We review the ROG Claymore!
When it comes to mechanical keyboards, ASUS isn’t a brand that immediately comes to mind. But despite the company’s focus on gaming notebooks and PC components, the Taiwanese company also is quite active in the gaming peripheral market, releasing a few solid and notable products that usually get buried by other high-profile manufacturers.
The ROG Claymore is one such product. It’s a twist on the old mechanical keyboard concept by introducing a removable number key that transforms it from a full keyboard into a tenkeyless model in seconds. The only thing that we don’t like about it is the price, as the Claymore is considerably more expensive than other mechanical keyboards we’ve seen in the market today.
A sturdy aluminum body that’ll take a beating
We’ve seen our fair share of mechanical keyboards before, but none will probably match the build quality of the ROG Claymore. The keyboard is built out of a mix of aluminum and hard plastic, and to be honest you can probably use this thing as a weapon when the zombie apocalypse comes and it’ll take a few whacks before disintegrating.
The overall design looks great, and the black coloration that’s etched with Aztec-insipired grooves make the ROG Claymore stand out from the crowd. The Claymore connects to your machine via USB on the bottom of the keyboard, using an proprietary ASUS cable.
The removable numpad attaches quickly on either side of the central piece (dubbed “the Core”). The numpad also has a volume rocker on top of it for convenience as well.
ASUS has opted to keep the Claymore relatively compact, and while it does have function keys (and remapable macro keys), you’ll have to press the function key to get to them.
Just like any mechanical keyboard in the market today (and really, any gaming peripheral) the Claymore has customizable LED lighting, dubbed Aura. If you’re an ROG fanatic and bought other Aura-equipped products from ASUS, you can get the lights to synchronize.
You can also change up the lighting scheme of the Claymore via the Armoury software that’s downloadable from ASUS.
Speaking of other ASUS products, when paired with an ASUS motherboard the keyboard will also be able to intiate motherboard-specific features, like changing fan profiles while you’re gaming.
A dream to type and game on
The ROG Claymore uses a variety of MX Switches made by Cherry and you’ll be able to buy it in either red, brown, blue or black. Our review unit came with red switches which is usually the best choice for gaming.
Actuation is short with the switches, and while red switches isn’t the best choice for typing, we survived several long articles by just using the reds.
Playing with the keyboard in Squad, Battlefield 1 and other FPS shooters felt great, as the instantaneous response that we got with them while playing gave us a slight edge when clearing rooms and in one-on-one fights.
Verdict: A great mechanical keyboard, but it’s extremely expensive
The ROG Claymore is a fantastically built product that manages to hit all the right notes for a mechanical gaming keyboard, except one: cost. At Php 9,520 for the full keyboard and Php 7,520 for just the core, the ROG Claymore is a very expensive keyboard even for gaming standards. It’s a fantastically built and awesome keyboard, but its price will limit it’s appeal to a very small audience of ROG die-hards.
