Kingston will soon be launching its first-ever mechanical keyboard under its HyperX brand, the HyperX Alloy FPS.
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 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.
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 types.
The keyboard will launch on August 29, first in Australia, China, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. launch will be sometime in Q4 2016. Pricing for the international launches is to be determined.
The MSRP for the U.S. version should be about $100.
