Performance
Just like always, for my testing I swapped the Blackwidow X Chroma in place of the keyboard at my main PC. This is where I do almost all of my gaming and a good portion of my writing as well on top of all of the complaining I do when posting on Reddit and Facebook. So this gave me a nice variety of situations to use the keyboard and it let me put some miles on it quickly. My first impressions were mainly focused on the aluminum design. The new design gave the Blackwidow X a really solid feel when I was hanging the keyboard. When I started typing I did have to adjust to the cold feeling at first. I also noticed right away that the design amplifies the noisiness of the green “clicky” switches. Part of this is because of the lack of a bezel around the switches to hold the noise in and the other is that the metal carries the vibration a bit. I personally don’t really like the “clicky” sound that you get with the greens or a Cherry MX Blue, but a lot of people do so I’m not going to consider this a bad thing.
The full sized layout was easy to adjust too, mostly because this is basically what I run all of the time with the exception of the bottom row and those changes weren’t big enough to be noticed in my testing. There is some joy to be found when typing on a clicky switch though, every single click has a very firm reaction. The Razer branded switches do seem to be improving though, in the past I have found them to feel a little looser than a Cherry switch but I didn’t notice it here at all. I’ve seen Razer recently mention that their switches are manufactured by whatever company they are working with at the time to their specs, so I do have to wonder if whatever manufacture they are working with now might have a little better quality control.
The lubed stabilizers performed really well in my testing initially but I did develop a very annoying squeak on the right side of the spacebar after a while. It seems to be exclusive to there and I know lubricating that stabilizer stab will fix the issue but it is ironic that the first time I complement Razer on having lubricated stabilizers I run into this most likely rare issue.
The backlighting on the Blackwidow X Chroma is a little different than other Blackwidows as well. Without a bezel around the keys there is a lot of light bleed. It ends up looking great on the keyboard though. The lighting is still very bright through the legends, in fact I was really happy with it and found out in my testing that I hadn’t even turned up the lighting all of the way. Being a Chroma keyboard the RGB lighting effects were also a nice thing to have. I always seem to default back to a custom lighting layout or the standard RGB wave, but I was really loving all of the downloadable effects to pick from as well.
