Gigabyte Aivia K8100 Keyboard Review

The Special keys and the Ghost Engine

Knowing that some keys see more action than others in gaming sessions, Gigabyte assigned different elastic forces to the keys, some get like 50, 60 or 70 grams. What is elastic force? In layman’s terms, it’s the force a spring exerts to return to its natural (resting) state after being stretched or compressed. The keys most used in gaming, like the WASD cluster, Space and arrow keys, for instance, were assigned 70 grams of elastic force. Others like Caps-Lock, Tab and Shift got 60 grams. The remaining keys were assigned 50 grams of elastic force. The objective is to lessen the pressure on the fingers while pressing the most used keys during gaming sessions.

Figure 5: Volume control

Figure 6: Programmable keys

The Aivia K8100 features an “anti-ghosting” system in 20 keys to guarantee that the keyboard recognizes the pressing of up to 20 keys simultaneously without skipping a particular command or misinterpreting some communication – the usual keyboard is limited to recognizing up to six keystrokes at the same time. It’s a lot of keystrokes, but it’s nice to know that the keyboard won’t fail to recognize that heroic jump that saves the virtual life of a character in mid-combat.

The Ghost engine allows the recording of up to 100 macros in the internal memory of 4 MB. The Mode button, on the upper left corner of the keyboard, changes color to indicate the current user profile. The Ghost application lets the user drag and drop icons of pre-configured functions (e-mail reader, copy+paste, calculator etc) to slots representing the programmable buttons.

Figure 7: Profile configuration

Figure 8: Macro recording

Working with icons makes the experience of recording macros easy, which it’s not always the case with other applications. If the user wants to go further than the suggestions made by the Ghost software and record his or her own command sequences, there’s no difficulty at all.