Rosewill RK-9100 Illuminated Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

Illumination Modes & Brightness

The Rosewill RK9100 Illuminated Mechanical Keyboard comes with three lighting modes that can be toggled through by pressing the Fn + F9 keys. The first mode has the keyboard entirely backlit. The second mode is a gaming mode that has just the directional keys most used for gaming backlit and the mode also disables the Windows and Application buttons. This is great as there is nothing worse than hitting the windows key on accident when you are in the middle of a game! The third and final mode disables the number pad back lighting. We often used mode 1 and mode 2, but never really used mode 3 at all.
Having the ability to turn off the number pad is nice to have, but why
would you want that mode?

When turning on the PC or when the PC wakes up from sleep mode, the keyboard illumination defaults to mode 1 and 100% brightness, but you can lower the brightness by pressing Fn + F11 or increase it by pressing Fn + F12. You can also totally disable the illumination by pressing Fn + F10. Our only complaint with the Rosewill RK-9100 keyboard at this time is that the Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock keys are not configurable. They are also a different color (green) and have a slit in them that lets off more light. This wouldn’t be a big deal, but these keys are set to full brightness and there is no way to adjust that.

Here is a look at the number pad area with the RK-9100 in mode 1 and all the keys are being backlit. The Num Lock function is turned off.

With Num Lock enabled you can see how bright it is and it is can be overwhelming in a pitch black room. You can remove these three keys and fix this issue yourself if it really bothered you. You can put black electrical tape paint, or anything that can reduce the amount of light coming out the key.

These green keys are so freaking bright that we thought Rosewill had put an LED on the top and bottom of the switch! In order to find out we pulled off the key and it turns out that Rosewill put the LED on the bottom instead of the top. Actually, it looks like they just rotated the switch 180 degrees. This means that the LED is right in front of the laser etched window and is the reason why it is so bright! If they would have kept the LED on top it wouldn’t have been as bright. They really don’t even need the front light slot as the LED’s are a different color and stand out enough thanks to that.