We’re big fans of Razer’s one-handed gaming keyboard, which gives you a compact keypad with a D-pad that’s optimized for mouse-and-keyboard gaming. For some gamers, it’s a much better alternative to using a traditional gaming keyboard, as it makes all the actions a lot easier to access. Well, the outfit just rolled out a new version in the form of the Razer Tartarus V2 Pro.
So what’s different? Well, there’s a bunch of new stuff. For instance, they updated the analog optical switches for greater actuation range, gave it a much higher polling rate, changed up the thumbstick, streamlined the wrist pad, and more, making it a potentially big update that fans of the original Pro might want to consider getting.
The Razer Tartarus V2 Pro is a small keyboard, so you’re likely to mistake it for one of those number pad keyboards when you first see it. However, punching in lines upon lines of numbers isn’t what it’s meant to do. Instead, it’s a compact gaming keyboard for folks who want a smaller keyboard peripheral during gameplay. It comes with 31 keys, all of which are programmable, so you can map out your own controls for every game. All of the keys use the second gen version of the outfit’s Analog Optical switches, which expands the actuation range from 0.1mm to 4.0mm in this iteration, allowing you to customize how fast each keypress registers.
According to Razer, the keys reset instantly as soon as they go into upward motion as low as 0.1mm. That means, you can immediately press the same key again while it’s still going up and register another keypress, allowing you to spam the same action faster than ever before. It also comes with Razer’s Snap Flex feature that lets you toggle whether to immediately trigger a secondary action as soon as a key is released or not, as well as Snap Flex, which ensures two keys are never actuated at the same time for folks with less-than-accurate key-pressing abilities.
The Razer Tartarus V2 Pro also gets a new analog thumbstick, which is now TMR, so it should offer higher precision and greater durability than the old eight-way thumbstick/D-pad as the original. It comes with three system buttons right next to the thumbstick: top one controls Razer’s Hypershift, middle one lets you cycle through different stored keyboard mappings, and last one lets you cycle through the different stored profiles. Speaking of saved settings, it lets you save up to three profiles, each with up to eight different key mappings, so you can have different settings for every game without having to switch profiles.
The wrist rest has also been improved for this iteration, which now comes in a more ergonomic shape for keeping your wrists naturally aligned to ensure effortless control. Buttons on the wrist rest make it easy to adjust its proximity, positional angle, and tilt angle, allowing you to fine tune its exact placement to your liking. Other features include an 8KHz polling rate, a default actuation rate of 2.0mm, and textured doubleshot PBT keycaps.
The Razer Tartarus V2 Pro is available now, priced at $199.99.
