SteelSeries Apex 7 Mechanical Blue Switch Review

There are a lot of incredible gaming keyboards out there these days, it’s a very competitive market. However, SteelSeries have proven time and time again they can compete with the best in the business. They’ve found a sweet spot of offering features that would appeal to the eSports and enthusiast gamer crowd, will still offering a few flashy luxury features to make their products appeal to at-home gamers too. The Apex 7 is their flagship model, rammed fully of funky features like a built-in OLED display, per-key RGB lighting, an aluminium frame, a detachable wrist rest and much more.

SteelSeries Apex 7 Blue Switch Edition

The built-in display is really cool though, as you can get notification from Discord on it, see track titles when listening to music, and more. There’s an SDK kicking about, so there are new features cropping up steadily, and you could make your own if you have some coding skills.

The keyboard also doesn’t bother with Cherry MX switches, instead favouring SteelSeries own QX2 switch design, which are manufactured for them by Gateron. While similar in design to Cherry, there are some small differences. Cherry uses a 50g operating force, with a 2.2mm actuation and 4mm total travel. SteelSeries switches operate a little lighter at just 45g, with a shorter actuation of just 2mm, but still have the same 4mm total travel and 50 million+ rated durability.

SteelSeries Switches

The APEX 7 is available in a choice of SteelSeries Red, Blue and Brown Switch. What I also love is that they have it available in 11 languages directly on their own website, most brands make it really hard to nail down a specific model like this.

Features

• Durable mechanical gaming switches
• OLED smart display
• Five onboard profiles
• Aircraft-grade aluminium alloy frame
• Dynamic per-key RGB illumination
• Premium magnetic wrist rest
• Dedicated multimedia controls
• USB pass-through port
• Three-way cable routing
• 100% anti-ghosting with 104 key rollover

What SteelSeries Had to Say

“The Apex 7 keyboard has mechanical switches guaranteed for 50 million keypresses. Red switches are known for their consistently smooth movement from top to bottom without any bump, allowing for lightning-fast actuation. An integrated OLED Smart Display with on-board storage is your command centre for on-the-fly info from your game, Spotify, or Discord, and provides software-free customization for tweaking and saving your settings. An unbreakable aluminium alloy frame makes it a standout mechanical keyboard.” – SteelSeries