Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro 75% review: Keyboards don’t need screens

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If you ask a dozen PC gamers who makes the ultimate gaming keyboard, odds are good that more than one will answer Razer. If you ask Razer which of their keyboards is its own ultimate, they’ll answer “the BlackWidow V4 Pro 75%.” Then they’ll take a breath, because that is a mouthful. 

The Pro upgrade to the original BlackWidow V4 75% adds wireless capability, an OLED screen, and PBT keycaps. Oh, and over $100 on the price tag — this $300 keyboard is now the brand’s most expensive by a healthy margin. While it’s not the priciest keyboard on the market, it’s definitely a splashy flex of a purchase, and well beyond the realm of an impulse buy.

 

Is the Pro version of Razer’s ultimate keyboard design better than its original wired model? Yes. Is it $110 better? No. If you want a wireless upgrade that has this keyboard’s premium materials and customizable options, I’d recommend going with a competing model. But if you’re a die-hard Razer fan and you want its ultimate mechanical keyboard, it’s at least plausible as a purchase. 

Design 

If you’re interested in the BlackWidow V4 Pro 75% (I’m just going to call it the “Pro” from here on out), odds are pretty good that you’ve already looked at the non-Pro predecessor. I’d recommend perusing that review, as I don’t want to cover too much of the same ground. The original is a fantastic mix of custom keyboard and gaming keyboard features, but if you aren’t sold on it, you probably won’t be along for the ride here, either. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

But to summarize, the V4 75% is a damn good blend of features from high-end gaming boards you’d expect from the Razer heritage, and a ton of new features borrowed from increasingly popular premium designs from the likes of Keychron and Nuphy. We’re talking high-end, satisfying tactile switches, hot-swap sockets if you want to try out something different, internal padding for a better feel and sound profile, and all the extra goodies like RGB, a volume knob, and side-lighting. 

Pretty much the only major features that the original design lacked were wireless and adjustable actuation, the latter of which remains an exclusive to Razer’s Huntsman line. It’s a great choice if you like to tweak your keyboard, but you still love Razer’s gaming-focused features…and you don’t mind a bit of a splurge. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

Aside from the jaw-dropping asking price, the Pro adds Razer’s high-speed wireless with Bluetooth for multi-device functionality, the company’s first display on a mechanical keyboard (it’s tried this before, but not recently), and upgraded PBT keycaps. Let’s tackle all of those first. 

Wireless upgrade

Razer has been making wireless PC gaming accessories for a long time now, and pretty much has it down to a science. Testing out the Pro for several weeks I never encountered a single hiccup, even though I was using either the 2.4GHz connection or Bluetooth for almost the entire time. It’s rock-solid, and if you have the superhuman reflexes to notice the 4,000Hz polling rate, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. 

That speedy polling apparently requires a bit more hardware than can be fit into the usual dime-sized dongle seen on other Razer keyboards and mouse. This one needs a separate USB-C cable, and it’s chonky, about the size (but not the weight) of a 9-volt battery. It’s a bit of a disappointment as part of the allure of a wireless keyboard is keeping your desk nice and tidy, and it also limits this thing’s travel appeal. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

But be honest: If you’re spending $300 on a gaming keyboard, you have a massive desktop setup anyway. One more cable to mind probably won’t be a huge hindrance. A bigger issue might be the battery life, at least when using this keyboard to its full potential. But that’s an issue for later in the review. 

PBT keycaps 

It’s about damn time. 

I’ve complained about Razer’s insistence on cheaper ABS plastic for its keyboards for years, and been told by Razer representatives that its customers only really wanted the more premium feel of PBT on the Huntsman line. This, while offering its own PBT upgrade as a separate purchase, rang hollow to me. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

I dare say that even Razer couldn’t keep up that reasoning for the most expensive keyboard in its current lineup, no matter what branding was put on the box. The Pro upgrade comes with PBT keycaps out of the box, as it darn well should. 

The keycaps are solid and pleasant for both typing and gaming, even while offering shine-through for the RGB lighting. If you’re not a fan of the all-black look you can replace them with your own set, with only the right modifier keys being non-standard. Even then, this 75% layout is so common that you shouldn’t have trouble finding something to match. 

Screen…dangit.

The OLED screen is perhaps the most dramatic change in the Pro upgrade. It’s a 2-inch, black-and-white strip that can show you your current configuration, offer adjustments to the keyboard, and (most of the time) enhance your typing experience with a looping animation. 

Let’s get down to brass tacks: I think putting a screen on a keyboard is stupid. It adds essentially zero functionality — after all, if you’re using a computer you’re already looking at a screen. And any changes or adjustments you make on-the-fly can be communicated via an alert from paired software (Razer’s Synapse in this case) or just displayed via the keyboard’s own lighting (see the Huntsman’s adjustable actuation visualization for a good example). 

Michael Crider/Foundry

No matter how you dress it up with lighting or keycaps or other ornamentation, a keyboard is a tool you’re not supposed to be looking at while you actually use it. Doubly so if you buy a gaming keyboard, where your attention should be on the screen at 300 frames per second. And if I may bring in a collaborating voice, the PCWorld for the Deathstalker Ultimate keyboard came to a similar conclusion more than a decade ago.

All that being said…the screen on the Pro is okay. It’s not so big that it actively distracts me, and it at least has the courtesy to show me important info when I press the Fn button. I like the extra button on the side that quickly cycles through the various functions of the wheel, displayed on the screen (which is not itself touch-enabled). 

Michael Crider/Foundry

But again, the vast majority of the time it was in use, I had it looping a Pop Tart cat GIF, at the request of a coworker who shall remain nameless Alaina. The screen moves the previously much more serviceable volume wheel and control buttons to the side. 

It’s better than the Asus ROG Azoth — the wheel remains a wheel, instead of a rocker. And the mute button is nice and big, easy to press without looking. But if I had my druthers, I’d remake this keyboard without a screen, and smack every other keyboard maker until they followed suit. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

I fully admit that most of the above is my opinion. It isn’t shared by everyone. But one of the objective downsides of adding screens to wireless keyboards is battery life. And on that note…

Battery Life 

…it’s awful. But manageable, thanks to some clever choices on Razer’s part. 

The bad news is that when operating the Pro at its most bombastic, with full RGB brightness, full screen animation, and 4,000Hz polling, you’ll be lucky to get 18 hours of battery life out of it. That is astonishingly low for any keyboard. I’ve seen the battery readout drop by 10 percent in an hour. 

But even if you really love that screen, odds are that you won’t be using it in that mode very often. Because Razer built in a quick switch to an ultra-efficient power saving mode. By default it’s Fn+Escape. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

In this mode the keyboard cuts the screen and all lighting, and will go to “sleep” in a minute or so without input. Razer claims that this mode lets the keyboard last for 2,100 hours, almost three months of continuous usage. I obviously don’t have that long to test it, but it seems more than reasonable. While using the keyboard in this mode for full work days and several hours of gaming after, it could go for multiple weeks while only dropping a few percentage points. 

Featuring this mode so heavily in the promotional material, and making it so immediately accessible on the keyboard’s design, tells me that Razer knew it would be in frequent use. And I appreciate it, since wireless with no lighting and no extras is how I use keyboards anyway. The second or two it takes to wake up after I come back to the desktop is a fair trade as far as I’m concerned. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

You might feel differently if that flashy screen is something you’re really after in a keyboard. But if that’s the case, I suggest that you might as well just plug this thing in and use it in wired mode anyway. That’ll work better if you’re constantly fiddling with it in Razer Synapse. 

Software 

Before testing out this keyboard, I’d have said that Razer’s Synapse is probably the best gaming accessory “driver” software on the market. Granted, that’s damning with faint praise, but it’s a big deal for the most intense PC gamers. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

The Pro upgrade of this keyboard comes with a redesigned beta of Synapse. And it’s rough. The new version handles all the basics of keyboard programming, but I found it extremely finicky. It often failed to detect the keyboard even when directly connected via USB, and it seemed to fight me for basic programming. It took about a half-dozen tries to get a custom GIF programmed, and that’s supposed to be one of the headline features. 

All of the standard programming and settings functions are here (including a digital-only version of the contentious “Snap Tap” feature, which I’m still not a fast enough gamer to actually use). But they’ve moved around and they’re harder to find. The new version of Synapse seems at least as interested in selling me new Razer devices as it does actually running my hardware. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

Worst of all, the issues expanded beyond the keyboard. I use and love a Razer Naga Pro mouse as my all-day device, for both work and gaming. And the beta version of Synapse wiped out the settings I’d had saved for months. It also failed to connect every time I rebooted or even brought my PC back from sleep, forcing me to “reset” the mouse by cycling from to wired mode and back to wireless. Eventually I got so frustrated that I disabled the Hypershift functions I had been using and remapped the buttons to rely on local (mouse) memory only, then shut off Synapse completely. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

That’s a pretty terrible state of things, since I was previously happy to let Synapse run in the background of Windows, something I don’t often allow from gaming apps. I think there’s a good chance that Razer will improve this beta version of Synapse considerably — it’s one of the few accessory companies that really pays attention here. But at present when the beta version is the only one compatible with this new keyboard, it’s an unavoidable low point. 

Value and conclusion

The Pro version of this keyboard keeps all the good stuff from the original V4 75%. The great typing, the custom flexibility, the comfy magnetic wrist rest that’s the best in the category. And the wireless addition is great, especially if you don’t need the light show and use it in the super-efficient battery saver mode. 

Michael Crider/Foundry

But to get those goodies you have to get over a $300 asking price. And that price seems even higher when Corsair offers all of these features, minus the wrist rest and the entirely unnecessary OLED screen, for half the price with the excellent K65 Plus Wireless 75%. 

Faced with that alternative, to say nothing of the original BlackWidow V4 75% for those who don’t need wireless, I can’t recommend this keyboard at this price. It makes too many sacrifices for that screen, while adding far too few actual capabilities, to justify the expense. 

If you’re a huge Razer fan, you have money to burn, and you really need to see a black-and-white looping animation on your keyboard, go for it I suppose. Just remember that if you want to see it for more than a few seconds at a time, you’ll be plugging it in.