Hands-on: Corsair Gaming's new K70 is the first RGB-backlit Cherry MX keyboard

Hot on the heels of Logitech's G910 Orion Spark keyboard announcement last week, Corsair's re-branding its entire peripheral depart to "Corsair Gaming" and releasing its own RGB-enabled keyboard: the K70 RGB. The difference? Corsair gets to keep those sweet, sweet Cherry MX switches. It's a back lit mechanical keyboard arms race, and I'm all too happy to watch it play out.

See, Logitech's Orion Spark uses exclusive Romer-G switches. You can read a bit more about them here, but basically it's a mod to the no-longer-under-patent Cherry MX design. Instead of the iconic Cherry MX stem, the center of the key is hollow allowing for smooth and even back lighting. The cost? At least to my fingers, the Romer-G switches feel a bit more rubber dome-esque than I prefer.

But there's a reason for Logitech's exodus—up until recently there was no RGB Cherry switch, and not due to lack of demand. According to Corsair, "Due to the current design of the Cherry MX switch, there is only room for a single 3mm LED that could mount directly onto the key switch." An RGB LED requires five millimeters of space, by contrast.

 Corsair really wanted RGB back-lighting though, so it worked with Cherry to solve the problem. The pair found that if they mounted the LEDs directly to the circuit board and used a lens to refract light, they could keep the iconic stem design and feel of the Cherry MX switches while still enabling full RGB back-lighting.

Corsair's built some intuitive software to go along with this device, and it's easy to set up anything from a solid background color to a WASD/Shooter control scheme that pulses quietly to a setup that sends waves for each key press to...well, complete visual chaos. You can just keep adding layers of lights until your eyes bleed, though you can only have a maximum of sixteen distinct colors on the board at a time.

Too lazy to make your own lighting scheme? Corsair allows you to import/export whatever you'd like, and is partnering with a few e-sports teams to, for example, make a keyboard set-up in that team's colors.

Similar to Logitech, Corsair is also putting out an SDK for the keyboard so developers can integrate the new lighting features into games—for instance, turning your entire keyboard into a health bar that fades from green to red as you take damage.

Sounds like a fantastic keyboard, right? Just like Logitech's Orion Spark, however, I expect the price to be the point where you choke: $170(Kshs.17,600) for the K70 and $190(Kshs.19,600) for the K95 (which adds eighteen dedicated macro keys to the left side, though both the K70 and K95 allow you to set a macro on any key, both on press and release)

We'll have a more extensive review sometime soon, but at the end of the day Corsair's K70 is a Cherry MX keyboard with full RGB back lighting, and it's the only such keyboard on the market. For now, Corsair's your only option if both those features are important to you.