ROCCAT - VULCAN 120 AIMO Wired Gaming Mechanical Keyboard with Back Lighting - Black

I bought this as my daily driver in the office to give my old KBTalking Pro with Cherry MX brown switches a rest after 5+ years. First impressions out of the box: I would prefer the USB cable to be removable/replaceable via a mini-USB jack (or better) on the keyboard. The metal top plate is nice (a bit lighter silver color than it looks in most of the marketing pics), but the plastic trim around it is a bit chintzy, especially the thick strip along the bottom edge of the keyboard. There are two screws with large black heads above the F1/F4 keys -- I have no clue why these are here (no manual other than a 5-step getting started guide in 16 languages), but they stick out like a sore thumb against the silver plate. Especially when one of them is loose and protruding, as mine was out of the box. Do they even quality control check these? I had no issue tightening the screw down. The rear feet either flip in or out but are not adjustable to multiple heights. The wrist pad feels comfortable, but is thin, hard plastic -- given the magnetic attachment to the keyboard, there should be options (leather, gel, etc) since they are easily replaceable if they wear out. The first time I detached the wrist pad, a strip of adhesive plastic trim with tiny magnets came halfway off the wrist pad with the magnets sticking to the keyboard. I was able to push it back into place, but it is inexcusable that the magnets aren't solidly glued into place. Lighting: the LEDs are bright but can be dimmed (including dimmed to 0) via brightness settings. More light seems to shine out to the rear of the keyboard compared to what you see sitting in front of it. There are two buttons (FX and sound) beside the multimedia knob that let you switch between using the knob to control illumination level or volume level (also programmable to other functions). Software: Roccat Swarm is huge (200+ MB) and relatively basic. There are a couple of character repeat settings, but it is mostly key/macro assignment and lighting config that you can group into profiles. The installer installed a Windows runtime package first, then I had to reboot and run the installer again to install Swarm. On first run, there was an update immediately available, then had to add on the package for this model keyboard, and then had a firmware update for the keyboard itself. Last step of the firmware update is to unplug the keyboard, so you may want to update before you climb under your desk to plug it into the back of the computer. The stock lighting animations were a bit too distracting for me, so I went with “fully lit” with a custom blue hue at the lowest brightness. The “fully lit” mode divides the keyboard into six zones where you can set a color for each zone, but is annoying that if you’re setting the entire keyboard to one color you have to configure each of the six zones individually. Also annoying that if you switch away to another lighting mode, it doesn’t remember your custom color setting when you switch back to fully lit, so you have to set all six zones again. Also, “applying” the lighting changes is sometimes flaky – it took a few tries to get it to apply the first time (seems like the “apply” button didn’t work until I turned on “auto apply” and then turned it off again). I also had issues where I switched to one of the stock animation modes and then tried to go back to “fully lit” with the custom color, and the color only applied to the right two zones while the rest of the keyboard remained the old animation color. I had to apply a fully lit stock “theme” first and then apply a custom color to get the colors to reset. I haven’t had any issues with the keyboard changing colors or not remembering the last illumination setting upon reboot (Win 10). The six Ins/Del/Home/End/etc keys above the arrow keys are programmable as macro keys. FN + Scroll appears to activate Game mode, which enables the macro keys. On the plus side, the macros appear to be able to handle complex sequences of keypress (e.g. press/release ALT, then E, then S, then V) that can be easily created with a record function. On the negative side, I haven’t been able to get that macro to work in Excel. I haven’t had time to experiment or dig through the FAQs (again, no manual). I understand many keyboards are doing away with dedicated macro keys, but I would prefer these on the left side of the keyboard since your right hand is already doing double-duty with the mouse. Key action: didn’t really stand out initially, they are a bit quieter than my old MX browns yet a bit more “clicky” sounding and feeling (the browns always sounded more like a plasticy “clunk” than a “click”). But they really started to shine after a few minutes of long-form typing. Maybe it’s the shorter travel, and I’m no typing expert but it feels like “touch” typing – it only takes a light press of the key to register and you still get a clicky response. I haven’t gamed with it yet so can’t comment there, but a hard repeated press of a single key seems to have a pretty solid feel too. Speaking of shining (sigh), the keycaps are matte and show every greasy fingerprint. I haven’t decided if I’m going to try to keep them clean, or wipe them down with something that leaves a residue so they’re all shiny. Good chance they will get glossy with use over time as the matte plastic wears, so another odd design choice there. I hate to “not recommend” this keyboard since I don’t have a better one to recommend. I will probably keep it since I like how it types and I will rarely use the software once it is setup. But I don’t think it fully lives up to the price tag or the premium/luxury “German design and engineering” marketing.

I love Roccat products and have been waiting for them to make a keyboard that wasn't over the top or using a cherry switch/clone. This finally is that keyboard and it hits all the marks in the best way possible. It is tactile and gives off a great noise, making it a true pleasure to just type on. The switches are so smooth unlike cherry's and give such great feedback both audibly and physically. They have this bounce to them that reminds me of Topre keyboards. The spacebar is stiff unlike so many other keyboards I have used (including Topre ones and practically every mechanical keyboard using a cherry or cherry clone.) The keys are thin and spaced out so not a lot of typos are committed. I feel like I type faster than I ever have before and with much less typos and I just got this today and have only used it for a few hours. Because the keys are spaced out and they use cherry compatible stems it is easy to replace the keys for PBT ones if that's preferred. (Or artisan keycaps, which I will be adding to this. =D ) I may add the PBT caps one day but I honestly love the feel of these key caps. They are definitely ABS but they have this soft feel to them that adds to the pleasure of typing and gives it the slightest amount of grip to keep the typos/miskeys from occurring, making it easier to game with. Even though the keys are spaced out, this board is smaller than a lot of other boards out there. It is light and the magnetic wrist rest is comfortable. It is plastic but it is a soft coated plastic that feels nice to rest the palms on. If another type of wrist rest is preferred it is compatible with others. I imagine this being the easiest keyboard to clean and fingerprint marks will be at a minimum. The volume wheel is very resistant and has a nice tactile click for each step. I wish the aluminum plate was black but it still looks really sleek. The lighting is very clean and can be the brightest keyboard I have ever used. I turned it down to ~30-40% because it was so bright. Right now it looks perfect and though I don't understand the AIMO lighting, it looks really nice. Honestly I bought this to see if I would even like it and I immediately replaced the board that was already on my desk and added the old one to the collection. I collect keyboards and love to talk about them and type on them. This thing blew me away. I have never had a problem with Roccat software and found it easy to use and don't like using software much for keyboards so it is fitting. I am so glad my favorite gaming brand made a keyboard this dang good. Cherry, their clones, and Omron keyboards are blown out of the water by this thing for typing and gaming. Thank you so much, Roccat. Granted, I have only had this for a short time and will definitely update it in the future if my opinion changes or if something goes wrong but I do not think I have had an initial impression quite like this with a keyboard.

Before i bought this keyboard the keyboards i had before it were two keyboards from amazon, one was the aula gaming keyboard that lit up purple blue and red tgen the otherone was another pretty much the same i just cant remember the name of the otherone, but they were cheap and good for me at the time, but when i found this, This keyboard..The Holy Grail of all gaming keyboards out of any i had ever seen on google, or youtube, or on, amazon, ebay, i was like holy mother and father of jesus, ive gotta buy this, honestly i had my doubts at first and thought this would be just like any otger keyboard seeling out on the rgb aspect mainly, but boy were my first thoughts 20 trillion light years away from the truth! I opened that package with my serrated steel hunting knife and when i first layed my eyes on all its glory i was blinded, i read the manual thry were so simple to understand i let my 5 year old cousin Benjamin try to make it work and he was able to do it and he's not even a gamer i mean hes 5! The feel of the keyboard is so pleasing to the touch it feels so sturdy i feel like i could run this keyboard over with my car and it would still work no problem, i mean seriously it has its own phone app for ios and android devices so you can download it to your pc as well and you can change roccat device setting with your phone using wifi network connection. You can individually change each key on the keyboard to so many different color combinations or keyboard configurations you can even change each key to have its own individual effect, you csn even make profile presets to create configurations and save them and tgen load them to whatever matches your gaming mood or whatever mood your in dosn't have to be gaming it dosnt have to be anything you can even just turn all the ligts on the keyboard off or any single key light you want, you can set certain keys or key combos to open programs or games or files, there is even an option for artificial asthetic keyboard typing sounds for when you are pressing keys, theres a volume knob on the keyboard, and it has the option for a wrist rest which is magnetic and can be removed or added onto the keyboard easily.

Purchased from Best Buy on 07/27/208, I'm hoping to keep some folks from being suckered like I did. I was in the market for a new mechanical keyboard and took to review sites, all of which touted the Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO as the hot newcomer (many still do, a quick Google search nets you results from TechRaptor and PCMagazine to name a few). Because of those reviews and the reputation behind the quality of German engineering I decided to pick one up with Best Buy at the time being my best option. The keyboard is stunningly beautiful, no doubt about it. It feels solid, too. Nice and heavy. It's a looker for sure and is usually one of the first things people notice about my setup. That would be fine if I were using my rig for some kind of PC fashion contest; while I concede that looks factors in, performance is a much higher ranked factor in my gear decisions. I was kinda giddy unboxing this keyboard because I'd not had one this expensive before. I got it plugged in, installed Swarm, and I was pretty taken with how it looked and felt. At first using it was a dream. It did take some getting used to because the switches were way different compared to those in the Ducky Shine that I was replacing. After a week or two of use though I began to notice some keys weren't firing off their keystrokes; password I knew that I knew would fail, I would catch more typos in my messages and writing. That's when I began to pay attention and sure enough some keystrokes were failing to go through, would fail to go through even hitting the key five or more times in succession. Beyond that I also began to notice that I would sometimes enter keystrokes twice, it's very fond of doing this with the "L" key. I put up with it for a while because it wasn't affecting my gaming. It seemed to behave fine in games and I'll be honest that there's not much of a difference between it missing a couple of keystrokes in an email or message or me just typing poorly. I changed my tune though, because it did begin to affect my gaming. In the middle of the Alphascape V3.0 raid in Final Fantasy XIV several keys stopped responding. These keys were unfortunately keys that I have key parts of my rotation (no pun intended) bound to. It took me a minute to put two and two together as to why my abilities weren't going off. I ended up having to click several abilities on my hotbar with my mouse. The result was my performance dropping to a point that I wiped my group twice before they vote abandoned. The Swarm software itself is a point of contention as it crashes daily, sometimes twice a day. You can tell when the lighting locks up or the lighting scheme goes to this weird orange/red splattered default. There's a firmware update every time you blink but none of them seem to help any of these problems. When I spend this much on a piece of equipment I expect it to work, especially equipment that makes a big show of talking about how it's "German engineered." Well, the German engineers must have fallen asleep when they were making this one. Between the software crashes the general failure of the keyboard itself to function reliably it doesn't deserve to boast about German engineering... this is an amateur product pretending to be worthy to stand among brands like Daskeyboard, BOSCH, Mercedes-Benz, Wiha and others. I'll give them credit for one thing though. If you were just looking at this keyboard as nightlight it's a pretty good one and maybe from that perspective it's worthy of touting it's German engineering heritage. Unfortunately it's overpriced as a nightlight (and a keyboard).

I purchased this because my Thermaltake X1 is ok, but just wasn't completely satisfied. The ROCCAT Keyboard is one of a kind and is now my main keyboard on my home workstation. The product is packaged very well, everything was covered in a plastic film bag keeping it in perfect condition. The installation went without a single issue, minus I had to restart after the ROCCAT Swarm Application recognized and installed the drivers and update. Once completed it requested a restart and after restarting a New Firmware notice popped up. Firmware installed with no issues. The application is organized very well and finding my way around was easy. Under General Features I was allowed to add Sound Feedback and wasn't expecting this feature. I set mine to a click sound and adjusted volume till it was a nice click and not an annoying click sound. Key Assignment seems easy and organized with a Keyboard or List View. I dont use any macros or just dont have a need or desire to change anything in the key assignments. Key Illumination has 8 predefined selections and a Custom Mode. I like the AIMO Intelligent Lighting that matched my ROCCAT KONE Mouse. The keyboard keys are well layout for my comfort and typing is as expected. One thing I like is the ability to easily clean between the keys, cleaning is super easy because of the design. From the 3 RGB keyboards I have owned, this is my favorite and choice of keyboard.

I love the look of this keyboard and the switches feel nice under my fingers. It is easy to type on with the switch bump at the top but other then that feels a lot like browns. The problem with this keyboard is the software. The software is fine for controlling the RGB but seems incomplete for other functions like profile creation. For example if you create a profile for gaming you cannot set the keyboard to automatically go in to Game Mode. To enter Game Mode you will need to press FN+Scroll so although the profile will change when you launch the game the macro keys and Easy-Shift Key will not be active and the Widows key will still be active until you active Game Mode. It is something you will find in every other vendor's software but not in Roccat's application. But that is just a minor thing the major flaw is support for Windows 64bit. Roccat has released there software with unsigned drivers and that is a major issue. Windows 64bit will not install unsigned drivers and sure you could work around that by disabling security settings in Windows but you shouldn't have to do that. Specifically it is the driver that allows the use of macros, djpnewton/vmulti. The software has been in this state since February of 2018 and although there have been new release of the software since then they have failed to correct this issue. I have some suspicions of why that has happened and with the recent sale of Roccat to Turtle Beach those beliefs have been reinforced. Even though I am giving this keyboard four stars (for build quality) I would not recommend it for these reasons: 1. Software not fully compatible with Windows 10 64bit 2. Software not polished and not properly maintained by Roccat 3. No onboard memory so software must be up and running at all times 4. Roccat recently sold to Turtle Beach (March 2019) so product line and future support is a concern Nice keyboard but proceed with caution.

I decided it was time for a change. I've been using a Das Keyboard 4 for several years and have found it well made but wanted a better typing experience combined with some nice back lighting. After reading a number of reviews, I settled on the Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO Gaming Mechanical Keyboard with Back Lighting. Best Buy didn't have one on display so I asked the salesman if he would open a box so I could try out the keys. He kindly acquiesced and I could tell with just a few depressions that this keyboard was definitely an improvement over the Das Keyboard. After pluggin in the keyboard and installing Swarm software and firmware update, I set up a custom light display that keeps the keys softly illuminated in a coolish blue tone. Unlike other reviews, I don't find the back lighting too bright (only if you look way from the sides) and it's very easy to read the key labels. The touch is precise, not loud, and feels very comfortable (not too heavy or light). The wrist rest works well, is simple to attach and stays in place. Highly recommended for someone who types a lot and wants to add a some nice illumination and color to their desktop.

This is an amazing keyboard. It's like typing on the best typewriter that was ever made. They keys are concave and feel like any other key. I wasn't sure they would at first. I've owned this keyboard for. The only issue I have is the space bar which will slightly cock to one side or the other as you type, unless you hit it perfectly. Really, that's the only negative and not a big deal at all. It's also the one key you won't be able to replace with an aftermarket keycap. Only the key they designed will fit. The dial for the volume is a nice touch and can be moved easily with a finger. In the beginning I had switched it with a chrome dial from an old amp but eventually I went back to the plastic key and won it's spot on the board. So just a note if that key bothers you it really does a fine job. The look, feel, and functionality is all top notch. It's the best keyboard I've ever used and the lighting is unrivaled. You can find better preprogrammed light shows in a board like alienware but if you update the software at any point, buckle up. Some of your keys might stop working and so on. This software works and you can preset alot of different creations. Most of all though, it's just a pleasure to type on and look at. It's basically a piece of art on your desktop the second you plug it in. The price is high but justified when you compare it to others. The more you compare the sooner you realize mkb can get much more expensive, especially keys, and what you get in the box right here is perfect.