Steelseries 6gv2 Mechanical Keyboard (Red Edition)

After clocking tons of hours on my PC (the bulk of my gaming hours this year) of Diablo 3, Civ 5, and some of the newer FPS's like Mass Effect 3 and Deux Ex, I decided that it was time for me to get a new keyboard. Too many annoying and unnecessary deaths attributed to non-registering keypresses on my Logitech DiNovo Edge.

While the DiNovo Edge is a great media keyboard - it's wireless with a built-in touchpad - I guess it just didn't work out for me in terms of gaming. After a little research, I found this bad boy: a Steelseries 6gv2 mechanical keyboard featuring cherry mx red switches.

Requiring only 45g of force to actuate, it requires 25% less force than the 60g cherry mx blue switches found on the Razor Blackwidow, which I had the opportunity to try out earlier this year. However, given that Red switches are also linear switches, they lack the tactile response and the clickiness of the blue ones. I thought that would bother me, and for a while it was the only thing holding me back from taking the plunge.

One week with the keyboard, playing Deus Ex Missing Link and Commandos (old school), there's an immediate difference. I was getting the responsiveness I was craving, but on the flip side, because of the non-tactile response and uber sensitive keys, I found my guy drifting to the left a lot because my the resting pressure on my ring finger was enough to trigger the key. While largely different from my media board, it was also different from the blue keys.

Right now I'm largely indifferent to which style is better for gaming, but I will say that it is a lot harder to type accurately on this red switched keyboard. I assume that I'll adjust eventually, and with the Starcraft II expansion (and possibly DOTA 2) around the corner, this keyboard will finally get a real test.