How does this budget gaming keyboard compare to some of the more expensive examples?
What makes a gaming keyboard? The answer to that depends on a number of things, including who's doing the gaming. For a serious gamer, mechanical keys are probably a necessity, but the prevalence of membrane-based models suggests there's also a significant market for budget gaming keyboards too.
At just £40, the Speedlink Parthica is one such product. And like other keyboards based on membrane technology, it justifies its gaming tag with an array of features. You get 93 keys, five macro buttons, ten multimedia keys, five configuration profiles, six-key rollover, 128KB of internal memory, a polling rate of up to 1000MHz, and four selectable key-response times (from 16ms to just 2ms).
These, of course, are the things that are proudly listed on the box, no doubt put there by an eager marketing copywriter, but how much do these things actually matter? Will you actually notice if the polling rate is switched between the four settings of 125MHz, 250MHz, 500MHz and 1000MHz? We're willing to bet you wouldn't.
And what of the six-key rollover? N-key rollover, of course, is desirable, but remember the Parthica costs just £40. Using the keyboard test at www.gigahype.com/nkey-rollover-test-page, we pressed the A, S and D keys simultaneously, and found several other keys wouldn't register, including half of the top row, from Y through to P.
That might seem like a problem, but be honest: how often would you actually press this sort of key combination? Probably somewhere between never and not at all. With all the real-life key combinations we tried, we experienced no problems.
Satisfactory this may be, but it's not what we'd call impressive. In fact, it's something we'd expect from even the cheapest of non-gaming keyboards.
What matters more is the ability to create custom profiles and store macros in each of the five macro buttons located on the left-hand side of the Parthica. Although we've never really found a good use for macros, a lot of gamers find them useful, and they're easily accessed here. If we're going to criticise this feature, though, we'd have to point to the 'P' button that sits just above these keys. This button, used to switch between five on-board profiles (stored in the Parthica's memory), is just a little too close to the macro keys, and it would be far too easy to press it accidentally. You might be able to get used to it, but it's still a poor design decision.
What's better is the actual feel of the keys. No, it's not as good as a mechanical keyboard, but the keys don't feel spongy when you press them, like a lot of cheap keyboards. Instead, they bounce back quickly and actually feel similar to their mechanical counterparts, so typing on the Parthica is a joy and not a chore.
The media control keys are also a plus, as well as the shortcut buttons to open email, a web browser and so on. So too is the ability to change the backlight colour between red, blue and purple, with varying levels of brightness, including a pulsating effect. It may be mere eye-candy, but it's still cool. Of more use, though, is the ability to turn off the Windows key by pressing Fn and F12.
As well the hardware itself, you get a software package, like most of other keyboards of this kind. In this case, it looks like a fairly simple affair, but it has a good amount of depth, allowing you to alter the function of many of the keys, as well as letting you link games with certain profiles. This is handy but limited, because you can only assign one game to each of the five profiles, whereas other keyboards allow you to have as many game profiles as you want, stored on your computer rather than the keyboard itself. Some manufacturers also offer a service where you can download preset profiles for popular games, but the Parthica software doesn't offer this.
Ultimately, in spite of some niggles, what you get here is a more than competent keyboard, with some genuinely useful features for gamers on a tight budget. It might not be perfect, but it's about as good as you're going to get at this kind of price. Anthony Enticknap
A decent budget alternative to a mechanical keyboard.