Thermaltake eSports CHALLENGER Prime Gaming Keyboard Review
A Closer Look
What jumps out by looking at CHALLENGER Prime is Thermaltake’s e-Sports logo. I didn’t find out until later that the logo glows along with the backlit keys. What is important to mention here is that the CHALLENGER Prime is made of ABS plastic which is widely used in many products nowadays. ABS is two-phase polymer blend. What it means in layman’s terms is that the material is highly durable and light.
With a closer look at they keys, you will see that they are very shiny. What came to mind is the question of “how long will it take to wear them out?”. The lettering is embossed so my estimation on the wear and tear on the keys would be one to two years. Since the CHALLENGER Prime is gamer oriented we quickly found some cool features such as arrowed WASD keys and six macro keys which could be programmed by using the CHALLENGER Prime Gaming Keyboard Driver.
The CHALLENGER Prime Supports up to 3 selective profiles. When the keyboard is in operational state, the M1, M2 and M3 LED’s represent the profile the keyboard is in. Looking back on the macro buttons on the right, with 3 different profiles the CHALLENGER Prime give you 18 highly customizable macros which you can take to any LAN party.
Depending on your preferences the CHALLENGER Prime offers adjustable dial for the brightness of the backlit keys. It is worth to mention that you can customize your CHALLENGER Prime in Blue, Red and Purple colors as you please. What I found cool is the “Breathing” mode to keep your keyboard illuminated. Besides the cool color tuning, the CHALLENGER Prime offers some convenience keys such as multimedia keys and shortcuts. These keys do come in handy at times.
The keyboard is not a thin one as it is a little over an inch and a third when measured. However, the design is relatively ergonomic so the keyboard feels just right at a right angle when laying flat. What we also noticed in Prime is the wrist rest. Wrist rest here is basically graded plastic. Does it provide any sort of grip? It does however if you are a gamer then you should know that sweaty hands are your worst enemy and we had some hard time leaving wrists on the rest.
If you ever attended a LAN party then you probably know that there are a bunch of junk food along with numerous caffeinated drinks that are available. Spilling a drink on the keyboard could be catastrophic, however the CHALLENGER Prime offers spillage holes. There are nine holes which are located all over the keyboard. These holes are designed to drain any sort of liquid from the keyboard in case of spillage. I have not tested this here however, I do believe that this would work specially with the type of switches which are used in CHALLENGER Prime.
Most of the keyboards come with a little risers on the bottom. These risers are very much handy when you are trying to adjust the keyboard to the right height. For those who do not know, adjusting keyboard height is very important. Research shows that from misuse of the keyboards, a user could develop Carpal tunnel syndrome which is caused by a pinched nerve. How is the keyboard when it is on a flat surface? Actually, not bad at all. From what I saw, the keyboard was very stable due to the rubber footing. There are total of four rubber feet which in my opinion works great.
The USB cable which is solely attached to the keyboard is braided and has a length of about 5 feet. There isn’t much I can say that makes this cable stand out but I did find a small Thermaltake eSports logo on the USB connector.
