Razer DeathStalker Ultimate Review

A keyboard to end all keyboards.

Lets just say I got really lucky, because there's no way in hell I would pay full price for this thing. This is Razer's flagship keyboard, the DeathStalker Ultimate. It shares much with the regular DeathStalker keyboard but has about a billion new tricks up it's sleeve. So what exactly is the reason for the ridiculous price tag on this thing? Better yet, is it worth the ridiculous price tag? Well, lets find out.

I took very little enjoyment in taking a full blown picture of my already semi dirtied keyboard so here's a stock image.

Ok so you might be wondering, how much is this thing exactly? Well, to put it this way, you could buy an Xbox 360 for this kind of money, $250 bucks. Yeah, no kidding. Like I said it shares much with the regular board so it feels very similar. It uses flat chiclet keys that feel pretty nice and serve me just fine but they don't have that characteristic, high quality feel that mechanical keys have. The keys now have full spectrum lighting so you can make them any color you like but not as in depth as the BlackWidow Chroma. Its only slightly longer in form factor because of the five macro hotkeys on the left side and the Switchblade platform on the right. The most major difference in feel is the wrist rest is now made out of rubber so it's much more grippy. I don't mind it but some of you might not like it. I will note that it's not that easy to clean.

The Switchblade UI is pretty much the main selling point on this board.

In place of the regular number pad, you got a laptop touch pad/screen and ten customizable keys. The Switchblade UI basically allows you to greatly alter this side of the keyboard to specific actions and add custom icons too go with. This can be pretty helpful for MMO players where hotkeys are pretty essential but the problem is that the keyboard uses a trackpad along with the ten keys and trackpads are pretty terrible for hardcore gaming, especially considering that's what this keyboard is marketed to. Yeah you can adjust the speed and acceleration of the pad but what's the point when you probably already have a mouse? Maybe even one with hotkeys? You would have to remove your hand completely from your mouse to use the keys and that's terrible. The point of a desktop is not to use it like a laptop and I feel like the trackpad along with the placement of the keys are pretty stupid decisions. There are also extra apps that go with it such as YouTube and they work decently but I highly doubt you would seriously intend on multitasking with this thing, not to mention the third party app support is tiny as far as I can tell. On the bright side you just make the touchpad a traditional number pad with the push of a button but that isn't exactly justifying this board's immense price tag.

Bottom line is I don't think this board is worth what it's marked up at and I'm glad I got it cheap. Okay maybe I'm just being a bit of skeptic because I did like the regular DeathStalker and this feels very similar if not almost the same. The problem is that the Switchblade UI, despite how cool it is, just feels too unrefined and the touchpad feels totally out of place for a hardcore gaming keyboard like this.  Perhaps someone out there has gotten this board's special feature to work for them effectively and that's great, it's all about personal feel when it comes to keyboards. But to me there just isn't enough to justify this over the drastically less expensive standard DeathStalker or a BlackWidow. I like it, I really do but it's token feature feels more like a cool party trick than it is a serious gaming peripheral. Save your money. 

The DeathStalker Ultimate is  discontinued.