Roccat Isku – The Keyboard That Talks The Talk

Physique and Features

A Keyboard of Congeniality

We've had a fair number of Roccat products come through our office, from gaming mice to a chord bungee to mouse pads but, so far have only seen one keyboard from the peripherals manufacturer. With that said, we are glad to have in our possession the latest gaming keyboard to come from Roccat, the Roccat Isku.

Packaging and Features

Packaging for the Isku received the standard Roccat treatment with an overall black box with blue highlights. Inside we find the keyboard itself wrapped in an anti-static wrapper. Underneath it is the driver disk with the accompanying Roccat card. The Isku occupies nearly twice the space when compared with a standard keyboard because of the permanently attached textured palm rest. For build quality, the Isku is primarily made of plastic materials making it very lightweight despite its perceived size. To prevent it from sliding off the desk are large rubber pads on its underside. Turning over the Isku revealed a network of trenches on its otherwise flat underside that are in fact designed to be used for organizing your peripheral cables by running them along these spaces.

Being a gaming keyboard, it includes a number of programmable (28 can be used for gaming) and media buttons. The standard function buttons also have limited customizability and can be used to toggle between profiles. Among these is the special EasyShift[+] button which has been permanently assigned to the Capslock button. This can be turned Off however through the Isku driver manager. Below the space bar are the three Thumbster keys that were first employed on the Roccat Arvo. These keys are part of the 28 programmable keys including the column of five macro buttons on the left-hand side of the keyboard. Finally, the keys are all backlit with a deep blue hue in accordance to Roccat’s motif.