They have four levels of brightness, adjustable with the FN key in conjunction with Numpad 2 and 8.

Those blue LEDs are another front-of-box selling point too. Aside from the hand cramp you’re flirting with by having so many fingers active at once. That might initially seem superfluous if you’re not used to PC gaming but it basically means you can walk forward, strafe, crouch and reload all at the same time without any issues. The full anti-ghosting and NKRO systems are technical provisions that mean you’ll be able to press as many keys at once as you need, without the keyboard missing any of them. They also have a fairly long throw so you’ll feel the 60 grams of pressure required to get each key press down before they return with a very satisfying rebound. What that means is that each key has a nice firm action to it that should insure against accidental key presses. Those are the firmest of the Cherry MX switches which are favoured by many mechanical keyboard manufacturers. Firstly, that it’s based on the Cherry MX Black switches. The keyboard box announces it as the Echelon Mechanical Gaming Keyboard but there are a few extra pieces of very important information there too. That’s the very least you would expect from a keyboard which is currently priced at over £100 though and I’d be very disappointed if it suffered from wear a year down the line. After spending a little over a week with it, I can tell you that it is still as good as new and every aspect of it still feels well finished.

Time will tell how that grippy coating holds up to months of future play sessions and greasy finger prodding – there’s a possibility that it will wear thin and shiny or even peel if it’s subjected to the kind of abuse these keyboards generally have to put up with. Everything else in the range is covered in a slightly subdued blue-grey digital camouflage pattern but this keyboard is spared that treatment, presented instead with a nice matte black, slightly rubberised coating over everything from wrist-rest to key surface. The range also includes a mouse and mousepad, as well as a headset and 7.1 sound card. So what is the keyboard? Well, it’s Asus’s final piece of their Echelon gaming range.

Asus echelon mouse driver