Review on Experience Elite Gaming with Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Keyboard: 🎮 Green Switches, Tactile & Clicky, Chroma RGB Lighting, Anti-Ghosting, Programmable Macros! by Mark Colbert

First of all, it's a very good keyboard. The action feels great and the Razer Green Switches offer great typing feedback. That's why I wanted this keyboard for great typing. not playable. It definitely works except for one bug so severe it ruins everything else. This keyboard requires Synapse 3 to work. That is, if you want to enjoy RGB lighting. Without Synapse 3, it can only switch between solid colors. When I read Synapse 3's terrible reviews before buying this keyboard, I thought the reviewers were just being dramatic. They weren't. Synapse 3 is terrible because: 1) it's a 400MB download. So, unlike Synapse 2 at 26 megabytes (which, by the way, does NOT work with this keyboard), Synapse 3 has hundreds of megabytes. Why? What does he do? 2) It's not too much of a problem once you've downloaded it, but Synapse 3 runs at least 8 different processes and consumes around 300 megabytes of RAM. The? 300 megabytes of RAM. Make keyboard light up? What else is he doing? Some say it logs keystrokes. I don't know, but it clearly does SOMETHING. I don't have a gaming console so it noticeably slows down my computer. Even if you have a powerful machine, why would you willingly give up so much RAM and process something so simple? 3) Without Synapse 3, the keyboard is just a regular keyboard. Yes, it can save macros without synapse, but it cannot save light schemes. It can only switch between spot colors. And it will do that EVERY TIME you restart your computer until Synapse 3 kicks in and tells it what to do. On my machine it takes over a minute. Everything else stops while Synapse tries to load at boot. I only have 6GB of RAM but I have an SSD hard drive. Without a synapse, it loads in less than 10 seconds. More than 2 minutes with him. 4) According to Razer Support, Synapse 3 requires Windows 10 and at least 8GB of RAM to run. This is not what this keyboard says on the box. It says Windows 7. According to Razer, that's what it takes to use it as a keyboard, but I suspect nobody just buys it as a standard dummy keyboard without the features Synapse offers. deceptive 5) As mentioned, Synapse 2 is slim and light. It also has many other downloadable profiles. None of these profiles are compatible with Synapse 3 and Synapse 2 will NOT recognize this keyboard. You're stuck with Synapse 3 (which, by the way, has been in beta for over 2 years) or nothing. If you don't believe any of this, visit the Razer site and see for yourself. You don't need this keyboard to download Synapse 3. Just download it and see what I'm talking about. I couldn't get this keyboard back to Revain fast enough. It's sad because I wanted to love it. I liked it but I couldn't handle this headache. So I got a Red Dragon keyboard with blue switches. It doesn't have any custom lighting effects, but it does have plenty of built-in options present on the keyboard itself and doesn't require any ridiculous malware (maybe spyware) to work. What I still wanted to miss, but is annoying as a typist: secondary functions are not highlighted on this keyboard. So if you're working in the dark, hopefully you'll remember where the $, %, & etc. are because of course you can't see them. Too bad this wonderfully designed hardware is completely ruined by software that someone should have purposely tried to make as shoddy as it is. All Razer had to do was make this keyboard backward compatible with Synapse 2 and everything was fine. Or make Synapse 3 something that actually works.