Cougar 600K Gaming Keyboard Review

Layout and Feature Overview

The Cougar 600K is made with aluminum / plastic components. I guess this is what you might call a hybrid keyboard. The Cherry MX switches are mounted onto the PCB board and under laid with blushed aluminum. The keyboard itself is relatively light with the Cougar 600K weighing in at just 1.1kg or about 2.4lb. Total dimensions are listed at 467mm wide, 40mm thick and a 230mm length.

With the feet raised you are gaining about 8mm in additional height bringing it up to 48mm at the peak. The majority of keys are not back lit like we saw with the 700K. The primary back lit keys are ASWD and the Up, Down, Left, and Right arrows. Additional miscellaneous keys that are also back lit are the 1x/2x/4x/8x repeaters, light sensitivity key and lock key.

The Cougar 600K doesn’t have a “flat key” design. The base of the keyboard is very much proportional, however keys are placed in a curved fashion for maximum comfort. Does this curved key releases stress on hands? I am not entirely sure. From what I saw by using this keyboard the arm rest does pretty a good job keeping hands elevated and relaxed however when it comes to key placement, I didn’t see much difference in comfort.

The very top row offers most of the features of the Cougar 600K. On the left side are four buttons which allow repeat of the buttons at certain speeds. This feature comes in handy when you are playing a game that requires a lot of button mashing. On the right side of the keyboard there’s the light sensitivity light which offers three stages of brightness and ghosting effect. Ghosting effect is best described as fading in and out of the intensity of the lit keys. I also found 6-key rollover and N-key rollover buttons under SCRLK and PAUBRK buttons. The features could be turned on and off by holding the left Windows key and hitting the corresponding buttons.

While looking all around the keyboard I discovered the USB pass-through on the back of the unit. The Cougar 600K has 1.8m USB cable which connects the keyboard and USB pass-through to the computer. The cable is braided and relatively thick so moving it around can be difficult at times. The USB connectors are gold plated for better conductivity.

As I previously mentioned the Cougar 600K is offered with four different types of Cherry MX switches, black, red, brown and blue. The unit I received came with the Cherry MX Blue switches. The difference between Cherry MX switches are classified by clicky, tactile and actuation force. Clicky type switches create clicking sounds when pressed. If a switch is tactile it creates a small force feedback bump at the beginning of the engagement point and before the key completely bottoms out. Actuation Force (measured in centinewton or “cN”) is used to determine how much force the switch needs to be pressed before it is registered.