The Roccat Suora FX is the German hardware company’s latest attempt to bring the mechanical keyboard to a wider audience. Unlike the Isku and Ryos, the Suora is a minimalist design – no fuss, no muss offering to the Roccat line of keyboards. But it does have one golden shiny feature – the full range of RGB illuminated keys.
As a frameless keyboard, if you’re used to the bigger offerings on the market the slim nature of the Suora FX will seem foreign at first. But the form factor is one of the selling points for me. It’s just the durable mechanical key switches on a slim aluminum frame. I miss having the headphone and USB ports that the Ryos had, but it’s not like I don’t have enough of those on my tower.
The RGB lighting is default set to range through the colors from left to ride on a constant glowing wave that’s mesmerizing at best, a bit distracting at worst. The good news is that if you do find the colors too distracting, you can customize the display of the illumination and how it works with the Roccat Swarm app.
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Other than the missing extra hubs, the Suora is feature-complete with the other Roccat models. It’s got the same anti-ghosting functionality, 6 programmable macro keys, a 1000HZ polling rate, media and volume hotkeys, a Game Mode button that lets you load a custom gaming profile, and quick F1-F4 toggling of the different sorts of RBG illumination (breath, ripple, solid, and wave).
It’s a smaller keyboard overall than the Isku or the Ryos, so the key layout took a bit of getting used to. But once I had it down I was very pleased with the overall feel and pressure needed to type on the Suora. The original Suora was also backlit, but didn’t have the multicolor RGB illumination and effects. The cost difference between the standard blue backlit Suora and the Suora FX? The Suora cost an MSRP of $99.99 while the FX costs $139.99 - $40 seems like an awful lot for just added colors that’s for sure.
While the Suora FX is a bit too much for what I think most people will be willing to spend on a barebones mechanical keyboard, there’s no faulting its design or simple functionality. This is a hell of a keyboard, that just happens to be overpriced for pretty colors. We received our unit courtesy of Roccat for review, but we wouldn’t recommend spending $140 on it unless you couldn’t live without the RGB colors – the Suora standard for $100 is a much better deal.
