Razer Huntsman V3 Pro 8kHz review: A competition keyboard

The screen on the right side is convenient and practical. I appreciate the gimmick of the launch visualizer, which is a small line of dots that light up from left to right as you press the key. It can help identify and set the ideal operating distance, but beyond that, it is almost entirely aesthetic. The rest of the indicators on the keyboard are nice, but disappointing compared to the full OLED displays that many gaming keyboards have today.

The rarely used set of keys above the arrow keys now has a secondary purpose, as each can be used with a function layer to select one of five preset profiles. Four of them are customizable, but the first, called “Factory Default,” seems to act as a fail-safe in case you mess up another profile map (like remapping your space bar to your controller’s “A” button — something the software actually warns you about if you try).

Via these profiles you can perform all standard Hall effect adjustments. Each key’s individual actuation distance can be adjusted, the Rapid Trigger lets you customize the key’s reset point (so you can immediately press the key again instead of waiting for it to go back past the initial trigger point), and Razer’s SOCD (Simultaneous Opposite Cardinal Direction) setting, called Snap Tap, works like any other key, allowing one key to overtake another for quick pounding.

Photo: Henry Robbins

Synapse also allows for more fine-grained customizations, with adjustments to toggle dead zones, Rapid Trigger sensitivity, and a “continuous Rapid Trigger,” which keeps the Rapid Trigger active above its default trigger point until the switch is fully released.

During my time using this keyboard, I had a lot of difficulty dealing with the RGB lighting. It would regularly stop working at all during use, requiring me to disconnect the keyboard to reset something internally. At one point, the main RGB layer stopped lighting up entirely, with its own lighting only maintained by the OLED display and the illuminated function layer (which displays which keys have a function when you press Fn). The strangest thing was that the RGB lighting would return to the default setting when my computer was locked, indicating something was wrong with the Synapse software. In the end, after a long troubleshooting, I had to completely uninstall and reinstall both Synapse and Chroma to get them working again.