Published: February 28, 2017 | Source: Cooler Master | Author: Bryan Waters

Cooler Master Masterkeys Pro M and Pro S Review

Conclusion

Both the Masterkeys Pro M and Masterkeys Pro S are based around the same Cooler Master hallmarks of great build quality and carefully selected components.

With the Pro S you have a keyboard which apes the majority of tenkeyless designs, having Cherry MX switches at the heart, a single colour LED, and lacking the number pad to help keep the foot print down. To be honest it’s all fairly standard stuff with little to make it stand proud amongst the sea of narrow keyboards on the market. It’s built like a tank, the Cherry MX switches are up to their usual high standards, and the lighting, albeit it only white, is crisp and clear. It has adjustable repeat rates and onboard macro recording, as well as profile switching. It might not have anything particularly innovative to recommend it, but neither are there any obvious flaws in its design. There is a slight niggle in that the removable USB cable has a right angled connector, but with the port on the right hand edge of the Masterkeys it ends up facing to the inside of the keyboard. With 99% of towers having their window on the left, and thus positioned on the right side of everyone’s desk having a cable that faces left is a bit irritating. By no means a deal breaker, but it’s such an obvious thing we wonder how the design department missed it.

The Pro M is very much the interesting one of the pair. Much like the Pro S it has excellent build quality, Cherry MX switches, on the fly macro recording and profile adjustment as well as plenty of lighting options. With full RGB lighting it is already more exciting on the desk, and all the colours are well represented, from subtler shades through the searing hues. What separates the Pro M from the crowded marketplace has to be the decision from Cooler Master to shrink it by removing the delete/insert cluster as well as the cursor keys – the cursors being relocated to dual purpose keys on the numpad – and retaining the number pad which is so often the victim of the tenkeyless keyboard size reduction.

Which of the two suits you best is largely dependant upon your intended use, but until now if you needed a smaller keyboard you were forced to go without the numpad. Now, however, thanks to some ingenious decision making at Cooler Master HQ, you aren’t committed to losing the numbers, but can instead choose to lose the cursors. Neither is better than the other option, but it’s lovely to have a choice at all.

Â Â