Thank you ROCCAT for sending us this keyboard for review!

While my use of mechanical keyboards is a bit limited, once I was introduced to them I have started replacing keyboards at my house whenever I could find a sale. So when I was given the chance to review the Vulcan II from ROCCAT, I jumped at the chance. The ROCCAT Vulcan II is a full (meaning it has the Number Pad on the side) mechanical keyboard, and besides the number pad has a few other functions like media control and a volume knob. The RGB on it is way more pronounced than all the other keyboards I have used recently making it, in my opinion, more fun to change the light functions.

Vulcan II uses Red Mechanical Switches for the keys, giving it a very nice key clicking sound without being too loud like the Blue switches. The keyboards were tested and found that each key can be clicked an average of 80 million times before having issues, which is great especially if you like playing games or even doing anything extensively on keyboards without having to worry about fixing or changing them. The keycaps feel way more durable than most of the other keyboards I have had the pleasure of using, but the keys caps themselves are thinner which gives much more space for the RGB lighting to shine.

The media buttons have a Previous, Play/Pause, and Next button, and is really nice for listening to music. The volume knob works great; my other keyboard has a volume dial, but it doesn't work nearly as well as the ROCCAT Vulcan II's volume knob. The knob is easier to access and seems to integrate with my system better than the other ones I have tried, so definitely a major improvement. The media buttons and volume knob are also nice features especially if you are in the middle of watching streaming series, since it only shows up in a small corner of the screen, which beats using a mouse that will cause the entire overlay of the screen to appear blocking more of the video. The only thing I think where it is lacking is no fast forward or rewind buttons.

The Vulcan II RGB lights are configured using ROCCAT's Swarm App. The app lets you take advantage of programming 5 different profiles for the keyboard; each of the profiles allows you to edit not only the different types of lights you want, but also creating macros, reassigning key functions, and also how fast a held down key can repeat itself. One of my favorite RGB lighting functions is called AIMO Intelligent Lighting. It changes the colors in almost a random way, and whenever you press a key on the keyboard, the key and the keys around it light up showing which key was pressed. It also allows you to program different key combinations with different colors and it will even allow you to program the colors on individual keys if so inclined. Which brings me to another really nice function of the Vulcan II which is it has 4MB of onboard memory, so it can store 4 of the profiles locally on the keyboard itself allowing you to move the keyboard to another computer without the Swarm app and still be able to use the different profiles that you set up. There are some limitations to it though as some of the more advanced RGB lighting will only work with the Swarm app installed.