SteelSeries Apex 3 Reddit Verdict: Office Hero or Gaming Pretender?

This is a membrane keyboard if anyone is wondering.

I think the "Quiet Switch" is intentionally deceptive on their part.

The keyboard is membrane trash.

My bad, was not aware. I guess that makes sense why it is water resistant.

I had one of these back around 2021 or so, and several keys stopped working in a very short time of normal use. I'd pass on this one.

So close to buying one for my work. Thought it was mechanical :(

Go on amazon, search mech keyboard, set a price max of $30 or $25, there are tons of options.

you can get pretty decent budget mechanical keyboard for like $25-$30 these days, i dont know why anyone would buy this unless your budget is super tight

Oops. Still bought one.

Such a good price. But hard pass on membrane keyboards.

I have that keyboard. OpenRGB works. Volume knob works. The RGB setting doesn't get saved anywhere so you have to wait for the openRGB to load your profile on boot and every minor disconnect will reset your RGB and you have to reload the profile.

interesting, i was considering replacing my 8 yo corsair with cherry mx switches. guess ill keep using this.

i have it and i'd say it's pretty good for the price. solid quality and no real issues with it

This makes a killer office keyboard

Its a decent backup keyboard.

Yup it's what I use. Love having matching size/layout as home for cheap.

Old thread but just came to say that membrane keyboards are completely suitable for any and all kinds of games. Keyboards are the least important part of your gaming setup.

Open RGB or Signal RGB are both good alternatives to Razer synapse to control case RGB and it uses a max of 5% of my cpu if even usually hovering around the sub 1% mark. It is able to control keyboard rgb.

I went from cherry mx reds to this, had the same corsair k70 for over 10 yrs until this passed Christmas when my lovely gf got me an upgrade. I've only had it for a few days now but I'm absolutely in love, didn't take long to get used to linear switches, you can change the actuation point to something more close to what your used to and it feels like an absolute dream, I haven't looked back once.

late reply, but it is one of the better membrane keyboards especially as a TKL with a volume knob.

I bought one for my kids PC and was very surprised at how good it felt. Not as good as my mechanical kb but very nice for the money.

IIRC the lighting requires steelseries-gg program to work. No software, no lighting. The software is pretty bloaty, I upgraded keyboards because of it. I quite liked the keyboard though.

Not only that but as far as membrane keyboards the APEX 3 and APEX 3 TKL are awesome. I have had plenty of expensive mechanicals.. I wanted to retrain my touch typing and all mechanicals were too loud at night time. On top of that I was doing recording and they were too loud/annoying for that too. I switched to the APEX 3 style of membrane and haven't looked back. Nice and quiet too.

Short answer: no. For fps games a membrane keyboard is not what you are looking for, if we talk competitive as just competitive games a mechanical keyboard will do the work way better than a membrane.

Return it. Get a decent keyboard.

My overall point is that it fails at even basic functionality: Periodically, keys stop working until it's re-plugged in, even $2 keyboards don't have this problem. I can't remap the macro key to a default context-menu key, this is a stupid software limitation.

I wanted a matching keyboard so I got a steel series apex 3 and rival 710 mouse. The left side of the keyboard doesn't work. I've tried everything and there is literally no solution on the Internet.

I found your post after buying one myself just today and just wanted to give a thumbs up to your review. First impressions: I've never seen a keyboard take longer to start responding. Plugged it in and it took 10 minutes to finally recognize device and respond.

Damn that sucks, I definitely will make sure that there's an onboard option next time I'm buying an RGB keyboard

After owning one for several weeks now, if a friend asked me about getting one, I would suggest they think about another keyboard if wireless is important to them. The keyboard is nice to type on and play games with when it's working, even if the software is a little janky, but the wireless experience has been a disappointment.

Not sure about the gen 3 but I had 2 Apex Pro TKL wireless and will never buy steel series again. The 1st one started ghost typing after 3 weeks, the second one did the same after 4 months.

Had my tkl wireless version a few days and honestly I say push the button and get one! Initially wanted a wooting but didn't want to wait ages as my g915 finally gave up so looked into the alternatives and landed on the gen 3. It's perfect apart from the software lol but once you've managed to set it up your good to go

I love it alot. It is a dream to type on.

Bought it, I cant even see behind me. Love it

I got the Apex pro Gen3 and only had it now 4.5 weeks and tonight it just randomly started typing the Number 1 as in properly spamming the key 1 opening random windows like Copilot as well, it basically made my pc go haywire. I had to reboot my pc to solve it, but i don't know if this is going to happen again. Keyboard overall i really do like the feel of the typing, but for sure if this is only going to last this amount of time-It's goodbye steelseries.

The sound this keyboard is producing is actually quite beautiful.

My budget got screwed and it looks like a good way to get something that isn't as terrible as the one I already have without spending so much that I can't save for the one I actually planned on getting later down the road

lots of people have this issues, i think this is not a problem, steelseries says this keyboard has gaming class ghosting, apex 3 and 5 users says that's why some buttons not working when we clicked with 2-3 buttons, but wasd shift caps f g etc. they working btw.

This is not correct. It has a few modes builtin that require no software at all. It can also be controlled with OpenRGB, though I'm not sure it supports as many fancy modes as the official software.

Dude, it's like a 40 dollar keyboard, it's for kids who want pretty lights and click clak noises. Let's kool it on the whole "fake expert" ego u got going on. It's seriously annoying people will try to find a keyboard or other accessory like this and judge it like it's a 300 dollar keyboard.

With silent/quiet typing like this one has (quiet-ish in the case of the Apex 3)? Why would "i want/need a silent keyboard" be a bad thing?