Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo Review

Introduction

The PC industry has seen its share of unique input devices over the years, everything from cameras to brainwave scanners. However, the mouse and keyboard are still, by far, the best and most efficient way to use your PC. As the PC has evolved, so have the peripherals. Some keyboards have Macros, USB pass through and dedicated media keys. The most desired feature these days seems to be RGB Lighting. Everything from fans to mice and especially keyboards has RGB lighting in recent history.

As enthusiasts, once we find peripherals that we like, we tend to stick with them for a long time. To persuade one to even look at a new mouse or keyboard, let alone willingly change peripherals, is a monumental task. It’s a safe bet that more than a few of us have something wrong with one of our peripherals. Whether it’s a sticking key or a frayed cord, it may be time for an upgrade. With so many choices out there, it’s sometimes hard to make a decision. But no worries, Cooler Master is here to make that decision a bit easier with their MasterKeys Lite L Combo.

Proclockers would like to thank Cooler Master for making this review possible. Now, let’s see what the MasterKeys Lite L Combo has in store for us!
 

About Cooler Master

Working on a hunch out of an apartment in Taipei with no support and no funding, a rogue product manager startedinventing, improving, making and marketing new products. Despite the humble beginning, Roger Lin founded Cooler Master in 1992 and his innovative spirit has propelled it to the market leader we all know today.

Cooler Master’s take on the MasterKeys Lite L Combo

The MasterKeys Lite L Combo with RGB gives you two gaming devices with incredible features. Equipped with brilliant zoned RGB lighting for you to customize with any color you desire, the keyboard also provides a crisp, tactile feel thanks to Cooler Master’s exclusive Mem-chanical switches. Toss in an equally decked out mouse with precision sensor, side buttons, and DPI presets, the MasterKeys Lite L Combo gives you the RGB experience and performance all in one package.

Specifications and Features

Specifications

Keyboard

Mouse

Features

Keyboard Features

• Six Zones with RGB Lighting

The keyboard has multiple lighting effects, including Wave, Ripple, and other active and reactive effects.

• Cooler Master Exclusive MEM-CHANICAL Switch

Durable and feels like mechanical switches

• Up to 26-key Anti-Ghosting

Ensure each key press is correctly detected regardless how fast and furious it gets.

• Brilliant RGB Lighting

Zoned Backlighting system with multiple lighting effects.

• Compatible with Custom Keycaps

Customize each key with your own CHERRY MX compatible keycaps.

• Water Splash Resistant

All possibilities of damage from liquid spills can be avoided.

• On-The-Fly Control

Repeat rate and lightening mode speeds can be changed quickly via key combos.

Mouse Features

• Precise and Stable Optical Sensor

Infrared red Avago 3050.

• Faster Response OMRON Switch

Left and Right keys.

Durable switches with life span of 10 million clicks.

• Two-Zoned Lighting with RGB

Two RGB Effects.

• Two Thumb Buttons

Perfect for working and gaming

• On-The-Fly Commands

Dedicated DPI with four levels and illumination colors: 500(red), 1000(Blue), 2000(Purple), 3500(White).

Shortcuts to change color of speed of effects.

• Smooth Teflon Mouse Feet

Suitable on any surface.

Packaging

The MasterKeys Lite L Combo comes in a clean and beautifully colorful box as pictured above.Covered almost entirely with a picture of the product inside, you only find the important info and features on the front such as the regional layout and Cherry MX keycap compatibility.

The back of the box however, gives an exploded view of the keyboard and the special Mem-chanical switch Cooler Master has developed.  You can also find a list of features of the mouse and keyboard both in 8 different languages.

Opening the box reveals the keyboard wrapped in a heavy plastic bag and nestled down into a folded cardboard tray with the MasterKeys Mouse   protected by a carefully cut foam block. The cords to both peripherals are tucked below the cardboard tray.

It’s really hard to beat the simplicity of the MasterKeys Lite L Combo. With no drivers or software needed, the package only consists of the Keyboard and mouse and a single page folded guide to the key combinations used to configure the lighting on both, and adjustable DPI on the mouse.  Cooler Master is off to a great start here, so let’s take a closer look!

Closer Look

The very first moment you plug in the MasterKeys Lite L Combo, they both spring to life with a slow wave of color. Color waves travel across the keyboard while the mouse wheel and rear lighted area smoothly cycle through dozens of colors, it’s quite beautiful! Even under the bright photography lighting, the soft black matte finish of both devices don’t reflect glare, and everything on the keyboard is easily readable.

The Cooler Master logo adorns the two keys that usually have a Windows logo, with a function key on the right side of the space bar. Coupled with the FN key, F1 through F7 function as the lighting controls. No software is needed; all adjustments can be made with onboard buttons, allowing you to adjust the cycle, color, effect, speed, area and even the direction the effects flow. FN + F9 to F12 control the repeat rate of keys held down, as well as locking the ‘windows key’ during gaming sessions. Nothing quite ruins a perfect kill streak like jumping to the desktop at an inopportune time, thankfully, windows key lock has become a standard feature on gaming keyboards. The ‘G’ in the top right corner will light up blue while the windows key is disabled. You can also lock the keyboard entirely by pressing FN + F11.This could come in handy for gamer parents or anyone with curious fingers roaming around while you are elsewhere.

Fully disabling they keyboard lights the ‘G’ indicator a diffused red, and the standard Caps-lock, Number-lock and scroll-lock indicators light up a soft white. I really like Cooler Master’s choice not to use ultra-bright LED’s for these indicators as they can be extremely distracting while gaming in a darkened room.

Media keys are handled here as well with a combination of FN+ the 6 keys above the direction keys. You have the standard play/pause, stop, skip forward, skip backward, as well as volume up and down which should cover most user’s needs.

Lighting effects for the keyboard consist of 8 effects, several active modes such as the multi-color wave and breathing effects, and several reactive modes that respond to key presses such as lighting the pressed key or sending a ripple across the board. Effects for the mouse are limited to a user selectable static color, and an automatic color cycle.

Cooler Master’s Mem-chanical switches feature an MX-Cherry compatible stem, so any of your favorite aftermarket key caps should work. The entire upper part of the switch is clear and translucent, so you get plenty of light through it to light up the key caps.

Here is a Cooler Master provided cutaway view of the Mem-chanical switch and a quick comparison of how they stack up to a standard membrane switch. You can see here the Cooler Master Mem-chanical switches are rated for a whopping 12 million clicks. Not quite the 40-50 Million clicks a true mechanical switch is rated for, but miles ahead of nearly every other membrane switch on the market.

The MasterKeys Lite Keyboard has 4 rubber coated feet that have amazing gripping strength. No matter how furious you game or type, this keyboard will not be sliding around your desk. Ever.  The rear two flip up in the traditional style for an angled keyboard and the ends of the feet have the same no-slip coating.

The ambidextrous MasterKeys Lite Mouse has two lighting zones, the edges of the wheel, and a rounded area along the rear of the mouse. It carries the same matte black finishas the keyboard, and a subtle Cooler Master logo painted on the rear. You have 6 total buttons, but only 5 of which interact with the computer. The top button immediately behind the wheel allows you to instantly flip through the adjustable DPI settings. You get four pre-programmed settings, 500, 1000, 2000 and 3500DPI and switching between them causes the mouse lights to flash Red, Blue, Purple and White respectively for each DPI setting to confirm selection.  The DPI select button, referred to as button 6 in the documentation, also functions similar to the FN button on the keyboard. Holding it down while pressing the right mouse, middle mouse button, or the backwards button will adjust the lighting and effects. 

The Avago ADNS-3050 is natively a 2000 DPI sensor capable of 60 inch per second movement speed and up to 20g acceleration. And, that means what in English? The sensor in this mouse can keep up with your wildest gaming sessions and not miss a beat, which is really what matters at the end of the day. The main left and right mouse buttons are Omron 10M switches, rated for 10 million clicks.

Here you can see the 3 large Teflon feet that let this mouse glide effortlessly over nearly any surface.

Mouse Polling Rate Test
Mouse Rate Checker 1.1b

“This little program measures and displays the sample rate of a mouse, i.e. how often the mouse sends information to your computer. It just measures the time between two "WM_MOUSEMOVE" messages and calculates the frequency.

There are programs to increase the sample rate of PS/2 mice to make the cursor movement smoother.

To check your mouse's sample rate, just move the mouse quickly over the Mouse Rate Checker window until the average rate stays constant.

It's possible that the rate is a bit inaccurate, especially at high rates (>=100 Hz). Try to uncheck the "show current rate" checkbox, which should lower CPU usage and close all other applications. If it's still inaccurate, blame Windows, not my program.

Mouse Rate Checker 1.1b is Freeware.”

In testing, the mouse is being tested and calculated out to be polling at ~1000Hz. This mouse sends updated location data to your computer one thousand times a second, insuring you never miss a beat, a feature you only really find on high end gaming mice, so it’s very nice to see it here.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Cooler Master might have managed something special here. They have taken the important and highly desirable features of much more expensive peripherals, durable switches, quality optical sensor, and RGB Lighting for example, and stuffed them into something a fraction of the price.  There are a few compromises, you don’t get per-key RGB lighting control, and you don’t get a ton of extra buttons for Macros and such. What you do get is a quality switch at a fraction of the price, which is very important when there are over one hundred of them in a full keyboard, zoned RGB lighting with active and reactive modes, an accurate optical sensor, and a few useful DPI presets.

Subjectively, the Mem-chanical switches match the popular Cherry-MX brown switches pretty well. They feel very similar to 2 different keyboards I use daily that contain Cherry-MX Browns. The actuation force feels identical, the keycaps sway about the same amount side to side while reaching keys farther from the home row, and the level of noise produced is audibly the same in a quiet office.  I can feel a slight difference between the two. It feelslike I reach the tactile actuation resistance slightly earlier in the keystroke. It’s enough difference to tell, but not anywhere near enough to throw off typing or gaming.

The mouse is light and responsive, purposely exaggerating jerks and very fast motion didn’t bother it at all and my cursor was right where I expected it in game. The 4 DPI presets should cover most scenarios and didn’t feel limiting. Not having to deal with a single piece of software for gaming peripherals was a nice change of pace, but if you use any voice chat software with push-to-talk, not being able to reprogram your side mouse buttons to something other than the default windows forward and back keys can get interesting while surfing the web.

Overall, Cooler Master has delivered a great product with everything you need, and nothing you don’t. In doing so, they have set the scale extremely high on value per dollar spent with this combo. If you are in the market for new peripherals and don’t have a fortune to spend, the Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo RGB should be at the top of your list. You can find the Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo for $59.99 at Amazon and Newegg.

Pros:

• Mem-chanical switch feels good to type and game on
• RGB backlighting with plenty of effects
• Zero software needed
• Fast polling speed

Cons:

• None