Logitech G512 X 98 Review: A Hybrid Mish-Mash

We all remember the toys that tried to do too much. The RC car with flashing lights, wailing sirens, flip-out weapons, and a spring-loaded rocket launcher—you know the one. That’s how the Logitech G512 X feels to me.

This gaming keyboard tries to cram in so many features, and nearly all of them feel a bit half-baked. The number of features gets in the way of the overall design. It’s a mechanical keyboard, with optional analog switches, and the switches also have rings that make them tactile, and the keyboard has built-in tools to swap out your switches on the fly, and the switches are held in a little case on the back of the keyboard.

I can appreciate that this keyboard is attempting solve a problem that plagues analog keyboards, but, its solution ends up creating just as many new problems.

The Logitech G512 X 98 isn't a standard gaming keyboard. It's a very pretty, stylish keyboard in its own right, with options for white or black with blue accents—but what makes it unique is all under the hood. As Logitech puts it, the idea here is to keep the speed of analog switches with the feel of mechanical switches. The largest limitation of analog switches, as seen in Hall Effect keyboards, is that they are almost always linear, meaning there's no tactile bump to tell you when a key has triggered. Because the actuation distance of an analog switch can be freely adjusted, simply having a static tactile bump can create a mismatch between the “feeling” of an input and the actual input. Inaccuracy defeats the whole point of a keyboard like this.

Logitech’s solution is a hybrid keyboard: Every key has the physical hot-swap socket to accept a mechanical switch, while some also have the sensor for an analog switch. Rather than a Hall Effect analog switch, Logitech is using Tunneling Magnetoresistance (TMR) switches, which use magnets to achieve even higher precision. This means, for any of the dual-purpose keys, you can freely swap between a non-customizable mechanical switch with tactile feedback, and a customizable analog switch without tactile feedback.

But that's not all. If you also want your TMR switches to also have a tactile response, there’s a solution for that, too: The G512 X 98 also includes a handful of small rubber rings that go between the keycap and the switch to create a faux tactile bump. When you install this ring and press a key, the keyboard (in theory) detects them and automatically adjusts the actuation point of the switch to match. This can be used to create two distinct inputs with one switch: One before the ring, and the second after it.