Razer Huntsman V3 Pro 8KHz Review: A Keyboard for the Competitive

The screen on the right side is convenient and practical. I like the gimmick of the actuation visualizer, which is a little line of dots that lights up from left to right when you press a key. This can help determine and set an ideal actuation distance, but beyond that it’s almost entirely cosmetic. The rest of the indicators on the keyboard are nice, but they’re disappointing compared to the full OLED displays that many gaming keyboards have today.

The rarely used key group above the arrow keys now has a secondary purpose, where each of them can be used with the Function layer to select one of five preset profiles. Four of them are customizable, but the first, called “Factory Default”, apparently works as a fail-safe in case you royally mess up another profile card (like remapping your spacebar to your controller’s “A” button – something the software warns you against if you try).

On these profiles you can make all the standard Hall effect adjustments. Each key’s individual actuation distance can be adjusted, Rapid Trigger lets you customize the key’s reset point (so you can immediately press the key again instead of waiting for it to return past the initial actuation point), and Razer’s SOCD (Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Direction) setting, called Snap Tap, works like any other, allowing one key to replace another for a quick strafing.

Photography: Henri Robbins

Synapse also allows for more careful customizations, with adjustments for changing dead zones, rapid trigger sensitivity, and “Continuous Rapid Trigger”, which keeps the Rapid Trigger active above the default actuation point until a key is completely released.

During my use of this keyboard, I had a lot of trouble with the RGB lighting. It would regularly stop working during use, requiring me to unplug the keyboard to reset something internally. At one point, the main RGB layer stopped lighting completely, with only the OLED screen and the lit function layer (showing which keys have functionality when Fn is pressed) retaining their lighting. The strangest part was that the RGB lighting reverted to default settings when my computer was locked, indicating some sort of problem with the Synapse software. Ultimately, after quite a bit of troubleshooting, I had to completely uninstall and reinstall Synapse and Chroma to get it working again.