Kingston has launched its first-ever mechanical keyboard under its HyperX brand, the HyperX Alloy FPS.
The HyperX Alloy FPS is a safe but solid and carefully-designed product. Kingston kept it fairly simple: It’s a slim device with plate-mounted switches, red backlighting and no software. The first run will feature Cherry MX Blue switches and Costar stabilizers, and the top panel is an aluminum alloy.
The only flashy aspect of the Alloy FPS is the handful of special key caps. All are ABS plastic, but the model on display had red textured key caps on the WASD cluster and some F keys. These are optional–the keyboard will ship with all-black keys and will offer the red ones as accessories, along with a key puller and carrying case.
The only other nod to gamer eye candy is the lighting modes you can employ. You can leave the red LEDs solid, or set them to breathe, “trigger” (where only the keys you tap light up), wave, ripple or custom. To set custom lighting, you press a two-key combination to “record,” tap all the keys you want to stay lit (say, the WASD cluster and spacebar), and hit the same two-key combo to save. The Alloy FPS can save a single custom profile on board.
There are also five brightness levels, and you can toggle between 6KRO and NKRO by pressing Fn+Delete (to turn on NKRO) and Fn+Insert (to toggle back to 6KRO).
The chassis is surprisingly slim–certainly one of the slimmer mechanical keyboards I’ve encountered–yet it’s nice and heavy, and is unlikely to slide around your desk.
One peculiar feature is the extra USB port. The Alloy FPS has a detachable 1.8m braided cable that uses a microUSB connection, but there’s a regular USB port, too. However, it’s not a passthrough port, as one would assume. Instead, it’s for charging only–there’s no data. No Mouse for you!
Make no mistake, this isn’t a one-off product. Kingston is being conservative about the keyboard’s launch–it will be available only with the Cherry MX Blue switches at first–but the company is already plotting additional models. Expect Cherry MX Brown and Red versions of the Alloy FPS, as well as international versions with all three switch type
FPS keyboard is now available from retailers, including Amazon. As expected, the keyboard costs $100 MSRP
