It is even possible to measure the level of blue, red, and green lighting yourself to find, as closely as possible, the color that suits you best. Turning the keyboard over, we see the case with a metal badge in the middle - this particular one is an engineering sample, and a laser engraving labels it as such. Paired with the aluminum case, it appears that Vortex may have been looking to keep the slightly cushy feel that was mentioned earlier. This helps with keeping it extremely compact, and yet the anodized aluminum case does provide a lot of structural rigidity as well. The icing on the cake: Vortex delivers a colorful set of keys to highlight individual keys and give your keyboard an original and vintage style.

The keycaps, including the included replacement ones, are made out of PBT plastic and feel great to type on. Go into programming mode by pressing Home+R3 (not simultaneously, press Home and while holding it press R3), right LED should light up white, then hit the L2 (LED blinks red), then L3 (LED blinks red), then Pn (LED shines white) to finish first move. Its PCB is excellent given its engineering sample status (though the revision code is quite old, so this has been in the works for a while). Fn + End toggles between Win lock, and the right space bar LED lights up blue if the Windows key is locked. It’s just a matter of getting used to it in a few hours of use, just as it was the first time you used a mechanical keyboard.I own several 60-80% mechanical keyboards of different brands - the thing that I appreciate about the Vortex Race 3 the most is that they have fit TKL into almost the size of a 60% format. While there is no release date provided, this will help provide full programmability to their keyboards. There are two LEDs under the space bar, and the left LED helps with visually identifying which layer you are on with red, green, and blue for the three other layers respectively and no lighting for the base layer.

Hassle-free layout changes that aren’t tied to a specific computer are quite valuable for mechanical keyboard power users. By default, you are in layer L0, which is not programmable, and what you see on the keycaps out of the box is what you get.

There is even a secondary bag of keycaps that contains RGB modifiers and Apple compatible key replacements.