My coverage of Computex 2019 is sponsored
by Tecware, providing affordable quality computer
and gaming products.
Vortex is one of the bigger mech companies,
and they had a booth to match.
They did share with Mistel and Leopold, so
all up there were a heap of boards in this
area.
Let’s just start off with the big one.
This is a sample of the upcoming Vortex Poker
4.
For me, and I guess for the community, the
Poker series is an iconic one, as it really
did popularise and bring 60% keyboards to
the consumer market.
If you were in the community like 2 or 3 years
back, the Pokers were super popular, and were
selling like crazy.
Now there’s way more players in the game,
and custom keyboards have flooded the enthusiast
market.
So this has actually been a long time coming,
and well, you can’t change too much as it
is a 60% board.
This time round, it’s a sleeker CNC machined
aluminium enclosure, rather than the casted
one of the Poker 3.
The bezels are slightly thicker, and it now
looks a bit sharper and more rectangular,
but still has the rounded corners.
I guess the biggest aesthetic change is the
RGB underglow, which is super sleek.
If we look at the bottom, it’s just a line
that goes around the edge, rather than having
like a full translucent bottom.
It looks like it’ll be available in a few
different colours, and there were front lit
caps, and also these DSA ones which I don’t
know if it’s an option, but that’s the
good thing about 60% keyboards, the keycaps
are super easy to replace.
These of course are pre production units,
so they’ll probably be a bit different on
release which they said would be in Q4.
But yeh, it’s definitely a solid keyboard.
I like it better than the Poker 3 already,
and yeh, an improvement.
There was the Hellcat 60%, and to be honest,
I didn’t even touch it, so my bad on that.
The other new boards were the slim low profile
versions.
So there’s the Poker 3 ultra slim edition,
and yes, they stuck with the Poker 3 name.
And these house the Cherry Low Profile keyswitches,
which still are only linear I think.
It would have been cool if it had Kailh low
pro switches since they have clickies and
tactiles, but yeh, I guess they have their
thing with Cherry.
So please, get them clickies in your lineup.
Super light keyboards, as the aluminium enclosure
is kept to an absolute minimum, so it has
a floating key design.
And we can actually see that they’re not
even the shortest switches, but the flat keycaps
contribute to how slim the keyboard looks.
And they extended this to their NEW75 V2.
As for the other stuff, much of it I already
reviewed on the channel.
Vortex have always been up there with mechanical
keyboards, and I’m interested to see how
the new Poker 4 will do, because the timing
is a bit weird.
It’s like they were too early in the game
with the Poker 3 before a whole lot of gamers
came in, and Ducky were the ones that caught
the wave with the Mini 2.
It will definitely still be more expensive
than the Ducky 60%, but it is a sweet board,
and you get what you pay for.
Big thanks again to Tecware for supporting
my coverage of Computex 2019.
And yep, more stuff to come.
