4000Hz Polling Rate Tested EVGA Z15 & Z20

[@MinimumIngenium]

Your content is brilliant and unique, keep it up!

[@BastyTHz]

is there a test like with for optical switch mouse vs mech switch ?

[@rob_over_9000]

I love that you put so much effort into dispelling all of the Marketing(non)sense that comes with "gaming" peripherals now ;)

[@Hathos9]

This data is actually really amazing. If people could send you popular keyboards of brands like Logitech, or perhaps even more niche mechanical keyboards, to test, it would be interesting to see the results.

[@hammer9856]

Your channel provides information we can't get anywhere else. Fantastic job as always!

[@benwilliam1010]

Great Work, Thank you! a comparison between USB 2.0 (polling) vs real USB 3.0 (interrupt based) would be awesome

[@BattleNonSense]

If there are keyboards which support this - and if I can get a test sample then I can surly test it! :)

[@dentjoener]

Very interesting video! Just two things I want to add: Debouncing: So, most popular mechanical keyboards don't do any debouncing in hardware, they do it in the firmware of the keyboard. As you'd need extra resistors and capacitors for a decent "analogue" debounce. There's two ways of doing this, either doing an "eager" debounce, which just means that once a key has changed state, it can't change state for another x ms. Or a "deferred" debounce, in which the key state will be kept, and if it's still the same in x ms, then the keypress is registered. Obviously the first method is preferred, but it is susceptible to noise. So it doesn't really matter if you measure the straight contacts or the actual keyswitches. Both will have debounce anyway. The one thing that's being measured in this case is the time to connect the switch contacts. PS2 keyboards: Yes, people keep saying these are faster, and most people think it's because of interrupts, but USB HID actually has this built in the standard as well. It works on basically the same principle, but an interrupt fired by the usb controller instead of the physical keyboard. Fun fact, HID traffic is of the highest priority, so you could connect a keyboard through a couple of different usb hubs, and transfer to a bunch of harddrives connected to those at the same time, but you'd still have nearly instantaneous keypresses, because priorities. Just a MK enthousiast/engineer chiming in :). Keep up the good work on the videos! Always super interesting.

[@SPENCER1SHOT]

Thanks for the info kind sir

[@windexislife]

Top tier content creator right here. One of the best in the world imo

[@Oldsah]

I am interested in a follow-up with perhaps the razer optical keyboards as well

[@holden7782]

love your content man, keep it up! would love to see you test the wooting keyboards

[@BattleNonSense]

I was in contact with them years ago, just reached out to them again. We will see what happens!

[@tunnfisch7548]

It is really nice to see you making video's again. I just love watching them.

[@ren49]

Cant imagine how much work and time you put in these videos. Very well done.

[@swift6994]

I absolutely love your content please keep it up

[@jadhsyjhduyhjy]

you had to do ton of work for us!

[@BattleNonSense]

It did take many many hours and failed prototypes to get it to this state, but it was a lot of fun! :)

[@Gwoooooo]

@@BattleNonSense Chirs , u r the greatest!

[@muffinman2621]

You're doing gods work, your latency testing setups are very neat. Now I'm super interested which keyboards are actually the fastest. I wonder how hyperx keyboards that almost all pros use compare to the k70, for example.

[@crisnmaryfam7344]

the answer is testing/error variance. Not enough of a difference to matter. 4k/8k hz keyboards cause more issues than they Hope to solve. Rocket jump ninja channel check it out.

[@Arjuningarson]

Days go by and yet you always find something more interesting and so informative!! You are doing a great job!!

[@ThomasMuehler]

Great stuff as always! Appreciate the time and effort you put into your videos. I would be really interested, especially since the K70 was fastest, how the Corsair K100 with optical switches would perform? As it’s entire purpose appears to be for speed. Also, would be interested in Razer’s optical switches as well.

[@christuckwell3185]

I can only imaging how big a collection of keyboards you will have when you have done all these exhaustive tests. Thanks for the awesome work you've done and shared!

[@superciliousdude]

This channel keeps blowing past my expectations! Really appreciate your thoroughness.

[@Petrakeas]

Looking forward to seeing measurements of corsair k100 with the new method.

[@andre267]

I would love to see this Test Methode with the Big-Player Keyboards like Roccat, Logitech, Razer etc. Keep up this AWESOME Content! Love it

[@BattleNonSense]

If I can get them to send me a test sample then I can easily do that!

[@YonatanAvhar]

That switch comparison sounds like it would be really interesting, but wouldn't it just boil down to the actuation distance of the switches? Since the solenoid is so fast

[@BattleNonSense]

My guess is that it doesn't make much of a difference in terms of latency - I think the main difference will be the "feel" and how much force is required to press the key (aka. accidental key press). But I will only know for sure once I did a test. :)

[@YonatanAvhar]

@@BattleNonSense Looking forward to that!

[@KeinZantezuken]

@@BattleNonSense would be cool if you could somehow modify solenoid to detect pushback resistance.

[@BlueBirdTS]

​@@BattleNonSense It would be interesting if you could include some tests where you yourself press the keys. This wouldn't be as tightly controlled as a test using the "keyboard torture machine" you built, but it might better reflect the actual latency humans would experience. I imagine a keyboard's actuation force and actuation distance could make a sizable difference to human reaction times.

[@TAG-GAMING]

A lot of work, good job keep it up.

[@supremest1]

I have never seen such precise work done before! RESPECT!

[@KoseChris]

did you check out the Cherry MX Board 6.0 with its analog input and 1ms latency guaranteed ;)

[@jimez86]

Dude i love your videos. So many tech tubers got LDat but you are the one that does the testing. I definitely want more keyboard testing!

[@zonkara]

Awesome video. It’s easy to tel you went through some pains making it. Keep it up!

[@amechanicalengineer4088]

Very interesting to see what kind of test rig you'd cook up. Big fan of your work!

[@GigaBoots]

You make me proud to be patron. Keep it up, Chris.

[@elmaestroderiver]

buenísimo el contenido del canal, lo miro el mismo dia que se publica! muchas gracias por tu trabajo

[@0mnis14sh]

Excellent video, thanks for the tests!

[@EricLancheres]

This is amazing! I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Hunstman elite with optical switches in the next round up of keyboards?!

[@BattousaiHBr]

4:08 for people thinking this is very impressive, raw performance is not the whole story. the reason they can get such low input lag (and also the reason the PS/2 keyboard that theoretically should be the fastest but instead is the slowest) is because the biggest contributor to the delay is the circuitry and internal processing of the keyboard. in the case of the PS/2 keyboard, because it is using common circuitry and chips, the internal processing time is slow. meanwhile, the corsair one, besides having very fast processing, also shoves off a lot of time with very tight debouncing wait. if you know what debouncing is and why you need to wait for it, as one might expect, very short debouncing also means less reliability of the switches with age. this is probably the biggest reason these corsair keyboards see a lot of key chattering 1+ years after use, and also the reason i stopped buying them in favor of an optical switch keyboard which doesn't suffer from having to wait for debounce. mine in particular is not as good as i'd like it to be, but it at least didn't start malfunctioning before 2 years of use, which IMO is a big improvement.

[@xynium.]

i'm just here trying to figure out why i have input lag for my mouse on minecraft bedrock edition, and that i have to go into the options text setting and set my max framerate to 50 for it to stop (actually turns into 33-34), when i have my mouse on the lowest dpi and my mouse on lowest polling rate too.

[@BattousaiHBr]

@@xynium. any modern mice has imperceptible input lag for humans, this is why this video uses machines to test them. if you are having enough input lag that you can clearly perceive with your human senses, the issue is either software or hardware. since you mention you are getting 34 FPS in minecraft i'm inclined to think the issue is your hardware processing power (in particular, your CPU is too slow). if you could, please share the model of your CPU (it looks something like "intel i5 5500K")

[@InqFabius]

I love your work man.

[@ohnoeskimo2165]

I know how much work goes into this, and just want to say youre awesome and good job.

[@domitorisan]

So proud to see my Corsair K70 in the test 8)

[@Bensam123]

Love it, glad you're taking time to touch peripherals no one else is taking time to do besides subjective review. I'm sure there will be a lot more in store as there is a infinite number of manufacturers and fan bois surrounding these.

[@stoked9004]

Neato! Could you include Wooting keyboads in the upcoming round up please 🙏🏻 They are a small team with keyboard designs focused on latency.

[@wangfred7283]

thanks for your detailed explanation. Super!!

[@Paiin00]

Are you gonna cover the NVIDEA reflex in Rainbow Six Siege? And the improved Servers?

[@BattleNonSense]

There will be a video about RLL "soon" where I might be able to add R6S to.

[@nwestman04]

@@BattleNonSense I'm assuming your going to test Overwatch as well

[@Waremonger]

I'm loving these new testing methods.

[@robinhood-xy7qm]

As always very intresting video :)

[@PappLacc]

Thanks again for the scientific levels of your test, they are awesome!

[@Blindastronomer]

Hi Chris, thanks for the video. Might I suggest you also test the Steelseries Apex Pro, which uses Hall Effect sensor "Omni-point" switches, and advertises the key delay as

[@vladislavkaras491]

Thanks for the video! I was kinda expecting such results, since this is like 360+ refresh rate on the monitor, though I thought the difference would be slightly more noticeable.

[@rtyzxc]

I once read an article that said that it's possible to achieve basically zero debounce delay with better debounce logic. It said that instead of averaging conductivity over a timeframe and deciding when it's activated enough, the switch could be activated right away at first contact and then just put on a set "cooldown" of few ms to ignore switch fluctuations. Same with off-event. Either peripheral manufacturers are having a huge oversight, or this revolutionary debounce idea has a problem: consistency. While lowest possible latency is useful, it may be that they are using more delayed debounce because it gives better consistency, which is also important. For example, non-reactive timing, pressing a key for a specific amount of time to move a specific distance, and rhythm games need consistency. So basically, I believe that any keyboard might have the ability to be faster on average but with worse consistency. The delay is probably determined mostly by the keyboard firmware and not the switch. My guess is that different switches on same keyboard are about as fast. However, if you use switches not designed for that keyboard, you may be having too little debounce (leading to uncalled repetitions) or too much debounce (not utilizing the potential of a better switch). Optical switches are their own category.

[@fabriziolazo7102]

I was about to buy a Keychron K4 with LK Blues this week. This video makes me want to do more research before I pull the trigger.

[@ALIENiAM]

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdclass\Parameters change "KeyboardDataQueueSize" from default decimal Number 100 down to 16 . Show us the TESTS if it is just SnakeOil or reduced "measureable" Input Latency :) that would be awesome and people would stop either "believing" or hell we all start doing those Registry Haxx :) . Good Work as usual, hope to see a little sidenote in one of your videos about this registry tweak with some numbers, would be interesting to see what you find out.

[@mowdogz1793]

Great video as usual! Maybe not much of an issue, but another variable... My i7-4790 uses 5% more cpu usage on my k70 when I bump up the polling rate from 500 to 1000.

[@Rezler_]

Great video, btw there is keyboard input lag tested on rtings but i wish they were more keyboard tested.

[@bokisatrii]

You tested a ps/2 keyboard which is really old right? maybe the proccessing chip inside it is really slow? A good keyboard to test would be Wooting One and Bloody Optical keyboards since they claim to have the fastest response times. Patreons please make this happen!

[@stoked9004]

I double Wooting.

[@Huynguyenkimnhat]

Doing God's work as always. Looking forward to your key switches test

[@Sanjarih]

You sir, are a gift to us mere mortals

[@CrashCA]

Thanks, always great

[@SpecialKthx]

THIS was the best way of testing, could actually use this method on mice! I own a Cherry mx board 6.0 it has a feature called RealKey, the only keyboard to offer this technology, I wonder how it would do, they say this keyboard has no matrix scanning, they said its analog or something.... I wish I could lend it to you or maybe you could try to get one.

[@alexe1337]

please do it!

[@SpecialKthx]

He didnt see it :(

[@Lagahan]

I wonder if the next generation of VR headsets will go down this 4/8khz polling rate route. Can't think of something more latency sensitive than that lol.

[@rtyzxc]

What exactly will poll in 4khz+? Camera and lighthouse tracking are 30/60hz but they are for correction, all fast tracking works with accelerometers. Accelerometers are noisy and require lots of averaging to remove jitter, so what we need is not higher update rate but better quality accelerometers.

[@YumBlin]

Thanks for this! Didn’t realize EVGA was making followup keyboards, hopefully their software has improved over the Z10

[@stevePDx]

Looking forward to seeing the keyswitch test

[@JoseEncarnacao]

Cheers from Portugal. :D

[@Ph42oN]

Interesting. Would be nice to see testing of some more keyboards, im especially interested in seeing how Romer-G switches do in this test.

[@Valla451]

Id love full Keyboard and Mouse latency tests if you run out of ideas. Quality content as always.

[@Fluxty]

Very informative video, thank you! I guess 8k would follow this suit as well.

[@djvidual8288]

Great work!

[@seetecktee]

Appreciate the effort

[@BlizzGMX]

great stuff sir

[@j4ckcalico]

this was an awesome video! now I can't wait to see the data of every mechanical keyboard out there for at least reds and silver cherry switches... damn, that would be nice haha

[@imadecoy.]

Delay on key lift off can be just as important. Keep that in mind when looking at fast acting switches.

[@a1337cookie]

Great video, very informative as always. Would love to see the Apex Pro get tested, since I daily drive one. It definitely feels more responsive than any other keyboard I've used, but would love to see some concrete numbers. I actually have a second Apex Pro lying around that I warrantied, it has a broken cable and a single faulty RGB LED, but otherwise should be fully functional. I bet you could repair the cable and use it for your testing. I could send it to you, let me know if you're interested.

[@chrisbenn]

2 x Thank you! Thank you for using Overwatch as your game in your video! :-) Thank you for NOT using a Battle Royale game! :-)

[@KiraDenys]

Switch type, spring weight, actuation point, and whether or not the switch is lubed, will probably be all be factors. Would love to see a follow up video, comparing different switches.

[@DomskiPlays]

Love it! Maybe you could put keyboard in the title it would get even more views. Because most people dont even know there can be so many hz on them haha

[@Cyndadogo]

As always love your content I learned a lot from your channel my friend, thank you so much and cheers from Argentina!

[@VRazorGaming]

Hello, i dunno if you will see this, but it may make for a good video/ investigation Win32priorityseperation is a registry key that affects the smoothness/ responsiveness of mouse/ game feel Decimal 40 being the most responsive and Decimal 22 being the smoothest. (there are many values in between, decimal 38 is windows default) The latency community knows that it does affects smoothness but we never know a tangible value of how much smoothness/ responsiveness is affected as repeated human testing can only go so far before being called placebo. Luckily the stark contrast between decimal 22 and decimal 40 is so obvious that anyone can notice

[@shuffle_rush]

please include gk61 yellow optical switches in your next test, a TON of people consider it to be the "fastest keyboard" but no one has actually measured this...

[@qbxcv]

Hopefully you'll test out the new Wooting Lekker switch when you do the switch comparison!

[@SentoryKURT]

I’m fairly certain that every switch will have the exact same input lag, as the only significant difference is the weight. The keyboard micro controller controls the debounce and usb interface latency. I would love to see a large scale comparison of different keyboards including custom pcb’s (could be bought fairly cheap as no case or switches are required)

[@Grucha_cfg]

Have you tested any small keyboards that you could recommend? (Low input Lag) BTW you create exceptionally high quality content, keep it up please! :).

[@V3ptur]

Great video as always. Although I'd be really interested to see these tests been done on Logitechs lightspeed series devices such as the G915TKL to see what the performance of these wireless peripherals are like, I've always preferred wired but I think it would be interesting to see.

[@ReubenHorner]

You can do optical switches also. I can show you how if you'd like. You will need a nchannel mosfet or npn transistor, some resistors and will need to remove the optical switch itself from the pcb

[@sir_bumpalot]

Since some of the best quake players are using chiclet or other rubberdome keyboards, i would love to see a comparision between mechanical and chiclet. I guess chiclet is very fast and precise. You need only ~1 mm to activate and there is no furter bottom out of 1-2 mm, which is a problem when you lift off your finger on a mechanical keyboard because it takes time. On a chiclet/rubberdome you do not have this problem. This seems to be a big thing in quake, especially because of strafejumping, maybe not so bigbin other games.

[@emhelmarkmanibo9646]

top tier content indeed

[@francisconovais2941]

Kinda sad you didn't include the corsair k100 since I think it's the only other 4000 hz keyboard with both mechanical and optical switches too

[@riba2233]

Awesome test, thank you for this! It would alo be cool to see some bluetooth and other wireless keyboards. Keychron is a good candidate because they keyboards offer bt and wired mode, lot of diffrent switches including optical and hotswap, and aren't expensive

[@starofeden9277]

wow good work

[@letcas3435]

Great video :3 thank you... who is your overwatch main btw?

[@tomwolf6353]

You should create a PC Build tutorial. It would be brilliant!

[@Oicaro.]

amazing work is much appreciated, if possible it would be nice if you could also try mainstream wireless keyboards and small form factor keyboards like 60%, to see how much the design of these keyboards affects.

[@Ivanical]

Are you planning to do these tests on the huntsman 8k polling rate keyboard?

[@cublyy]

Basically higher polling rates than the already standard 1000Hz on mice and keyboards is negligible and is not worth the extra markup these products might have. Seems like a repeat of the DPI craze a while back where higher and higher DPI was advertised like it was actually useful, you know, bigger numbers sell products. Higher polling rate is fine as a bonus and is welcome as a 'nice-to-have' on wired products. However with the push to wireless and the wireless tech being so great right now, higher polling rates would just mean less battery life and wouldn't make sense to implement for, essentially, no impact on performance vs 1000Hz.

[@KALTBLUTWOLF1]

Wow, I really didn't expect to see such differences in response time in keyboards. Keyboards seem so much more simple than mice. Interesting to see that one can make mistakes here too... I have a question: is the Corsair K70 you tested a standard one or a "MK. 2" version? It's right in the name so it should say it somewhere on it or its packaging very visibly. Thank you so much for your scientifically objective testing!

[@BattleNonSense]

It's the "standard" version, I think the MK.2 came out after the one I bought 3 years ago. :)

[@KALTBLUTWOLF1]

@@BattleNonSense The MK.2's came out October 2018. So over 2 years ago.

[@howiejcee]

Now we need the K100 tested for comparison.

[@alevxzx]

Amazing setup! Do you think that CSGO on Linux will have a different delay?

[@Bruh-mm5rn]

It would be fun to see next gen console content on next battlefield maybe?

[@sp-xx8ty]

when i switched from my cherry mx reds to gateron optical yellows I could tell the difference. there were several times in game i would usually die from not moving fast enough behind cover just by switching keyboards.

[@HexlGaming]

this is awesome. now I wish this data would exist for all keyboards; Razer, Ducky, Logitech, maybe even Sharkoon..

[@BattleNonSense]

Now that I have a reliable testing method all it needs now is companies sending me test samples. :)

[@incinerate6130]

Very informative video :). Sadly the only way to get a great sounding and feeling keyboard is to go for a custom keyboard. But there is pretty much no information availible about the latency of the custom keyboards pcbs. Would be nice if you could combine a nice sound/feeling keyboard with low latency. I have a corsair rapidfire but compared to customs it sounds and feels really bad. @Chris. Did you look up the terms chord splitting and scan range of keyboard pcbs? Would be interesting to know the impact of these properties :)

[@Agentfirestarter]

Yea I’m wondering if I should buy the Keychron q2. Some people say you won’t notice a difference and some people say it’s to high.

[@Mario-je7jo]

Would be happy to see the difference in response time between the Cherry switches. I use the blue switches with 2.2mm and expect the worst response time of all Cherry switches. Unfortunately, since I find the tactile feel the best. But I have not yet tried the MX speed.

[@dalegetswild8301]

I have a custom keyboard in which I use kailh speed silver switches with 20cN springs. Flashed the qmk firmware to poll at 1khz and also changed the debounce method to register keypress instantly then wait 5ms for debounce. Its feels very responsive Scan rate and debounce method/optical are important in keyboard delay, would be interested in something like the apex pro that is regarded as the 'fastest' keyboard

[@MrFlatox]

I am not sure if the actual switches have some influence (if any) in the latency result. I would guess it all boils down to the keyboard electronic implementation : is there any input filtering ? Is there a debouncing check in hardware form or programmed into the keyboard micro-controler ? How fast the micro-controler is checking for key press ? USB polling rate is just one of many factors that contribute to the overall latency. It is the easiest one to advertise though 😉

[@enhex]

Would be interesting to test Wooting 2 HE with its short actuation distance (advertised 0.1mm) and magnetic switches. Also Keychron K3 with its low profile optical switches.

[@jetpil0t]

TLDR; does not matter, volume wheel is king.