you're going to want to set that up probably using their Hera software anyway you can also disable the functionality of the keyboard like you would on a laptop for example using this one and then you've also got yes here on the fly macro recording that is enabled using the function and control key so again that relies on the Hera software in order to function correctly. Next up you've got the cover oh yeah you get a couple of Gamdias stickers included not that that's a page taken out of Razer's playbook or SteelSeries I think they also include them as well so the wrist rest I think is a really high point for this keyboard because if you're anything like my wife you refuse to use anything other than a SteelSeries 7G not because you particularly like Cherry MX Black switches or because you particularly like the keyboard at all in fact the layout has sort of a short backspace which is terrible but you like a nice big wrist rest the Gamdias has a huge wrist rest on their Hermes keyboard and it doubles as a keyboard cover so you can go ahead and I think it goes like that maybe it's like that there we go feels like something that's for sure there we go so you can cover up your keyboard just like that which I think is very very cool it's magnetic so getting it in place is not a problem I just kind of put it close and then it just snaps into place which means there's nothing to break no little like plastic things here or anything like that I think this is one of the smarter things that they've implemented about this particular keyboard you can switch between six key rollover and n key rollover using the function key as well so the advantage of n key rollover is of course n key rollover you can press as many keys as you want without any ghosting or non-registered keystrokes but it can make compatibility with your motherboard a little bit more difficult so you could switch to six key rollover for the best possible compatibility and n key rollover for the best possible functionality which leads us to the final thing this right here is a blue cherry mx switch I'm just going to go ahead and turn off the backlight here so oh yeah I can show you the six different backlight levels so it goes all the way to brightness brightest then off oh that's pulsating rather sorry so let's go ahead and turn that off that's kind of nice all right that is a cherry mx blue switch with what they're calling the gamdias element around it in effect this is sort of it's it's like that's a damper down there that what it does is it makes the key bottom out a little bit earlier than it otherwise would so gamdias is claiming this improves responsiveness by around 20 percent and can improve the well basically yeah improves responsiveness and shortens the keystroke travel I personally don't like it I'm just going to be completely upfront about that I find that particularly with a cherry mx blue I'm expecting it to bottom out and it feels a little bit weird to me however this is my initial reaction I can't say for sure that I wouldn't get used to it over a more extended period of time it's definitely a much shorter travel and if you hear the sound because you're not bottoming out because you're hitting that damper it has a similar effect to something like an o-ring mod but it even feels a little bit different than that because you're really going up against something that's under the entire key rather than something that's just on the the top of the key or the bottom of the keycap itself so this is the one thing that I'd say is kind of different about this keyboard and I'll leave it to the individual to decide whether you want your cherry mx blues messed with so to speak or whether you prefer the more sort of vanilla cherry mx blue experience it definitely makes the key travel shorter so if that's what you're looking for is cherry mx blue with a shorter travel then this might be the one for you thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Hermes from gandias don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos don't forget to like this video if you liked it or dislike it if you disliked it one way or the other it's just fine and leave a comment letting me know what you think does gandias have a chance as a new gaming peripheral company would you consider it based on what you've seen so slick actually pointed out a couple things to me about this keyboard I know the video was sort of done but we're back number one is this is actually kind of cool I didn't think of this but these spots right here are aligned perfectly with the slots behind them meaning that you should be able to plug them in blind fairly easily whether you're in the dark or whether you just don't feel like looking over your keyboard like this I personally consider that very very handy and definitely thumbs up for that next up is that it looks like we could remove the gandias element quite easily if we preferred a more a more sort of traditional cherry mx blue experience see they come right out so there you go once that's done we can definitely hear the contrast between the two keys so it's much louder and we can also see in the key travel distance how much less the gandias element one is so that's that's very interesting this may actually be like a pretty pretty ultimate grade keyboard especially if you have the option of removing this.