IOGear’s Kaliber Gaming sub-brand is at it again with the HVER Pro X gaming keyboard. This model continues the keyboard family’s legacy by delivering some premium keyboard features at a price well below the competition. In the case of the HVER Pro X it’s bringing optical-mechanical switches at just about $90, and it throws in a few other premium extras that make it fairly competitive. But, let’s see how it stacks up against the polish of the
best gaming keyboards.
Design and Features
Optical-mechanical key switches are the key point of differentiation between the HVER Pro X and the Pro RGB, which uses standard mechanical Red- or Brown-style switches. While the actuation is handled by the optical switches, the design otherwise has a Brown-style mechanism, giving it a large but less pronounced tactile bump than a Blue-style switch.
Because the keyboard uses these optical switches instead of metal electrical contacts, IOGear claims the keyboard is spill resistant. That doesn’t mean you want to get liquids on it though. It may be spill resistant from an electrical standpoint, but after taking a close look around the keyboard, I see plenty of ways for spilled liquids to get into the chassis and very few ways for them to get back out. You don’t want to leave your keyboard full of water or any other liquid.
Aside from these changes, the HVER Pro X is very much the same as its mechanical counterpart, the HVER Pro RGB. It has an aluminum backplate for praiseworthy structural rigidity, double-injection keycaps to let the per-key RGB lighting shine through, and a plastic base with some rubber grips, two legs for adjusting the angle, and an attached keycap puller.
Much of the Pro X’s features sound better on paper than they are in person. The RGB lighting is dim even at its brightest setting. The fonts used on the keycaps, particularly in the number row, look like they’re not quite finished (8 looks more like a curvy H, and 0 looks like a pair of parentheses) – just as they were on the HVER Pro RGB.
The special functions like lighting and media controls on the keycaps are just printed on, dragging down the sense of quality.
The style itself gives the feeling of trying to be gamery without much consideration for how. The aluminum base plate extends past the keys and has some odd bends and little cutouts. It could have been a more compelling design if that extra metal was just folded down and out of the way. All the same, the keyboard does a good job not taking up much more space than it needs to.
Software
IOGear hasn’t stepped up its software game from the HVER Pro RGB. It’s still a very basic program for changing the lighting, setting up per-key lights, creating macros, and saving profiles. The software only offers three profiles, with no per-game profiles to let you set up macros specific to individual titles. Customizing the lighting is also tedious, and took me a little time to figure out despite having used this software before for the exact same thing.
Performance and Gaming
The HVER Pro X claims to have superior gaming performance thanks to its optical-mechanical switches. Because the keyboard can more accurately detect when a key is pressed or released, as there’s no debouncing involved, IOGear claims it can offer “25% faster key response actuation.”
Just how responsive it is, down to the millisecond, is beyond me. But, in my experience playing Rainbow Six Siege and Metal Gear Solid V with the keyboard, it felt perfectly dependenable. I didn’t notice any delay between my keypresses and in-game actions while playing Siege at 144fps. Quick taps to peek around corners for enemies worked out just like I’d hope, even if my ability to shoot the enemy before they shoot me is not always as consistent.
The HVER Pro X is every bit as dependable gaming as the Pro RGB in my experience. It maintains the 1,000Hz polling rate, anti-ghosting, and full N-Key rollover. But, for any advantages it may have in gaming, it falls apart outside of gaming.
The HVER Pro X may go for the same Brown-style key switch feel as the Pro RGB, but it’s not as consistent. It has the large tactile bump, which feels more like a big lump (think speed bump vs. speed hump). The kind of heavy presses I use in games work perfectly well, but lighter taps don’t always depress the key all the way over that lump. In game, that’s only really an issue in button-mashing quick-time events or in looting sprees when hammering away at E to pick up every item around.
Outside of games, the key switches feel awful to type on. It’s partly because the light taps aren’t always enough to actuate, but there’s a bigger issue at play. Missing a keypress because I stopped partway through the tactile bump is my fault, but I found I could press keys past the bump and still not actuate them. They took just a little more to actuate – so much for muscle memory. Then there’s the matter of consistency. It’s one thing for the space key to feel different from a letter key, but the bump felt different even among keys of the same size. Pressing the edges of keys also led to a different feel than pressing down in their center.
Those differences manifest themselves painfully in typing, as I often found myself failing to double-press a key or managing to press one letter before another. I’m not a perfect typist, but I can feel the HVER Pro X dramatically increasing the frequency of my typing errors. This is an issue the HVER Pro RGB didn’t have, as I found its mechanical switches surprisingly pleasant and consistent. Even the SteelSeries Apex 5 (a membrane keyboard!) felt more consistent in my testing.
Purchasing Guide
The IOGear HVER Pro X is available direct from IOGear with an MSRP of $89.