Patriot’s Second Mechanical Keyboard, The V770

In addition to a couple of new mice and a trio of new headsets, Patriot dropped in a new keyboard, as well. The V770 is designed as a slight step up from the V760, at least in terms of how many features are onboard.

For example, whereas the V760 has a simpler design, the V770 offers a vertical, left-side bank of five macro keys, a row of eight (2 x 4) lighting buttons, three mini-rollers on the upper-right side of the keyboard, and a click roller. The V760 has no such additional keys.

Both keyboards ship with removable, magnetic wrist rests, but the V770’s has a band for RGB lighting (because of course it does, in the age of RGB-everything). 

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Whereas the V760 offers USB passthrough, the V770 has both USB (left side) and audio (right side) passthrough. It’s a seemingly curious decision to split up the passthrough ports this way; typically, you see all the ports clustered. It’s particularly odd considering the USB port (where you’d connect the mouse) is all the way on the left, although if you think about it, most mouse cables can easily reach the width of a keyboard, and further, this way the USB plug isn’t sticking out into your mouse space. (However, that raises the question of why the audio ports are on the right, because they present the same problem.)

Really, the V770 is similar to the V760 except that it has many more dedicated, extra keys and has a flashier wrist rest. The V770 will also have a Kailh Red option in addition to Brown, whereas the V760 has only Brown.

The V770 that we saw at Patriot’s Computex 2016 suite looks a little rough around the edges, but that’s because it’s a prototype. Some aspects of the device will change, such as the lettering on the extra keys (currently they just reflect internal codenames)--and, in fact, the function of those keys may evolve as well. For example, they may be used to control the lighting on a connected mouse or headset.

Being a prototype, there is no set date nor price for the V770. All we know is that it’s coming in the September-October time frame. Presumably, it will cost slightly more than the V760, which is $199.99.

Update, 6/10/16, 7:50am: Fixed typo.

Seth Colaner is the News Director for Tom's Hardware. Follow him on Twitter @SethColaner. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.