SteelSeries 7G Keyboard Review

Look and Feel
If you're looking for a keyboard with game-specific functions, you'll have to look elsewhere. The $150 7G keyboard from SteelSeries is really rather basic. There are no fancy LCD displays or custom key layouts, no differently shaped keys to place game functions at your fingertips, no macro recording or other fancy software tricks. It's just…a keyboard. Only this keyboard is focused on key action and construction quality.

The keyboard itself is a full-sized standard affair with your basic rows of letters and numbers and function keys, the "inverted T" arrows, and a number pad. There are no separate media keys or game function keys.

Keyboard layout is a bit of a personal preference issue. The 7G includes the large L-shaped Enter key many people like, and a single-width backspace key (we prefer the double-wide backspace key, because we make lots of mistakes). It's a standard straight layout, rather than the split "ergonomic" or hybrid curved layouts you often see today. Beyond that, it's nearly devoid of special features.

There are really only two things this keyboard does outside of the general "typing in characters" stuff. The back left side includes a two-port USB 1.1 hub, and a headphone and microphone jack. The large, cloth-wrapped cable terminates in four connections—PS/2 for the keyboard functions, USB for the hub, and headphone/microphone for the audio jacks. You can't just plug in the USB and expect the keyboard to communicate with your PC that way—this is a PS/2 keyboard, though a PS/2 to USB adaptor is included. This is deliberate: A robust PS/2 buffer system is used to ensure that you can press a bunch of keys at the same time without locking up the input on your PC. Mash your hands down on all the keys at once, and they will all be transmitted to your PC. This is important in games where you're rapidly pressing multiple keys, sometimes with Shift or Control held down.

The keyboard itself is rather small, with a large, flat, sturdy "overlay" of sorts to add a palm rest. It's flat and hard, which makes it durable and less comfortable than those keyboards with softer palm rests.

Where you would normally find the Start button on a typical modern keyboard (between the left Ctrl and Alt keys), you'll see the SteelSeries key. Pressing this button does not open the Start menu or perform any other function in Windows. Rather, you use it in combination with the F1–F6 keys for Media Key functions (mute, volume up/down, pause, and next/previous track).

The ZPC-GX31, a Computer in a Keyboard

Here is an example of a great idea that will probably never take off with the power user community: the Zero-Footprint-PC™ (ZPC-GX31). The reason why it won’t take off is simple: it cannot support a discreet graphics card. For that reason you are stuck with Windows XP, which is yesterday’s news for many people; alternatively you could go for Ubuntu Linux, or any other flavor of Linux for that matter. For those of us that do have a place in our home for a small form PC, this could be a winner. As configured with a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4500, 1GB of RAM and a DVD/CDRW optical drive, you are only paying $700.


I played around with the configurations to make it a little bit more versatile and came up with the following specifications:
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4500 - this is not going to break any speed records, but it will give you more than enough zip in XP to make your user experience a pleasant one.
4GB of RAM: this is over the top for a non-gaming machine, but 4GB is only $25 more than 2GB, so why not?
Internal 802.11g Wireless - You can get an external option for a lot less than the $99 that this upgrade costs, but internal is infinitely more sexy.

To put all of that together and add a DVD-R drive will set you back $929, not exactly cheap, but more than you would ever need from a machine running a lackluster Intel G31 graphics chipset. The perfect PC to take from room to room, it is less functional than a notebook, but not too hard to set up. If they really wanted to sell this thing to the performance crowd, I would suggest that they pack in some higher end graphics. Rather than Intel G31, this thing should be have some DirectX 10 compatible NVidia GO. Give it that and you will have a “portable” PC that really challenges the bulky gaming notebooks that are achieving such unprecedented popularity of late.