Gravastar Mercury V75 Pro

Introduction

The Gravastar Mercury V75 Pro adds the potency of the top gaming keyboards into the brand’s signature style.

Its chassis and feel bear a lot of resemblance to the Mercury K1 Pro model I looked at earlier this year, keeping with Gravastar’s left-field design philosophy. With this new model, though, we’ve got the powers of an 8000Hz polling rate and hall-effect switches with rapid trigger to put it against some of the best gaming keyboards out there.

A price tag of £229.95 / $239.95 also puts it up there as one of the dearest options in its class, going toe-to-toe with established players such as the Wooting 60HE+, Asus ROG Falchion Ace HFX and SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini Gen 3.

I’ve been putting the Mercury V75 Pro through its paces for the last couple of weeks to see if it can take the crown against some serious competition.

Design

• Space-age design
• Immensely sturdy and well-appointed
• Convenient interface and layout

The Mercury V75 Pro carries a similar look to the Mercury K1 Pro, with its sci-fi-inspired look that makes it seem like it’s from a Men in Black film. It’s quite divisive, with varying folks I’ve shown it to either digging it, or wishing I put it away immediately.

I generally like the way this Gravastar keyboard looks, especially with its range of curved lines and the illuminated spider-type legs that return at the back to act as adjustable feet.

With the Urban Graffiti variant I have, it adds even more pops of colour to the keyboard, both across the chassis itself and the ‘pudding’ style PBT keycaps with a range of bright hues if you want it.

As with the Mercury K1 Pro, this Hall-effect variant also has a predominantly aluminium alloy chassis to give it a durable feel. Tipping the scales at 1.09kg gives it plenty of heft, too, while the presence of PBT keycaps gives it an enthusiast-grade feel.

The 75 percent layout also helps the Mercury V75 Pro have more enthusiast-grade credentials to provide you with a function row, single column nav cluster and arrow keys for lots of functionality while retaining desk space for big, sweeping mouse movements.

The top right houses a tactile metal rocker for volume and mute controls, while you’ll find a small display above the right arrow key that displays the Gravastar logo. It doesn’t seem that the display is programmable for anything else, though.

The interface around the back of the Mercury V75 Pro is interesting, with a central USB-C port for connectivity, which is flanked by two switches – one is for choosing an operating system between Windows and macOS and the other for toggling the keyboard in ‘Office’ or ‘Rapid Trigger’ modes. Very handy for when you want to switch between work and play profiles without having to use a shortcut or delve into software.

Performance

• Fast Hall-effect switches
• 8000Hz polling rate
• Strictly connectivity

It’s inside where the Mercury V75 Pro differs from its typically mechanical brother through its use of magnetic switches. To be specific, they’re Gateron Jade Magnetic HE switches that, as seen in other Hall-effect switch keyboards, give them more in the way of customisation and configurability than more standard mechanical switches that lack the means of adjustable actuation points.

The benefit of Hall-effect switches is thus; with there being adjustable actuation points, you can change how far up or down the travel you want an input to be registered. For where you need speed and responsiveness, such as for movement controls or a reload in FPS games, you can set it to high. Conversely, if you want to avoid pressing a key, you can set it as low down the travel as possible to avoid potential mis-hits.

That’s just one part of the story, though, as the Mercury V75 Pro also has rapid trigger functionality. With this, you can adjust the actuation and reset point of the switch for immensely responsive inputs, as there isn’t any need to wait for the switch to bounce back up before you can register another input. For instances such as directional movement and reload in Counter-Strike 2, in my testing, it makes this keyboard especially fast and responsive.

As much as the Gateron Jade Magnetic HE switches inside are rather potent, their rapid trigger powers are their limit, where this keyboard is lacking in the controller-like accuracy that you can get with the Wooting 60HE+’s analogue powers, for instance.

In taking all the magnetic and rapid trigger powers away for a second, the switches inside the Mercury V75 Pro genuinely feel pleasant to type on, with a light and linear keypress that’s helped along with their lubrication for a smoother finish. This keyboard also has several layers of sound dampening inside which, alongside the lubrication of the switches, goes some way in creating a pleasant sound profile without any case rattle or ping.

This keyboard benefits from an 8000Hz polling rate for even more frequent reporting of inputs than more ‘standard’ gaming keyboards that have a 1000Hz polling rate, to allow for potentially even faster and more responsive inputs. It may not be something that mere mortals can experience, but for the pro players, where every millisecond counts, it can make a world of difference, especially when paired with those rapid trigger switches.

The Mercury V75 Pro has strictly connectivity with its bundled USB-C cable. While this may make it a little inflexible against comparably priced wireless options, it demonstrates how much Gravastar has focused on this keyboard’s speed and power as opposed to its versatility.

Software and Lighting

• Vibrant RGB lighting
• Clever software trickery

Thanks in part to both its pudding-style keycaps and the method by which light can emit around the sides and back of the keyboard, it should come as no surprise to see that the Mercury V75 Pro has slick and bright RGB lighting that works a charm. It provides oodles of colour that works well with the vibrant look of the board itself.

It appears that Gravastar has learnt a lesson from the Mercury K1 Pro when it comes to software, though, as that’s a lot more feature-rich with this keyboard. Being web-based means it’s lightweight and easy to use, and you can also do a lot with it.

With it, you have a method of remapping keys on up to three layers and configuring per-key actuation points for rapid trigger powers, while you can set dead zones and polling rate in more advanced menus.

The RGB lighting is fully addressable, too, and you can bind keys with more ‘advanced’ software tricks such as SOCD for unnaturally quick side-to-side movement or DKS (or dynamic keystroke), so multiple inputs can be mapped to levels on a switch’s travel. There is a lot to do here if you want to delve.

Should you buy it?

FAQs