What’s that? You like RGB? Well have I got the keyboard for you. The new Thermaltake
Level 20 RGB Titanium Mech keyboard arrived at home back in Australia for review while
I was at CES checking out the same keyboard, but now I’m back so let’s find out what’s
on offer.
The Level 20 keyboard has a silver titanium colour scheme, although it’s also available
in black. The top plate is 2mm thick aluminium, so it’s quite sturdy. This results in a
total weight of around 1.5KG, and the dimensions of the keyboard are 48.2cm in length, 18.6cm
in width, and 4.4cm in height. The cable has a nice braiding and is 1.8m long and is not
removable. It’s got two USB Type-A connectors, one for the keyboard itself and the second
is for USB passthrough to the keyboard. There’s also a 3.5mm audio jack for audio passthrough.
There’s a single USB 2.0 Type-A port on the back of the keyboard and a 3.5mm audio
output for that passthrough.
I’ve got Cherry MX Speed Silver switches here, so they’ve got a 1.2mm actuation point.
This was my first time using this switch type as I usually use browns, the first thing I
noticed was that they were much quieter, here’s what we’re dealing with to give you an idea.
This will of course vary depending on what switches you get, it’s also available with
Cherry MX blue which would be louder, and also Razer Green switches. My first impression
on the silver switches are that they are much easier to activate, which makes sense given
the lower actuation point. I definitely still prefer the browns myself, but did start getting
used to it after a while and found it pretty nice to type with. The keyboard also has anti-ghosting
and n-key rollover.
The keys have a floating design so they appear to be elevated a little from the keyboard.
It comes with a key remover tool so it’s very simply to remove the caps, and it also
came with some additional red key caps should you wish to highlight the keys 1, 2, 3, 4,
Q, W, E, R, A, S, or D.
We’ve also got some dedicated buttons towards the right above the numpad, from left to right
we’ve got a game mode button, a button to adjust brightness of the lighting between
5 levels, or turned off if you prefer, followed by a button to quickly lock the Windows keys
if you’re playing a game.
There’s a wheel for adjusting system volume and a button to quickly mute all sound. Below
these are dedicated media buttons, including stop, last track, pause and next track buttons.
As you might have noticed this keyboard has a lot of lighting, along with key backlighting
there’s also a strip of lighting running between the letters and numpad area. The notch
towards the bottom can also be used for routing a cable through for a headset to keep things
tidy. There’s also lighting running across the back and side edges, and while there’s
no lighting along the front there is a clear space where we can see some.
Some of the lighting can be changed using the keyboard itself without the software,
for example the function key can be held while pressing the F6 light effect key to cycle
through the effects. Likewise the function key can also be held and F7 and F8 can be
used to slow down or speed up lighting effects respectively. The F9, F10 and F11 keys can
also be used to manually adjust the amount of red green or blue light in various effects,
although as you’ll see it’s much easier to choose through the software.
We can also hold function and press scroll lock, which is the light mode button, and
this changes between highlighting different keys for different types of games.
The TT iTake Engine software can also be used to customize lighting. This allows us to easily
pick from the 13 key effects and 14 sidebar effects visually in Windows, it gives us an
idea in software what the effect will look like with an animation. It’s much easier
to pick colours here, as we can manually enter in specific values and see what we’re doing,
much more granular compared to using the keyboard to cycle through colours.
The software can also be used to customize key lighting on a per key basis, we’ve also
got the option of setting up macros here and we can save our settings in 6 different profiles,
allowing you to quickly swap between them.
The lighting effects can also be synchronized across other Thermaltake products like their
CPU coolers or fans, and the keyboard also supports Razer’s Chroma if you’d prefer
to use that instead with your other Razer products, however I don’t have any of these
myself to test with.
If you prefer there’s also an app you can install for either iOS or Android and this
lets you control the keyboard too. Apparently the keyboard can also be changed with Amazon
Alexa, so you can control the lights by talking, however as I don’t have Alexa I wasn’t
able to give this a go.
Underneath there’s just a couple of feet up towards the back which can be adjusted
in two different levels, so you can either use the keyboard flat, or raise it up between
two height levels based on your personal preference.
For up to date pricing check the links in the description. At the time of recording
Thermaltake’s suggested prices are $150 USD for the speed silver version that I’ve
got here, $140 USD for the cherry blues, or $130 USD for the Razer Green Switches. Here
in Australia they all seem to be going for around $200 AUD. I honestly don’t really
keep up to date with keyboards and pricing, but at least here in Australia that’s looking
fairly average, and this includes a 2 year warranty.
Overall I found the Thermaltake Level 20 keyboard pretty nice to type with once I got used to
the silver switches, it’s a little larger than my normal keyboard but it looks quite
nice if you’re into RGB. The effects look nice in my opinion and the keyboard is solid,
I get that it’s a gaming keyboard but I think some more switch types would have been
nice. Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and if you’re new here
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