Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO Gaming Keyboard Review

When the style and functionality combined! With the Vulcan 120 AIMO, the peripheral manufacturer Roccat surprises with an exciting concept and presents a keyboard that combines a completely new look with extensive functionality.

Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO Review

The extraordinary design raises the lighting in particular to a completely new level for player keyboards. In the long-term test, we can also determine very good stability, easy maintenance and consistent performance.

The bottom line is that we can recommend the Vulcan 120 without restrictions, provided you are willing to invest a whopping 160 euros in a keyboard.

Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO in a practical test: stable and functional

The Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO costs almost 160 euros and that’s a tough announcement even for a gaming keyboard from a well-known manufacturer. Reason enough for us to take a closer look at the luxury board.

We worked, played and put it through its paces almost every day for a total of two months. To start with, a few words about optics: The Vulcan 120 AIMO can hardly be compared with the usual player keyboards.

Because instead of letting the individual buttons into the housing as usual, they protrude completely, including the push mechanism. Below is just a very pretty electronics cover in brushed aluminum.

There is also a separate palm rest that is very loosely docked to the keyboard. On the one hand, this ensures that there are no fragile elements, on the other hand, it only takes a little vertical movement and the pad comes off. But if you don’t lift the keyboard permanently, you shouldn’t have any problems with it.

Roccats Vulcan 120 is a mechanical keyboard. In this respect, each key has its own trigger mechanism. In contrast to the classic (and usually significantly cheaper) rubber dome technology, in which a rubberized mat under the keys ensures the transmission of signals, the Vulcan 120 feels like a typewriter in the broadest sense. Roccat relies on in-house development for the switches of the individual buttons.

Instead of simply licensing Cherry switches like many other manufacturers, the company installs so-called titanium switches, which are developed in cooperation with TTC.

It is interesting that Roccat basically strikes a middle ground between normal keyboard keys and the chiclet keys known from notebooks and reduces the keycaps to half the height. This allows the underlying RGB lighting to emit a lot of light, as there are hardly any blockages. In short, with the right settings, you can seriously turn the keyboard into blinking Christmas lights.

Roccat Vulcan 120 AIMO Review: Great feel

The Roccat keyboard has proven itself in practice. In general, we can take a lot of positive things out of the pleasantly soft pressure point. Writing is easy because we hardly have to use any force to trigger the mechanism. Even after half an hour of typing, our fingers never get tired.

On the other hand, the accidental triggering of individual keys is also limited. In this respect, the chosen pressure point is ideal for the way we work and play. The only exception to this is the space bar. This seems a bit loose and too unstable to us.

Those who tend to keep their thumbs on the space bar (for example when thinking) can easily trigger it accidentally. We like the inconspicuous special keys and also because Roccat does without a lot, which would just stretch the keyboard even further.

At the top right, directly below the Roccat logo, we find an excellently processed and very practical controller that adjusts the profiles for audio volume and lighting. If you want, you can also set the volume completely to zero at the push of a button.

Finally, we would like to say a few words about the software: The Vulcan 120 supports Roccat’s Swarm app. The PC software allows extensive configuration of the individual keyboard features, such as the lighting.

Roccat allows numerous predefined profiles that range from monochrome lighting along the RGB scale to pulsating color waves. It works so that you can also set each key individually.

If you also have other supported Roccat hardware such as a gaming mouse, you can synchronize the lighting and save all settings in a profile afterwards so that you can keep them for later.

The auto-update features are also useful for the software itself, but also for the firmware or the keyboard driver. One click is enough to get the latest improvements. We like the look of the Swarm surface because it is very clearly designed.

Vulcan 120 AIMO Pros:

• Excellent workmanship
• Large range of functions
• Subjectively pretty optics
• Good driver software (Windows)

Vulcan 120 AIMO Cons:

• Fairly high price point
• Susceptible to dust & dirt