Performance
Like I said earlier I have been using the Hermes RGB for weeks now on my main PC night and day meaning I write and game on it. This has given me a good chance to get a feel for the keyboard and find the good and the bad. With it only having blue switches available you can expect the Hermes RGB to be a little noisier than a keyboard with browns or reds. You do get the full mechanical experience with blues though. For gaming a lot of people seem to think that reds are the best option but in my opinion I think it really just comes down to preference. With a completely standard layout getting used to the Hermes RGB took no time at all. I had to drop my normal wrist rest due to the built in wrist rest but even there I was surprised that I didn’t have more issues. I initially expected the two triangles to put lines on my wrists but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. That said I would still prefer to see them avoid shapes in a comfort zone.
I did run into an issue when typing on the Hermes RGB almost right out of the hole. There were a few quality issues on the keycaps on our sample that caused hangups and miss pressed keys. Specifically, the spacebar had a bend to it that pushed it very close to the comma key. This combined with a ring around the bottom of the keycaps from the paint caused this to be an issue for me over and over until I pulled the spacebar off and trimmed the edge off. I also had the same issue with the I key as well and it double pressing the 9 at the same time. I think these issues were exclusive to our review sample because I’m not seeing any customer reviews mentioning it, but still it was a big pain and it leaves the quality of the Hermes up in the air.
Once I had my keycap issues worked out typing on the Hermes RGB went smoothly. Gaming went good as well. I didn’t really find any good use for the function layer macros on the spacebar and the B button, but I’ve never been one to use any of the extra macro keys on any gaming keyboards as well. I do think those two macro keys are much easier to reach and put to use than what most gaming keyboards have and frankly even if you don’t use them they aren’t hurting anything being there.
The media keys up in the F Row didn’t get a lot of use for me. I prefer the media keys to be over in the Insert and Delete section with a function button that is reachable with your right hand as well. The lighting effect buttons that Gamdias put over there could work just as well up in the F row. I was surprised with the F4 keys function though; you can flip your WASD keys to be a direction pad. As a gamer I thought this was a nice way to get a direction pad in a location that I am more comfortable using for games like worms that use the direction pad over WASD. This same mode also moves WASD over to the direction pad for people who prefer to use the direction pad in FPS games!
With this being an RGB board the lighting was obviously one of its main features. I found the lighting to be more than bright enough and obviously being RGB I could set it to any color that I wanted. For most of my testing I ran it on the wave mode to check out all of the available colors but as mentioned in the software section there are a lot of different options. You can pick from a whole list of effects or make your own layout as well.
