In order to combat the growing popularity of console gaming (and also to support a growing population of gamers) many peripheral companies began to invest money into making real devices to support gaming on the PC. We have seen many of these products (usually mice of game controllers), but with the exception of a few of the mice we were not all that impressed with them. That is until we started to see the first mechanical switch based keyboards. As we spend a large amount of time behind the keyboard (and also still game) we had a serious interest in these devices. Most of them are centered on the Cherry MX switch. These mechanical switches come in different colors; each of these has different properties. We have shown you blue and brown and what they each bring to the table. Now we are going to take a look at the Thermaltake Tt eSports MEKA G1 Mechanical gaming keyboard. This product takes a little different tack on switches and has opted for Cherry MX Black. So let’s dive in and see if the MEKA G1 will be worth the $100 Thermaltake wants for it.
Performance - For testing we put the MEKA G1 through about 10 hours of gaming. This was with a variety of games from Alan Wake to Mass Effect 3 and through some older (but no less fun) games like Bioshock 2 and HalfLife 2. The Cherry MX Black switches in the MEKA G1 gave a different feel to our game play. It was not bad, and in a way it felt a little more comfortable. The noise of the keys was also much less than what we saw on the Quickfire Rapid with the loud click from the Cherry MX Blue switches and the heavier keys. As far as usage the level performance in the game was the same. There was no giant leap between the two in terms of movement, accuracy speed or anything else. Where we did run into a slight difference was with multiple key presses. We found that the MEKA G1 was not as fast to respond to ley combinations in the same way that we saw on other keyboards while running in USB mode. When we switched over to PS/2 mode there was no issue. This is a little disappointing to tell you the truth. For regular typing the Cherry MX Black switches were nice, but were a little too stiff for our liking. Do not get me wrong they are very comfortable and easy to use, but we prefer a little less resistance when typing up articles or reviews. We found that with our typing style and the resistance that the MX Black switches had we missed letters (not always a good thing). We are sure we would get used to it, but it would take time and as we said it did not fit our typing style.As a test of both the USB hub and the audio ports we gamed with our Sentinel Advance II in one of the on board USB ports and plugged our House of Marley Zion Headphones into the audio port The only issue that we noted running the Sentinel in this manner was that the mouse would dip well below its stated 1000Hz polling rate many times during use. This probably has a lot to do with the onboard USB hub controller which is not going to saturate the connection to system to maintain a high polling rate of a single device. In more ways than one, this is a good thing and is designed to make sure your MEKA G1 continues to work regardless of what you have plugged into the USB ports. We has absolutely no issues with the audio ports, the sound we received was the same as when we plugged the Zions into the actual ports on the system.
