SteelSeries Apex 7 – Mechanical Gaming Keyboard – OLED Display – Blue Switches – English (QWERTY) Layou
APEX 7
From the inventors of the Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
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OLED Smart Display
Customize the OLED screen with your favorite gifs, view game info, Discord messages, and more.
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Aircraft Grade Aluminum Alloy
The Series 5000 metal frame is manufactured for a lifetime of unbreakable durability and sturdiness.
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Premium Magnetic Wrist Rest
A simple magnetic solution for easy and secure attachment, full palm support with soft touch finish.
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Dedicated Multimedia Controls
A clickable metal roller and media keys allow you to adjust volume and settings on the fly: change brightness, rewind, skip, pause and more, all at the touch of a button.
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USB Passthrough Port
Avoid crawling behind your desk: insert a flash drive, wireless transmitter, or USB device directly into the keyboard.
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Three-Way Cable Routing
Prevent your cable from getting in the way. The frame has built-in channels that allow you to choose from one of three possible places for your cable to exit, keeping your desk tidy.
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SteelSeries Mice
Our award-winning gaming mice feature the best optical sensors, RGB illumination, and are compatible with PC and Mac.
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SteelSeries Headsets
The most awarded headset-line in gaming. Every Arctis headset comes with our flagship audio drivers, a Discord-certified ClearCast mic, and extraordinary comfort.
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SteelSeries QcK Mousepads
Designed for performance and durability, SteelSeries’ best-selling mousepads come in a wide variety of styles and sizes, so everyone can find a mousepad perfectly suited to their needs.
SteelSeries has fueled the gaming industry for over 15 years by creating innovative new products, designed specifically for esports and passionate gamers everywhere.
| Dimensions: | 43.7 x 13.92 x 4.03 cm; 952 Grams |
| Model: | 64778 |
| Origin: | China |
Red switches are super light touch, but the whole keyboard feels built to last, which is just as well considering the price.
The software to control the RGB lighting is great and allows for superb customization, also allowing the little LCD screen to be programmed to show what you like, mine shows CPU & GPU load and temps.
Great keyboard, I expect it to last longer than the PC it is attached too.
Love the feel and ergonomics of this keyboard, but the steal series software isn’t great, once it works, it works, but getting the launcher to open so I could play with the lighting and features took 2 weeks
Thoroughly recommended.
If you’re looking for a keyboard purely for gaming, I’d recommend choosing linear switches (Cherry MX Red or equivalent) instead. Otherwise, the blue “QX2” switches provide a lovely typing experience. Smooth and sharp with a loud click, clear actuation point and light keypress.
The Steelseries software seems reliable, though don’t expect tight integration with many games out of the box. There seems to be quite a lot of work involved with configuring at an in-game event level, which I’m not personally that interested in. It’s quite disappointing that you can’t have something like a simple digital clock displayed on the screen as default. There are tech demos that show this, but it’s not an out of the box feature.
The RGB is fine. It’s a shame there aren’t any separate indicators for the status of NumLock, CapsLock, etc. Instead, it’s just the keys themselves that change colour, which isn’t necessarily always the easiest to discern.
Ergonomically, it isn’t the best keyboard I’ve used. There is only one tilt angle at the rear of the keyboard. The screen can also be slightly hard to see depending on your posture. The wrist rest is okay. Nothing special.
Build quality is quite good. There is very little flex, and the volume rocker has a nice knurled finish to it. The pause/mute button under the volume rocker as well as the USB passthrough on the left hand side of the keyboard are permanently illuminated white, and can’t be disabled/dimmed in software. The QX2 switches are not hot swappable, but Cherry style keycaps should technically fit.
My previous mechanical keyboard was a Corsair Vengeance K60 (genuine MX Reds) which worked perfectly for 9 years until a pint of Rum and Coke got poured over it. Oops. I’ll let you know if this one makes it to 10. Cheers.
First of all I love this keyboard, the red switches sound amazing, it’s very comfortable and light (not cheap feeling) but I have a few issues including the sensitivity of the switches because for some reason the D key is less sensitive to press than any other key on the keyboard which bothers me a little also I don’t know if this happens on every keyboard with red switches but there is barely any haptic feedback which confuses me but I will have to get used to it I guess.
Although a little loud, 100% would buy again!
volume scroll,
TKL,
english UK,
Bonus: smart OLED screen with some cool functionalities
I just wish gaming keyboards would be less pricy, but compared to the competitors, i think this blows away the market.
Hopefully it doesn’t break on me
We have a number of PCs in our house. It says something when people would rather use the PC with the Apex 7 than theirs, so much so that this a second one, for one of the other PCs.
My favourite bit of the keyboard (apart from the keys themselves) is the volume roller, which gets a lot of use. I’m not sure on how useful the LED display is – whilst I’ve had fun changing what it displays, I’m pretty sure I know who is using the computer without having a display tell me.
It’s crazy how many things you can do with this keyboard with the led screen and the rgb is great. The red switches are buttery smooth and are great for gaming. The led screen has a lot of possibilities you can display gifs, pictures, discord messages and lots more. The rgb has infinite customisation which is amazing and you can control everything in the software.
El teclado es lo que buscaba. Suena de maravilla y preveo una escritura rpida con l,
espero que a todos los usuarios les funcione durante mucho tiempo y confin en la marca steelseries, ya tengo 2 productos de ellos y estoy muy satisfecho.
My teenager son wanted this for Christmas, loves gaming, great colour in the lights
Got this since december 2020 and I’m loving it. The screen is really practical for the temperature and other things. The RGB configuration is quite limited with Steelseries gg, but that’s ok. Give them some more time to partner Up with more games and companies. At the meantime I suggest Antares, open RGB and especially project Aurora (although the project is near to abandonment, the community is still fresh) for various animations, stats, audio and Ambient visualizer etc. Also, more games are supported through these open source additions. And it’s pretty darn fun playing and working like this.
The keyboard itself is top-notch. I found the blue switches to be too loud and brown switches were not available. So, i settled for the reds and am satisfied (all though the click sensation might have been a great Bonus, since I happen to rest my fingers on the keys without noticing until something happens).
Cleaning is easy and simple, the quick settings and wheel are reliable and on-point and the armrest is simple yet highly useful.
I’m one of the minority who buy expensive mechanical keyboards and never game. They’re just a dream for typing — especially blue switches — and not enough professionals are aware, because they’re so obviously flashy they look like they’re just for gamers.
This one feels amazing, not too loud, great features, and the removable magnetic wrist rest is genius. And does not get dirty easily, despite what I’ve read in reviews. But for me, one thing that I hadn’t realised is that a full keyboard is less convenient for quick touch typing + mouse control vs a TKL keyboard. So I’ll be returning mine just to get the TKL version. You might want to consider the same if you’re a professional who types a lot.
Don’t buy cheap Chinese knockoffs, pay the extra and get a top quality board like this. Hope this review is helpful to potential buyers.
If you just started to use keyboard and mouse probably start with a cheap blue switch keyboard unless you just like the ascetics
Keyboard works great though.
The audio scroll wheel is also a button you can click to mute.
Double/Triple press the media button to skip/rewind tracks.
Only has a single USB pass-through unlike its predecessor
The “SteelSeries” key does not act as context menu key like on some other keyboards and cannot be remapped.
Great backlighting
Comes with decent wrist rest
The Oled is more than just a gimmick and the dial makes changing volume or other setting easy.
All in all a fantastic mechanical keyboard if a little expensive
Before I was using hyperx alloy elite,and there was cherry mx red switches,so I was scared to make some changes for my gaming life,I mean new keyboard.But I did it,so I 100% recommend for gamers,who’s playing something like league of legends,call of duty,or cs go.This keyboard is quick and cool.
Great keyboard. I actually love it,worth his money.Its a bit loud,but still I like to type on it.
Before I was using hyperx alloy elite,and there was cherry mx red switches,so I was scared to make some changes for my gaming life,I mean new keyboard.But I did it,so I 100% recommend for gamers,who’s playing something like league of legends,call of duty,or cs go.This keyboard is quick and cool.
Son very happy with this and researched it fully before purchasing so must have checked out simliar products and chose this one.
I bought the Apex 7 after a disappointing experience with the Apex 5. I found the Apex 5 to have extremely loud keys and no USB passthrough.
The Apex 7 with red switches is a joy to use. The keys are much quieter and have a quality feel. In my opinion the blue switches are best avoided unless you like your keyboard to be loud. The brown switches would also be a good choice if you prefer more tactile keys.
The wrist rest has a velvety feel and is quite comfortable and the USB passthrough port is illuminated.
The Steelseries software works fine, it just takes a bit of time to map the keys for each game.
Some would say the OLED screen is a bit of a gimmick, but it works well and it’s quite handy if you want to change settings etc without closing down your game.
I got the Apex 7 for over 47 less than the RRP so although it’s still expensive for what is just a keyboard I would recommend it if you want a high end keyboard.
I think looking back I would have perfered one without a number pad for gaming however I find myself using it all the time when browsing the Internet.
Coming from a cheap keyboard to this was like going from a scrap car to a top of the line Audi. Keystrokes are smooth yet also have great feedback (feel and noise). I only recommend steelseries now.
Build quality is excellent
Comfortable with the ergo wrist wres
PROS:
-One of the best looking sleek keyboards I have ever had, it’s quite minimalistic and the overall feel to it is quality, there is barely any plastic to be seen. (Except for the keycaps)
-The screen is built into the keyboard and is amazing, I love that I can control the keyboards lighting effects, brightness of the screen, macro settings and even a factory reset if needed all from a little screen.
-Keycaps honestly feel nice and your fingers end up resting into curved middle quite nicely, the keys themselves don’t wiggle that much and it’s very nice to type with.
-I chose the cherry red switches as there wasn’t any other switches in stock but I would’ve chosen red regardless, it’s very nice to hear the switches click and provide sound feedback when your typing and it has a linear switch as well, that means when pressing a key down it will feel smooth and linear from top to bottom during the travel of the switch.
-Hand-rest is a pleasant additional touch, I have a wooden desk and my wrist aches with other keyboards but with the Apex 7 you have a magnetic hand-rest that feels nice whilst typing. If I need any space I can easily detach the hand-rest by simply pulling away from the keyboard as it’s only held in by two magnets, that being said there is still enough force between the magnets to ensure no accidental detach during usage.
-The media controls, which are very simple are easy to use and usually register what I’m trying to do (pause a track, skip a track, go to the previous track, mute the volume) so I don’t have to switch screens trying to do it.
CONS:
-This keyboard can get very, very dirty. I had to remove all of my keycaps and even then I couldn’t clean it properly with the switches in the way. The hand-rest attracts a lot of dust that is quite hard to clean unless you have a micro fibre cloth, even then you have to scrub the rubber in order to get the dust completely off.
-I had a problem with a gif not being able to be removed from the screen (you can upload gifs to the keyboard’s screen via the SteelSeries engine application) so I had to factory reset the keyboard.
-The screen for some reason doesn’t have colours, it’s only black and white unfortunately which limited the option for certain gifs to be uploaded.
In summary I’m honestly surprised that a keyboard with a screen could look so clean, especially considering that many many keyboards have tried this same screen effect and it not looking clean as the Apex 7. There are barely any problems I’ve had with the keyboard, and at the price I would recommend this keyboard.
The wristrest feels amazing but has 1 small problem for me. Which is that the magnet on the left has scratched my keyboard permanently.