Quick Fire TK

Cooler Master’s CM Storm line of products are designed for competitive PC gaming, with a lot of focus on LAN tournaments, so apart from having good hardware, it’s important to have some level of portability as well. And with the Quick Fire TK, Cooler Master sets out to do just that.

Size

The Quick Fire TK is a compact mechanical keyboard that combines the Numpad and navigation keys in one format, as found in most laptops. You still get complete function keys on top as well. This chop means that instead of a large full sized keyboard, the Quick Fire TK measures just 14.9 x 5.4 inches. Weighing just 544 grams with a detachable mini-USB braided cable means the CM Quick Fire TK is one of the most portable keyboards on the market.

Switches

The Quick Fire TK comes in three flavors of mechanical switches: Cherry MX Blue, Brown and Red. While you can find guides on the types of mechanical switches online and what is best, my personal favorite is Cherry MX Brown because of its relatively low actuation force and light bump (registered half-way through pushing a button) which also makes it great for typing.

The Quick Fire TK also comes with individually backlit LED keys, with each switch type denoted by a specific color, so Cherry MX Red is red, MX Blue is blue and MX Brown is white. Our test unit came with the Cherry MX Brown keys, so it had a white backlight. The backlight itself can be adjusted to 5 levels of brightness, and 3 modes of display which are all keys lit, pulsating, or only WASD and arrow keys lit.

The F12 also comes with the secondary function of disabling the Windows Key on the bottom left, to prevent you from accidentally pushing it during a heated gaming session.

Usage

The Cherry MX Brown keys are relatively quiet with a more subdued clicky sound than other switches. Using it for typing was very pleasant, while gaming was equally fun. Every keystroke registered just fine. My main gripe with the Quick Fire TK is that during office work, I misclicked the navigation keys a lot of times thinking that the Num Lock was off, and vice versa. This made for a lot of frustrating times when I was switching between Excel and Word as I tend not to use the numerical keys on top of the QWERTY keys. For people who use laptops on a daily basis, this will be a non-issue, while other will adapt to this quick enough.

The CM Quick Fire TK doesn’t come with any audio or USB ports, meaning that it’s a simple keyboard deigned with gamers in mind. To that end it works flawlessly, and coupled with the portability it’s excellent for LAN parties or tournaments.