HARDWARE REVIEW

SteelSeries Apex M500 Keyboard Review

by Kieron Davies, October 4th, 2016

SteelSeries are to gaming what bread is to toast, they’ve been around since the dawn of PC gaming and have many products out there for the aspiring pro gamer. The Apex M500 is one of the latest members of the SteelSeries family being a small, mechanical keyboard designed to be compact but professional.

At a glance the M500 looks sleek, streamlined and is just joy to behold. Boasting blue backlight LEDs for greater brightness the keyboard looks fantastic whether it’s lit up, breathing or even if you turn the backlighting off completely. However, the keys are very difficult to see with the lighting off, so having them on even dimly would be advised.

You’ll have probably noticed from the pictures a lack of macro keys. Although macro keys are usually found on gaming keyboards, the M500 opted to remove these in favour of being more compact, leaving gamers with more desk space. This is a great move personally, as I never find myself bothering with additional keys for macros and the additional desk space was something I didn’t realise I wanted until I had it.

Keys on the M500 are using MX Cherry Reds, the leading mechanical key design on the market. They are very comfortable and quiet while being very responsive. The actuation and reset depth is only 2mm, which is insanely small for keys meaning you get a great responsiveness which can sway the game. The actuation force needed to active a switch is only 45cN which is not very high, meaning if you are reacting quickly but you’re not very accurate, the chances are you will still hit your key and get the much needed ability to activate. Anti-ghosting keys come as standard which is what you’d expect from any gaming keyboard. For those who don’t know what it is, you can mash the keyboard and it will still register all the keys pressed.

Cherry reds are responsive a quiet as far as mechanical keyboard go, brown switches are also quiet but take a bit more pressing and blue take some pressing and like to let you know they’ve been pressed. Reds are always the best choice for an all-round keyboard as they hit the middle ground perfectly.

For this review I tested the keyboard in a number of different games. CS:GO for the eSports edge, World of Warcraft for the responsiveness when casting spells, Overwatch for the causal edge and Battlefield 4, because Battlefield 4 is great. Needless to say in each game the keyboard performed spectacularly, if a keystroke was missed, it was me fat-fingering the keyboard. I Warcraft my spells cast as soon as I hit the key, and I spam my keys a lot so there is a lot for this keyboard to try and keep up with.

One of the greatest things about this keyboard isn’t the keys themselves, although they are brilliant, but the rubber feet which are built into the keyboard itself. This may seem insignificant but having the feet moulded into the keyboard means that the rubber won’t fall off if you knock your keyboard about or move it. This has happened to many on my older keyboards to the point where I have just removed them entirely, but the M500 has not given me any issues stuck firmly in place.

As far as cable management goes, on the underside of the board the two meter, rubberised wire bends easily and can be fed down the centre or left or right sides of the keyboard down a small canal built into the keyboard.

The M500 is supported by the SteelSeries engine, so you can create your own custom key bindings, but with there being no macro keys unless you are an advanced MOBA or RTS gamer, you’re probably not going to need to do this. You can control the lighting features however; brightness, effects and language mode can all be edited from within the SSE.

The build quality is fantastic, the M500 is built like a tank and can take some real punishment. It also weighs the same as a tank in comparison, the M500 weighs in at 7.2 lbs, which is heavy for such a small keyboard. At 5 inches deep and 17 inches wide it’s a chunky little keyboard which will fit nicely in any setup. I’m a rage-filled gamer so this keyboard has probably been through more than an average review should put it through and it is still going strong with absolutely no issues.