SteelSeries Apex M500 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

SteelSeries Engine 3

The SteelSeries Engine 3 software is largely optional when used with the Apex M500. Nonetheless, it does expand some of the keyboard’s functionality, most notably fully customizable keybinds. SteelSeries Engine 3 is not included in the keyboard bundle and instead must be downloaded and installed from SteelSeries’ website.

The main menu consists of three tabs of which only MY GEAR and LIBRARY will be of interest since the Apex M500 does not have GameSense support.

MY GEAR displays a list of the user’s SteelSeries products and the configuration/profile each has been assigned.

With LIBRARY, the user can add applications including games so that a configuration can be bound to automatically run with the launch of that application.

Opening the settings menu for the Apex M500, we see graphic of the keyboard in the center for quickly customizing any key. To the left is a dropdown and effectively a full list of the keys and their current keybinds. To the right are other settings which are the illumination brightness, the illumination effect of which there are two steady and breathe, the polling rate, and the keyboard region for adjusting for international variations of the Apex M500.

The full range of customization for each key is impressive. The eight categories of options are keyboard buttons, macros, media buttons, mouse buttons, launch application, launch configuration, OS shortcuts, and record macro.

The Macro Editor has two interfaces. Here keypresses and delays are shown in a flow diagram allowing for macro micromanagement.

Alternatively, the text macro editor makes it much easier to dump a block of words, sentences, or even paragraphs compared to the keypress macro editor.