Been using this board since late Feb 2021 and I love it. It has a much smaller footprint than the alloy elite while boasting pretty much all of the same features. At first the removal of the dedicated media keys, volume roller, and dedicated RGB keys was bothering me, but all of these functions are mapped to the function keys on this board. Not having those keys is actually the big thing I love about this board. It offers the same hyper x clicky switches that I love in a much more compact form factor.
The build quality is great. The deck is all metal and super slim compared to the alloy elite as well as every other board I've used in the past. It's close to logitech's offerings as far as thinness goes, but without the extreme flex and terrible keycaps. The hyper x keycaps use standard mx stems so using pretty much any keycap set should fit these, though check the questions if you're looking for specific compatibility.
I removed the pudding keycaps from my alloy elite and swapped them over to these which ... is a mixed bag. Overall I love the floating keycap design and the backlighting on this thing is both very bright and software accurate. I do miss the the legends printed on the FN keys that tell me which keys do what since I no longer have the dedicated media keys, but it took approximately a day to remember everything. Compared to the alloy elite this board seems much brighter overall. The lowest setting on these switches seems to be brighter than the highest setting on the elite, which could be a placebo effect but I don't know. I can't turn these up to max without it being painful to keep in my periphery. So RGB?? Fantastic on this board, especially with the pudding keycaps.
I also really like the adjustable feet that offers you 3 different height adjustments. It's pretty standard these days but I still love to see it.
Another thing I love is the numlock/caps lock display. It's positioned perfectly so that you can easily see at a glance which functions you have activated. This was not the case on the alloy elite. The display was placed too closely to the numpad meaning that unless you were sitting up very straight, are super tall, or leaned forward to look at it you could NOT tell what was on/off. This is a big improvement. It seems minor but it really bugged me on the elite.
Not much else to say. Keycaps feel great, very stable and it has that satisfying bump I'm looking for in an mx-blue style switch. i love it.
So everything about this keyboard is amazing, but it right now!! ... oh wait ... the software
Well the software is pretty barebones, isn't very streamlined, and still appears to be in beta from the MS store? I'm not sure as I didn't install this on the computer I'm using right now. I used my old pc (desktop) to set this up since it already had the hyperx software (ngenuity i believe) installed, and it works well enough. While the colors of the keycaps are very accurate in terms of how close they are to what you see in the software you would not notice this with the stock keycaps. The black seems to shift the colors just a little bit so that they appear darker. With the pudding keycaps though they're amazing. Can't complain here. So yeah use the software once to customize your board, then uninstall it. There are plenty of effects to choose from whether you prefer static colors or moving effects ... it all looks great.
And with that yeah I think we're done. This is a fantastic keyboard for anyone looking for a better overall typing experience. Do some research about switches, maybe order a sample pack of switches or something, to find the one that's right from you, then go nuts. Great product, will definitely be buying hyper x again if they can maintain this level of quality and value. Good stuff