Asus ROG Falcata review: A discrete gaming keyboard

The wheel on the left side has options to adjust trigger distance, quick trigger sensitivity, and RGB brightness. You can also adjust volume, media playback, and turn it into a scroll wheel. The LED matrix below is designed to display adjustments to the operating distance but looks a bit strange: each 0.1mm adjustment fills its own bar, and only uses the bottom nine bars, so the screen will roll over Four times When adjusting (the top three bars light up, with dots next to them, to show the number of times the screen flipped during adjustment). The saving grace of this is that when you adjust the actuation distance, you can press down on any key to see a visualization of how far you have pressed it, and then adjust the actuation distance to match.

Besides all this, Falcata (and by extension, The Falchians) now has an aftermarket swap option: TTC gold magnetic keys. Although this is still only two switches, it represents an improvement over the single switch option of most Hall effect keyboards.

Split apart

Photo: Henry Robbins

The internal assembly of this keyboard is straightforward and interesting. Instead of a standard tray mount, where the PCB and board are mounted directly to the bottom half of the enclosure, the Falcata is more comparable to a bottom mount. The PCB is screwed into the board from the bottom, and the board is screwed into the bottom half of the case along the edges. Although the difference between the two mounting methods is minimal, it improves the typing experience by removing the “dead zones” caused by a column in the middle of the keyboard, along with isolating typing slightly from the case (creating less vibration when typing).

The top and bottom halves can be easily separated by removing the screws on the panel (no breakable plastic clips here!) Once that’s done, the internal silicone sound deadener can easily be removed. However, the foam wetting material stuck strongly enough that removing it left pieces of foam stuck to the PCB, making it impossible to read without new adhesive. This wasn’t a big issue, as the foam can simply be placed in the keyboard, but it’s still frustrating to know when most manufacturers figured this out.