Mad Catz is renowned for its out-of-the-box designs for mice. These slick, customisable, skeleton-like mice make you oooh and ah whenever you look at them. But did you know they also create other gaming peripherals?
Well, considering that I’ve been labelled as the keyboard guy over at NAG HQ, the team decided that I should have a look at the Mad Catz S.T.R.I.K.E. 11 Wireless RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard.
Try to say that five times fast.
On paper, the S.T.R.I.K.E. 11 Wireless RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard is the ideal keyboard for those of us who use our monster rigs for both work and mid-work gameplay sessions. It’s a full layout board, meaning it has all the keys, including the numpad, but Mad Catz has squished out all the gaps in an attempt to make it as compact as possible.
At first, this squished layout takes a bit of getting used to, but once you know where your fingers need to be to hit all the right keys, it’s actually quite nice to not have to sacrifice a lot of the keys I use for work without the board taking up my whole desk.
It also has a nice heft to it, which I like in a keyboard. It makes it feel like good-quality components were used when the board was made in the factory. In reality, this shows as well. The keyboard doesn’t feel janky, and the keys are tight and snappy. The added metallic Mad Catz nameplate on the bottom edge also feels pretty premium. It makes me wish I could customise the nameplate with my own nickname and have it stuck on the board.
The keyboard comes standard with Mad Catz Linear Red switches, which aren’t necessarily my favourite, as I’m more of a tactile guy myself. Still, Linear key switches tend to be the preferred gaming switch due to their linear, non-invasive keypress feeling built for speed. It does make typing for work feel a bit weird, but the switches are hot-swappable, so I can always just pop in my preferred switches should I choose to. It’s worth noting that the S.T.R.I.K.E. 11 Wireless RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard only comes with these red linear switches, so if you do choose to swap them out, make sure you already have your key switches on hand. There’s also a good amount of sound dampening, so the board has a good thock, even when running linear switches. My one gripe is the stabiliser setup for the spacebar. It’s a little loose and makes the spacebar feel slightly more jiggly than most people would prefer.
Being wireless makes the S.T.R.I.K.E. 11 Wireless RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard pretty versatile, too. It comes with a 2.4GHz dongle, so you don’t lose any keypresses when in intense gaming modes, and it supports Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity for when you want to take it into the office for your standard Excel Spreadsheeting or whatever you do at work. The battery lasts around 30 hours, which felt pretty close to the amount of time I had before I had to plug it in via USB-C.
While I’m not a fan of how the software looks (it just reminds me of late 2000s AMD software), it’s functionally spot on. It allows for full RGB customisation, macros, and other features you’d see in keyboard software, like battery percentage, sleep timers, and more.
For gaming, the full NKRO (or N-Key Roll Over) and 100% anti-ghosting mean I can face-roll my way to every League of Legends defeat without having my keyboard to blame, even if it’s definitely the tools at fault and not the actual gamer.
Overall, you can colour me impressed with the Mad Catz S.T.R.I.K.E. 11 Wireless RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard. It’s a solid keyboard with every feature I could want in a wireless gaming keyboard, plus it has all the extra keys I use for work. While the software could use a bit of a polish, and I might make a few changes to the switches and stabilisers myself, for R2,500, you’ll be picking up a pretty premium product that will have you gaming for hours on end, and then slipping straight back into work when your boss walks in.