Final Thoughts
Price
The Cougar Attack X3 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard is available from most popular retailers on pre-order, with stock coming very soon, in a choice of Cherry MX Red, Blue, Brown and Black. The best price we found so far is at Overclockers UK for just £84.95.
Overview
Time and time again we’ve seen Cougar deliver fiercely competitive peripherals and I’m happy to say that this trend is continued with the release of the Attack X3. There are a lot of mechanical gaming keyboards on the market, but the X3 is a welcome addition and comes in at a very competitive price, so it should appeal to quite a lot of people.
The build quality on the X3 is fantastic, it’s very durable and has a good weight to it without feeling overbearing. Of course, a lot of that strength and quality comes from a sizable lump of brushed aluminium, which plays no small part in giving the X3 a gorgeous appearance. Even with the backlighting turned off, the keyboard looks great, but the warm red under glow really brings out the textures in the metal work.
Having a choice of four Cherry switches on a new keyboard is quite rare too, so I must commend Cougar on giving their customers so much choice. Personally, I prefer to work on MX Red switches, but given that this is one of the quietest MX Blue keyboards I’ve used, it’s certainly the model I would have to recommend the most, but everyone has their own preference when it comes to switch types.
At just £85, the price is very competitive for a mechanical keyboard, and there are a lot of cool features here that add to the overall value. The UIX software is packed with cool features, such as full-key remapping, macros and the ability to tweak multiple Cougar products from a single interface. There’s a black braided cable, which is nice and durable, removable key-caps for easy cleaning, or to allow custom caps, LED backlighting with brightness adjustment and a range of multimedia shortcuts.
Overall, another solid addition to the Cougar range, and without a doubt one of the best sub-£100 mechanical keyboards I’ve seen this year.
Pros
- Excellent build quality
- Gorgeous aesthetics
- LED backlighting
- Aluminium chassis
- Multimedia keys
- On-board storage
- UIX software
- Competitive price
Cons
- None
“With lots of great features, a stylish design and excellent build quality, the Cougar X3 ticks all the right boxes for a great gaming keyboard which will make a great addition to anyone’s desktop setup.”
Thank you Cougar for providing us with this sample.
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.