 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at what is clearly a pre-production retail package because I don't think Cooler Master, with all of their experience, would release a retail product that looked like this, but this is pretty much what you'll get inside your real one with a more fancy graphic on it. This is the Quickfire TK. So if you didn't know already, Cooler Master has been doing mechanical keyboards for a little while now, actually. So they're quite well regarded. They have a pretty wide variety of products. I mean, you look at some companies where they'll release sort of one mechanical keyboard with one particular key switch and maybe it has a backlight or it doesn't have a backlight and you should be happy to get what you can, I suppose. Cooler Master is taking a completely different approach and they're going after more like the guys who do a lot of different SKUs with a lot of customizability. So the Quickfire TK alone is available in Cherry MX Blue, Cherry MX Red switches, and Cherry MX Brown switches. They also come with different backlight colors to correspond to the types of switches in them. So this, I asked for, if you guys follow me on Twitter and you know what I think of keyboards, I asked for obviously the Cherry MX Blue version. Oh, check that out. Oh, hold on. Oh, there it is. Alright, I thought we were going to be missing a key there. Oh, well this is a good opportunity to show you guys what it looks like. So there, you can see the Cherry MX Blue switch. You can hear, if I move it up to the mic. Oh, yeah, you can hear the sexy sound that it makes when you actually actuate the switch. I'm just going to go ahead and throw that back on. It comes with a key removal tool. Right, so yes, this is the blue version with a blue backlight and a blue and blue switches. I'm just going to show you guys how this works. So it comes with a removable cable, which I don't know if that's entirely necessary, but I guess if that's something they want to do, then that's great. It also has cable routing holes, so you can bring it out the one side, bring it out the other side, or bring it straight out the back of the keyboard, depending on what you find preferable. There are rubber non-slip feet here, here, and here. Oh, these are my favorite. Check this out. So if you get right in there, you can see the entire, both sides of it are rubber. So it's an entire coating on the keyboard little foot itself here that's rubber. So what that means is a lot of the time you deploy these things and the keyboard becomes slippery all of a sudden because only the bottom two are making contact properly, and these will be just plastic. Cooler Master's gone the extra mile and made sure that that's not going to cause any problems for you. It comes with a key removal tool, so you can go ahead and remove the keys. You can remove the keys without the key removal tool, but it's not recommended because it can damage the switch underneath. So let's go ahead and check this out. So there you go. You can see the blue, the blue backplate. It has a full metal backplate. So let's find out. Oh, that's very solid. Actually, this is among the more solid keyboards that I've encountered. Even some mechanical keyboards, you can tell these, they're still, they're not that solidly built because they'll have a lot of flex in them, but you can see I'm actually putting a lot of force on this. Can you see the flex? There's a little bit, but I mean, there's only so much you can do, but it's very, very solidly built. That makes a great difference. When you're mashing on something, pressing buttons hard to have it not have any flex to it because that's how you get that sort of that perfect tactile response. Now, blue switches are not for everyone. You can hear how loud they are. But like I said, Cooler Master is making the keyboard available in a variety of different configurations, depending on what you want. The brown switch one does not come with a brown backlight, just so you guys know. So the blue switch one comes with a blue backlight. The red switch one comes with a red backlight. And the brown switch one comes with a white backlight. So don't worry, it's nothing ridiculous like that. And you know what? This might be a bit of a problem here because, oh, no, it works. There we go. I was worried that it wouldn't work because I'm not actually booted into Windows, but it looks like all the software is running in here. So the keys are individually backlit, and it comes with a variety of modes. So you can see the mode here, for whatever reason, has these ones not illuminated, and this one not illuminated, and the F12 not illuminated. It also has three different brightness levels, so I'm just going to hold down function here. And so we'll go brightness all the way down. Wow, five different brightness levels. You know what? That looks stunning. Look how good the backlight looks when they can see here. If I unplug it, so unplug it again, you can see they've colored the backplate blue, which means the reflection of the LEDs off the backplate actually makes the blue much more intense and much more striking than keyboards that I've seen in the past. That is a really nice touch. That's smart. I haven't seen that before. So let's give it a sec to... Oh, yeah, I plugged it into the right thing. Okay, so we'll give it a sec to turn itself back on here. So give me a moment. So I managed to lock up the computer because I didn't realize it was doing something and I was mashing on keys over here, and it was obviously plugged in. So I'm going to not mash keys too, too hard anymore, but I want to show you guys. So it has five different brightness levels. It has several different modes. So that looks like sort of more of like an... Oh, okay, so there's WASD mode. Then there's sort of full mode, except for the function key here and these keys right here. And then there's sort of what looks like kind of a... Oh, is it like pulsating or something? Oh, cool. It has like a breathing mode. That's really neat. Okay, and then brightness you obviously can't control in that particular mode. I'm not sure what this guy does. Back in a sec. Okay, I figured it out. So I think I got everything down pat now. This switches between six key and N key rollover. Remember, N key rollover is better because it means you can type like this if you want and it'll actually register every single keystroke. No big deal. Six key rollover, however, is more compatible with various BIOSes or with Apple computers, for example, that don't support N key rollover because this is over USB, which normally sort of naturally doesn't support N key rollover. All right. Next, we've got... I could not figure out for the life of me why these keys weren't illuminating. Number lock. So when you have number lock off, you can see these arrow keys illuminate because we are in the mode that allows us to use the other functionality of this block of keys here. So we've got a full number pad block, which I personally still like to see, but we have a keyboard that's not much bigger than a 10 keyless, which is really cool. So by switching this functionality, so number lock is on, other functionality is on, you got all your usual keys, end page down, page up, delete, all that good stuff, and you have a full number pad, which is very, very cool. Right here, this is a function key lock. So this is... okay. However this works. Okay. One of them is... no, sorry, Windows key lock, so you can turn your Windows keys on and off. And this is your function key lock, which will lock your function keys on and off so that you can either have them operate as F1 to F12, or you can have them operate as dedicated media keys, including play, pause, stop, back, forward, mute, volume down, and volume up, as well as all of your lighting adjustments and all of that good stuff so you can go sort of... I think we showed all the different lighting modes. I think that pretty much covers it. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the very well built, very solid feeling. I mean, there's, you know, the whole CM Storm thing. They've just got good little touches that make it look nice, make it function well, and that pretty much covers it. So as you guys know, I'm big into mechanical keyboards. Would I recommend this one? Absolutely. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.