Performance
The Cougar UIX software is certainly one of my favourites, it’s really nicely laid out and it makes it easy to find and tweak the settings you most desire while also being able to control other Cougar products from the same interface.
There are multiple profiles too, which can be stored directly on the keyboard, meaning you don’t always need to use the software if you travel with your keyboard. This is great for tournaments, but it also means you can hot-swap between different work and gaming profiles quickly.
Any key on the X3 can be remapped, making it great for tweaking your gaming setup. Personally, I wouldn’t really need this feature, but I can see it proving handy for people who work with editing software, where key mapping isn’t native to the software they’re using.
Adjustable polling, N-Key and repeat rate, rarely needed, but always nice to have.
The LED lighting is only single colour, but you can tweak the brightness or even add a breathing effect if you so desire.
Overall, this is a really nice keyboard with fantastic build quality. The durable frame helps take some of the vibrations of typing out of the mix, helping this to be one of the quietest MX Blue keyboards I’ve ever used. It’s fast, responsive and an absolute joy to type on. Working or gaming, you’re going to want to keep your fingers typing away, just because it feels so good.
The RGB lighting looks great too, I must admit that I’ve become taken in by the whole RGB craze, but the warm red glows here look great and provide a lovely under glow on the brushed aluminium chassis.
It looks pretty good although I would like to see full RGB on the next Cougar keyboard. I have their 700K which has worked well for me so far and I’m happy to see they’ve dropped the idiotic ‘split’ spacebar from the previous versions on this model.