Cooler Master Octane M35 and MB7C review

1. Octane2. Unboxing3. Cooler Master Octane M35 Mouse4. Cooler Master Octane MB7C Keyboard5. Testing6. Final Thoughts7. View All Pages

The keyboard that the Cooler Master Octane kit comes with – called the far less catchy, MB7C – is again, quite a typical looking gamer keyboard, with some chunky plastic protrusions along the side, an oversized space bar and a matt black colour theme.

 

The keys also have the usual concave shape to make them more comfortable to rest your finger tips on and the lettering is translucent plastic to allow the backlighting to shine through.

This is a membrane board, so when you pop the keys off you get that familiar off white sight. However, unlike a lot of membranes this board takes some inspiration from mechanical designs and isolates each of the keys with a plastic surround.

That should give excellent protection against spills and other dirt that could otherwise build up under the keys and affect the keyboard's performance.

 
Additional functions on this board come by way of the FN key, located between the right alt and control, and it gives you the ability to adjust things like the keyboard's repeat rate, by pressing FN+Q, or the brightness of the backlighting, with Page Up and Page Down.

Changing the backlighting colour is achieved by pressing its dedicated button, located just next to the function key (for backlighting images, skip to the next page).

There are no dedicated macro keys on this board – nor software to program them – but there are some dedicated media keys. Above the F1-4 keys are stop, play/pause and skip forward and back buttons, whilst over on the right near the Lock indicators are two volume switches.

Other than the oversized spacebar and the grilled edges of the board, the only real aesthetic feature is the wrist rest, which has an Octane logo and some embossed styling.

The underside of the Octane MB7C is a textured plastic and has rubber feet at each of the corners to aid in grip.

However, the two rear mounted grips no longer touch the desk when you flip out the little stands in the corners to help elevate the board. Hopefully that will not impact the board's grip on the desktop too much.

Like the Octane mouse, the MB7C's cable is rubberised with a nickel plated USB 2.0 header.

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