Corsair K70 Pro Mini Wireless Review

(Pocket-lint) – It seems Corsair is getting serious with the K70 Pro Mini – a hot-swappable keyboard with specs and features in a tiny form factor.

This is an intriguing offering for a number of reasons, and not just because it’s the first time the company is offering this level of customization.

However, the market is now packed with tons of powerful gaming and productivity options. So how does Corsair’s latest effort fit together?

We’ve been testing it for the past few weeks to find out.

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Serious specs

• 8,000Hz Hyperpolling; Key sampling at 4,000 Hz
• 2.4GHz Slipstream Wireless or Bluetooth 4.2 low latency
• 8MB onboard memory for 50 profiles and 20 layered lighting effects

At first glance, you might think the K70 Pro Mini is just a wireless version of the K65 RGB Mini. There are some similarities here – both have Cherry MX switches as standard, and both come with specs that include an 8,000Hz polling rate and a promise of low-latency data transfer.

Think of the K70 Pro Mini Wireless as the K65’s pricier and fancier sibling, though. It may look similar, but there’s actually a lot more on offer here.

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First off, of course, it’s wireless, meaning you can ditch the USB-C cable unless you need to charge it (which is about every 30 hours with RGB on, or 200 with the lights off). You also have a choice of low-latency Bluetooth or 2.4GHz wireless, and there’s even a special mode designed specifically for the PlayStation 5.

It also promises hyper-fast performance with an 8,000Hz polling rate, 4,000Hz key scanning and Intelligent Frequency Shift to scan and switch to the cleanest wireless channel on the fly. It all adds up to a fast (0.25ms) and accurate signal from the keyboard to your gaming PC. So that means you can’t blame your hardware for your in-game bugs.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also 8MB of onboard memory, allowing you to save up to 50 different profiles on the keyboard (think different settings for different games) and stacking up to 20 different lighting effects on top of each other as well.

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The Corsair K70 Pro Mini Wireless may be small, but it has several additional features packed into the secondary layer. That means you can do anything with a double press, including checking battery life, recording macros, activating PlayStation mode, switching to Bluetooth, and more.

This is great news as 60 percent of keyboards are a bit difficult to handle some standard uses and key presses. Simple things like directional arrows can be buried in other keys and must first be pressed on FN to access them. But the placement here is good and logical.

This keyboard also includes some quirky controls, like mouse movement and clicks in the WASD area, which is unusual and intriguing.

So far, so good. However, the highlight for us, as you might have guessed, are the hot-swappable switches.

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Hot-swappable to an extent

• Standard switches are Cherry MX RGB Red or Speed ​​Silver
• Interchangeable three-pin Cherry MX switches
• Default bottom row layout
• Includes keycap and key switch puller

One of the most appealing features of the K70 Pro Mini Wireless is the ability to swap out the switches. By default, there are two switches to choose from:

• Cherry MX RGB Red – 45g actuation force, 2mm actuation, 4mm travel
• Cherry MX Speed ​​Silver – 45g actuation force, 1.2mm actuation, 3.4mm travel

These are three pole switches that you can remove with the included switch puller and replace with switches of your choice. This is great if you plan to upgrade or replace broken switches in the future, although it’s worth noting that only three-pole switches are accepted – not five-pole – which may limit your options.

We originally intended to use Novelkeys smeared creams to change the feel (and sound) of the keyboard, but couldn’t because they are five-pin switches. So that was a sad setback.

This might seem like a minor complaint, but the more affordable NZXT Function MiniTKL accepts both three and five pole switches. However, it’s still nice to see this option included on a mainstream keyboard as most major gaming brands haven’t made the move yet.

The other benefit of the K70 Pro Mini wireless design is that it has a standard bottom row layout, giving you the option to try different custom keycaps to change the look and feel of the keyboard.

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It comes standard with either PBT double-shot or polycarbonate keycaps (depending on your region), and in our experience, the lighting doesn’t shine through as well with the thick PBT setup. The K65 RGB Mini had some nice RGB bleeding thanks to the white backplate, but that’s not here with the K70 Pro Mini Wireless, and that’s a real shame.

We’ve tried a few different sets of keycaps and the Corsair colored ones look a little nicer, but again they don’t let as much light through. However, from the side you can see that this keyboard has a 360-degree RGB LightEdge lighting bar with 28 LEDs to add accent lighting to it.

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We didn’t find this added much glamor to our desk, but it’s still a nice extra touch of style for the keyboard.

With the ability to stack lighting effects, we would have liked better optics by default, especially when the K65 RGB Mini looks better out of the box.

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However, you can get some improvement by using something like SteelSeries PrismCaps. Pudding keycaps provide much nicer lighting and better aesthetics.

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Writing by Adrian Willings. Editing by Conor Allison.