ROCCAT Ryos MK Pro Mechanical Gaming Keyboard - Installation and Software

Installation and Software:

This keyboard is an interesting unit. It has so many different options for lighting, macros and more that I could write a couple thousand words about this alone. I will save you some of the boredom though and briefly take you through the installation and setup process. The keyboard itself doesn’t require drivers for basic plug-and-play connectivity, but if you want to customize things and control lighting, macros and more, you’ll need to head on over to the ROCCAT site and grab the latest drivers. Included in the driver package is a firmware update for the keyboard itself. This fixes some issues that may have cropped up since the last release.

Once the software is installed, you have a few tabs to check out. The “Main Control” tab lets you configure things like the purpose of the “FN” key, “Caps Lock” key and allows you to enable or disable a few different keys. You can enable (or disable) Left Windows Key, Right Windows Key, Application Key, Tab Key, and Left Shift Key. You can disable these globally or choose one of five individual profiles to assign these changes to. In this tab you’ll also find the illumination brightness, and be able to control illumination dimmers, audible feedback when performing certain tasks and even perform a rest on the drivers if you mess something up really bad.

When it comes to “Key Illumination”, things get interesting. In this page you have the ability to turn LEDs on individual keys, key zones, feature keys and create custom lighting options and LED macros that can be activated in the previous tab. While there is only a single LED color on this keyboard, you can make the keys “twinkle” after a timeout, “breathe” or just go dark. Key presses can trigger a fade of the LED lights or even a ripple effect where the lights ripple out from each key as you press it. There are so many options in this section, that I encourage you to simply buy the Ryos MK Pro and play around with it yourself. It’s very nifty.

The remaining two tabs cover the R.A.D. statistics and trophies as well as software updating and support. Until I used my first ROCCAT product, I thought the achievements were a little odd for a piece of hardware, but the fact that ROCCAT logs key presses and button clicks on their hardware shows that they expect it will last a long time. It’s pretty interesting to see how many keystrokes you make on a keyboard. 

The software update and support page is fantastic. I know that sounds odd, but clicking any of these links takes you to the appropriate place on their website and gets you the help you need quickly. You can even click links to go directly to their support forum as well as email support. It’s very clean and it works well.

The keyboard has a couple of USB ports on it that help replace the two USB ports that it may require to power your keyboard plus devices. The cables on this unit is very thick and covered with a nice tight nylon braid so you’ll never have to replace it. The audio jacks on the keyboard seem a little redundant as they keyboard itself will have to be plugged into your audio jacks and these are merely a hardware pass-through. Even if you don’t use the provided audio jacks, the volume control keys are effective in Windows itself. There is no need to use these unless you have a really short cord and you want all your audio and mouse USB connections hooked up to your keyboard.

On the next page, we’ll actually talk about the keyboard as we share our usage and final thoughts.