My last Corsair peripheral has expired!
Over the past nine years, I have had several Corsair peripherals, including a Strafe RGB keyboard, a M65 Pro RGB mouse, a Dark Core RGB mouse, and a K70 Mk.2 keyboard. And every one of them has failed from 8 months to 8 years from new, and now my relationship with Corsair peripherals is over.
The first product I purchased was the Strafe RGB keyboard, which lasted roughly 2 ½ years before failing. The backlight on the keys suddenly went out, and I thought that it had just crashed, so I turned it off and on again, and a selection of keys on the left-hand side stopped working. No liquid had ever been spilled on the keyboard; it just failed during regular use, very disappointing for a $150 keyboard.
The next purchase was the M65 Pro RGB mouse, which recently failed. While it still technically worked, the left mouse button would double-click 80% of the time when single clicking, making it useless. Most of the time, I don’t want to double-click, and I don’t spend my entire day launching applications. The M65 Pro RGB lasted about 8 years, which I guess is not bad, but not a patch on my old Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical, which I used for 12 years, and was still in perfect working order when I retired it in 2012.
I replaced the M65 Pro RGB with a DarkCore Pro RGB wireless mouse, and sadly, this one didn’t quite make it to a year before the scroll wheel started to malfunction. It would randomly do the opposite once in every two or three scroll-up or scroll-down motions. For example, when scrolling down a page, every two or three ‘clicks’, it suddenly jerked back up. I did a lot of scrolling in my daily use, which became extremely annoying and disappointing for a $80 mouse at the time of purchase, it’s now $100. This is when I reverted to the M65 Pro, which was still working in 2019, after sitting in its box for a year.
After the Strafe RGB keyboard failed, I bought a K70 Mk.2 keyboard for $180 as a replacement, which was an even bigger disappointment. After 7 or 8 months, the backlighting on specific keys started to fail, no longer maintaining their color. Even worse, the keyboard would stop responding at least once daily, and the only fix was to unplug both USB cables for half a minute, effectively power cycling the keyboard. A computer reboot wouldn’t even fix it. This was the last straw for Corsair peripherals for me.
In January 2020, I received a Steel Series Apex 7 keyboard as a Christmas gift. More specifically, I received a $150 Amazon gift card, which I used in part to purchase the Apex 7, adding the extra $30 myself. This keyboard has been rock solid, with the exception of a very occasional lock-up, which can be fixed by quickly unplugging and replugging the USB cable. And as of today, it has been in use for 5 ½ years, 2 years longer than both Corsair keyboards combined, which says a lot about the Corsair quality.
As I have had such good luck with the Apex 7 keyboard, I decided to stick with Steel Series and purchased the Rival 5 wired mouse. Although it’s too early to judge the product, the Rival 5 does feel somewhat light compared to the Corsair mice, but it gets the job done, and it was a bargain at only $40.