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Written by Nomad
Added 04:40 am, 12/09/2008 under Reviews

This month I will be writing about the newest piece of hardware from the new kids on the block at Roccat studios in Hamburg, the Roccat Valo gaming keyboard. I opened the box with the anticipation of a young child on his way downstairs on Christmas morning. The sleek black case with foam edges gives the solid impression that this is a quality piece of equipment that demands your immediate respect and should never be taken lightly. Out of the box and its foam surrounding, the valo first of all appears to be oversized and too heavy. But when one turns the keyboard over and sees the shocking 105 keys and LCD display, it’s obvious that this is sized as such for a reason. The box itself contains parts and small add-ons for the keyboard such as media keys and a microphone, but I will cover those in more detail later.

When plugged in the first thing that strikes me is the illuminated keys and the LCD display. Each individual letter is made in such a way that even in a semi to fully dark room you are under no illusion of what keys are where. The LCD screen plays a small intro with the Roccat logo itself brightly burning for all to see, and then switches to whatever preset mode the user has set it to.

The keyboard has a very nice coating of semi hard rubber, which gives it very good grip on most desktop surfaces as well as giving it the unique matt black finish. The keyboard contains 105 keys with 41 of them being macro keys and keys to record and set your own macros. These recording buttons allow macros to be set quickly in game with a minimal loss of gaming time. The keyboard itself stores up to 5 different keyboard profiles each containing 4 layouts with every individual key being available to change. All of the keys can be interchanged, with a supplied tool making it very simply to pop out the keys themselves. Macro keys can be replaced with coloured keys to highlight important macros the the user sets themselves. As I stated last month, Roccat are soon to be releasing the SDK pack which will allow every key to be individually set a different colour as the user wishes. This feature will also be available for the kone extreme gaming mouse.

The Valo is actually the world's first keyboard to feature 2Mb of internal memory. This is what allows the user to store up to 20 keyboard layouts with 420,000 key press combinations and 420,000 timers. Also an anti-ghosting ability allows simultaneous key presses. Another feature is the ability to turn off important windows keys, so as accidental key pushes will not interrupt gaming time.

A very cool side feature is the gamer microphone. A small mic comes along with the keyboard which plugs into the side. This has a surprising sound range and picks up a users voice with surprising clarity.
The internal 40MHz Turbocore Unit represents the power heart of this device. Every calculation is being processed internally by the keyboard. This enables timing information for macros and reducing the actual CPU load for the benefit of game relevant processes. Therefore this keyboard has twice the performance power of other high class gaming keyboards.
The ROCCAT Vale keyboard enhances connectivity with two USB ports and audio sockets for headphones and the ROCCAT Gaming Microphone. The external noises cancelling ROCCAT Gaming Microphone is included with the keyboard. Rubberized feet ensure stable positioning.

An overview of the features is as follows:
• Blue illuminated keys and display
• 41 macro keys, Macro Pause und Macro Kill keys
• First keyboard with 2MB of internal memory
• Integrated Turbocore Unit
• Ports for headphones and microphone, 2x USB 1.1
• External ROCCAT Gaming Microphone
• Anti-Ghosting capability
• Compact gaming shape with specially coated casing
• Key deactivation (such as Windows key)
• SDK for individual adjustment of light effects and LCD (shortly downloadable from the ROCCAT website)
• Connection via 2x USB (keyboard and USB hub)

Overall I like the valo. Although it seems a bit over the top, the macro keys suddenly become an essential part of your play, and you dine yourself wondering what you did before. Macros like buying full weapon sets in CS: Source and Many macros for quick fire spells in World of warcraft, are suddenly easily available without key binding important keys you would normally use for something else. I would however only recommend this keyboard to the most hardcore of players, as it doesn’t offer much extra functionality for normal everyday use.

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