Good, but pricey for what it offers.
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The latest craze in gaming keyboards are mechanical keyboards that ditch the tenkey number pad in favor of a more compact design. Made to make it easier to tote to a LAN party and to position your mouse closer to the keyboard, these keyboards typically eschew some of the bells and whistles of bigger keyboards in favor of just the basics. Of course, there are some accoutrements. You may not get dedicated macro keys, physical volume dials, or USB pass-through ports, but fancy LED lights are table stakes for even the most basic “gaming” keyboard these days.
Cooler Master’s MasterKeys Pro S (See it on Amazon) is a great example of what to expect from this genre—it’s compact and durable with reliable Cherry MX switches, but relegates all controls to function keys instead of dedicated buttons. It’s a well-performing compact mechanical keyboard, but the $140 price is a little steep given its limited feature set.
Design and Features
If you’re spending well over $100 on a premium gaming keyboard, you expect some heft. The MasterKeys Pro S doesn’t let you down in that regard, though it’s not quite as tough and heavy as some of its competitors. It seems as though there’s a solid metal frame inside, but it’s surrounded by a rigid plastic body. Its best competitors have a metal keyboard deck.
The profile is quite small, with just a few millimeters of bezel surrounding the full-size keys. There is no included wrist wrest nor any place to snap one on—except for a couple snap-out feet to angle of the keyboard, what you see is what you get. The key caps sit atop Cherry MX switches (my review unit used Brown, but Blue and Red are also available) embedded in a white plastic tray. This allows the light to glow around the edges of the keys, and pass through the transparent parts of the key caps. It also provides a handy place for crumbs and dust to accumulate.
Around the back you’ll find a single micro-USB port for the included braided USB cable. It’s got an L-shaped connector to run the cable to the left, which is great if you want the cable to go that way. My desk demands my cable goes straight back, and I would prefer a straight plug. Fortunately, any micro-USB cable you have will work just fine.
On the right side of the space bar, between the Windows key (which sports a Cooler Master logo) and the CTRL key, you’ll find the keyboard’s lone Fn key. It’s not a toggle, as the Fn key is on most laptops. Rather, you hold it down and press the F1-F12 keys, or the block of keys above the arrow keys (Ins, Del, End, etc.), to perform secondary functions.
For example, you can hold down Fn and press F4 to change lighting modes. Pressing F1, F2, and F3 alter the amount of Red, Green, and Blue (respectively) used in that lighting mode. F5-F8 changes the key repeat rate from 1X to 8X. F9-F12 contain the Windows Lock and macro recording functions. The Ins, Home, End, Del, and Page Up/Down keys are your media controls.
It’s not a bad system, but of course all these things are just a little easier with separate controls. Volume, especially, is annoying to adjust by holding down the Fn button and pressing Page Up or Page Down multiple times. Physical volume dials are vastly superior.
At least you get plenty of lighting modes. You can choose from static color, color wave, rain drop, color cycle, breathing, and several dynamic effects that animate when you press keys, including single-key fading, cross mode, star effect, and ripple. You can even set the keys to light up as a CPU utilization monitor or audio EQ meter, or even play a game of Snake. Crazy!
On a technical level, the MasterKeys Pro S performs exactly as you would expect any modern premium gaming keyboard to. Latency is basically non-existent, the Cherry MX Brown switches have the same wonderful feel that have made them so popular over the years, and N-key rollover ensures that no matter how many keys you press at once, they will all register correctly.
Software
Cooler Master supplies simple keyboard software on its website. It’s used exclusively for setting up lighting profiles and updating the keyboard firmware. You can save up to four different lighting profiles, adding or removing ones you don’t want and customizing the colors to your heart’s content. There’s even a nice “multilayer” option that lets you stack some of the lighting modes. For example, you could make all the keys except the W-A-S-D and 1-4 number keys one color with a breathe effect, and then make those keys another color with cross mode reactive lighting. The possibility for customization is extensive.
The software has a “library” tab that allows you to save your profiles to your PC, but it seems a little minimal to dedicate an entire tab to. This could easily be accomplished with “save/load” buttons on the main LED tab. The software is just for tweaking lighting. Cooler Master’s software does not handle other common functions like tweaking macros or remapping keys.
Once set, the LED changes are saved to the keyboard’s four internal profile slots, and will remain as you take your keyboard to other computers. So you can use the software to tweak your lighting then you’ll never need to use it again. It’s essentially a “driverless” keyboard, and Cooler Master’s software is entirely optional, which is nice.
Gaming
I don’t want to be blasé about mechanical keyboards with Cherry MX switches, but we have reached a sort of “if you’ve used one you’ve used them all” era where they all have similar basic performance. Nearly any gaming keyboard worth its salt has incredibly fast polling and response, with N-key rollover to prevent binding up or ghosting. And of course the switches themselves are excellent: there’s a reason Cherry MX switches have endured as favored mechanical switches for so many years, despite so many challengers.
So it comes down to the other features, the stuff beyond just pressing a standard key and registering the expected response. In these regards, the MasterKeys Pro S gets the job done. The lack of dedicated keys for macros or media controls (or at least just volume) start to get in the way during a heated gaming session, though.
Plus, using the on-keyboard controls to set and play back macros is more complicated than it has to be. You have to hold the Fn key, press the profile you want to record a macro for (the 1-4 keys), the macro record button (F11), and then release the Fn key and press the one you want to record a macro on. As there are no dedicated keys, you have to “give up” a keyboard key, like backslash, to record a macro for it. Then you press the keys you want to record, and end by pressing the mode you’d like the macro to play back in (one loop, toggled infinite playback, or repeating on a loop). Finally, press Fn + Esc to exit programming mode.
If that sounds like too much to remember and execute in the heat of a game, you’re right! I had trouble getting it right while just experimenting at the desktop. The lack of dedicated macro keys, combined with the inability to set or tweak them in the Windows software, makes this ill-suited to gamers looking for a keyboard with macro playback (which are especially useful for MMOs).
I had no problem playing games with the MasterKeys Pro S. Whether playing Diablo III, Slime Rancher, or Crypt of the Necrodancer, the Cherry MX Brown switches never let me down and I always experienced perfect accuracy and lightning-fast response. The key action itself is great, and the LED lighting options are superb, but that’s as far
Purchasing Guide
The Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro S has an MSRP of $139.99, and is often sold for that price or just $10-$20 less. On very rare occasions it has dropped to $100:
• See the Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro S on Amazon
The Verdict
As a relatively basic compact keyboard that you can take with you to a LAN party, the MasterKeys Pro S works great, and it offers superb LED lighting options. But, as with most tenkeyless keyboards, the lack of dedicated controls for macros and media controls makes those functions somewhat hard to use. This, plus the plastic keyboard deck, makes it a little hard to swallow the $139.99 price.
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