Performance Test

We put the Quick Fire through its paces with a number of games that ranged from FPS to MMO’s to see how’d she perform. Yes we consider peripherals to be female. Big whoop..wanna fight about it? (Paddy Tanninger – Family Guy) We also tested the keyboard to see how it would do with day to day typing tasks, and media activities as the Quick Fire has some media features included. Please note that the Quick Fire does not come with it’s own software, so all you have to do is plug it in, and you are good to go.

Gaming

One thing we would like to mention before we go into our evaluation of game play with the Quick Fire is that cherry blue mechanical keyboards tend to not be favored by FPS gamers as the keys tend to “bottom out” more then players would like in comparison to other mechanical cherry switches.

When we say “bottom out” we are talking about the amount of pressure needed to press on the key to activate the desired action of said key (i.e. pressing “W” to move your character forward). To some this is more an issue when double clicking when gaming. Cherry Blue Mechanical keyboards tend to need more pressure to have the key activate the desired effect vs. other cherry switches like red, or black. We recently posted a review of another CM Storm keyboard, the Cooler Master Trigger Mechanical Gaming Keyboard which features brown mechanical switches by GSC-9. Take a look to see the different you may find with Blue vs. Brown switches.

In all honesty the high majority of people who would even notice the difference would be people who have previously used mechanical keyboards with switches like cherry red, or cherry black. There would be a slim chance if any of anyone new to mechanical keyboards, especially coming from a membrane based keyboard, noticing a difference. With that being said lets get into what we discovered while using the Quick Fire in our games tests.

For the most part we enjoyed using the Quick Fire in games like Batman Arkham City, Champions Online, Vindictus, Battlefield 3, and Mass Effect 3. The key response was good, and smooth for the most part. We did experience a slight bit of “bottoming out” in some of the games but in all honesty to us its not a deal breaker. We were able to play as we wanted, and achieve our missions, kick some bad guys in the teeth while playing as Batman, and own a few Geth in Mass Effect 3.

Media

The Quick Fire has alternate functions for media playback located on the Function keys. These alternate functions include standard options like play / pasue, fast forward / rewind, mute, volume up / volume down etc. In order to use the alternate functions you need to press the FN key located right below the right Shift key. Using the alternate keys while listening to a CD via Windows Media Player was pretty good. Each key did as it was suppose to. One gripe is that on other keyboards which have media function specific keys, they include keys that allow you to fast forward, and rewind your selected media. The Quick Fire however doesn’t. This would be a bit disappointing if your sole intention on purchasing the Quick Fire was to use it as a media keyboard. Now since the Quick Fire is being advertised more for gaming, then media, anyone who purchase this board…an informed person we add…wouldn’t care about the media functions as they would only care about the the gaming functionality of the keyboard. Does this excuse the Quick Fire for having basic media keys? Actually yea. We were actually surprised it even came with media keys since its generally a gaming keyboard.

General Typing

It is said that cherry blue switch keyboards are great for typing, and we whole hardily agree after using the Quick Fire. In all honesty the keyboard is one of the better keyboards we have used in regards to typing. Key response time is great. We hardly made any mistakes typing up some responses to forum questions, answering PMs, and IMs, and of course writing reviews. As a matter of fact we used the Quick Fire to type up this review.

Next Page: Conclusion

Pages: 1 2 3