Corsair Strafe Mechanical Keyboard review - Article

Corsair Strafe Mechanical Keybboard

We review the all new Strafe, a Cherry MX Red mechanical keyboard that is not only affordable at 120 EURO but quite customizable as well. The Strafe comes with Cherry key switches and red LED back-lighting, that is per-key configurable. There are some more options and features improved with this basis and concept as it has a trick or two encompassed in the new design as well. Sporting a new, somewhat industrial design the STRAFE is available as we speak at at an MSRP of $109.99.

The Strafe makes use of very similar design characteristics as the Vengeance series keyboards, it takes a step back to a more common design with just one color LED lighting system for example. The keyboard comes with the lovely Cherry MX mechanical keys and you may order the keyboard with Cherry red, brown or blue key switches. Most common are the red ones, which we would recommend. Some of the keys are contoured with a special textured feel to them to enhance FPS and MOBA gaming.

The Strafe also has a floating key design as the keys seem to hover above the keyboard base, so you can pull out the mechy keys of course and switch them out for others. The housing is based on an aluminum body though now with a plastic cover base just under the keys. You will notice that the Corsair logo once again has been changed, now to a final design. 

Included is also per-key adjustable back-lighting, using red LEDs, so that you can customise which keys are lit, according to the game you’re playing. Corsair includes swappable and rugged keys for the contoured red WASD and QWERFD key-caps.  
 

The specs overall remain the same, including a 1000Hz polling rate, 100% anti-ghosting, and the media keys and USB pass-through on the rear remain too. One change is that the Strafe is actually a full n-key rollover keyboard (104 keys) now and if you like choice, Corsair will also offer versions with Cherry MX Brown and MX Blue keys. Standard is Cherry MX red though, as used in this review. 

A funny addition to the keyboard is a four-way report rate including 1, 2, 4, or 8ms including BIOS Mode. It allows you to reduce the polling rate or even strip it back to a basic BIOS mode. Corsair states that this is basically just to aid compatibility with some BIOSes. So in general very few people will ever need to touch the switch. 

For the Strafe there is no expensive RGB back-lighting, the keyboard comes with red only LED back-lighting. These are configurable and not all keys need to be to be lit, there are also some effects available; six of them in total and you guys will be able to create and share more lighting effects through Corsair's CUE (Corsair Utility Engine) software. Talking about the CUE software, you may assign and alter macros for all of the keys.

So before we dive into the review, I need you to look at the following video so that you get an idea what the Strafe really is about - please have a look.