OCZ Alchemy Elixir Gaming Keyboard Review

Up close and Personal

When you first glimpse this keyboard your initial impression may very well be one of disbelief (and not necessarily because it’s such a long keyboard, which it is) but because of how much you get for your rather modest fiscal outlay. The first time I looked at I had to go and check to make sure this was the right model, as it is jam packed with features and actually has a very intelligent layout to its macro keys. If this keyboard was sold by just about anyone else you would know it would cost a heck of a lot more than $35. By the same token all these additional features do stretch the keyboard's size and makes it a bit on the mid to large side (the size of the Elixir is 20" by 7.87" by a fairly svelte 1.14" thick). It is not as large as some keyboards we have used in the past but just make sure you have the necessary space for it.


One interesting decision OCZ made with this keyboard is the fact that it has a little bit of a quirky layout to its keys. It is a QWERTY layout and not an oddball DVORAK (which is actually faster…once you get used to it…or so I have been told as my usual 50wpm is good enough for me) it is just the layout of some of the keys are a little different.

Examples of this quirky layout are the locations of the Delete, home, page up and page down keys. This is getting nit picky but when you are used to the more typical double row of three keys, the seemingly odd layout does take some getting used to; however once you get used to that nicely oversized delete key you will wonder how you ever got by without it! Also on the positive side, the Insert Key is way up by itself so accidentally hitting it instead of the Delete, or Home key is unlikely.


There is another small issue in the fact that the macro keys are little close to the Enter, + and – keys on the right side and awfully close to the tab, caps, shift and cntrl key on the left. Luckily, the keys are rubber coated so your fingers are unlikely to slip off them during a frag fest, BUT when you are touch typing it can be just a bit annoying to have a macro run when your pinky misses the tab key and slams into one of ‘em. Of course after a few days of use these minor issues did resolve themselves and can be considered nothing more than “teething problems” or even “learning curve issues”.


In total you get 10 macro keys each of which can be set to repeat and set intervals (also customizable). While 10 keys does not sound like much you can basically set up a custom “profile” of what those 10 keys do for any program you like. Are you hooked on WoW, Team Fortress 2 patch 99999, Half Life 2? Not a problem for this bad boy. What is also vey interesting is not only games can be assigned their own profiles. Yes, you can set up a profile for Firefox and have Left 1 macro copy the page to the clipboard, then open up word and have this self same Left 1 macro key act as Cntl+V to paste it into the a new word page. The potential for customization really is staggering and we will be looking into these options later in the review.