Logitech Pro X 60 LIGHTSPEED

My son’s on the Esports team for high school and while they don’t travel a lot, they’ve been killing it at the end of the season and going to the regional and state finals. When you go to these things, you’re allowed to bring your own equipment of course, such as headsets, mice, and keyboards. There’s been a few Esports accessories from Logitech, but they hadn’t released a 60% keyboard until now.

Meet the Logitech Pro X 60 LIGHTSPEED, Logitech’s first 60% gaming keyboard. We’re talking a width of 10.3 cm with a height of 29cm and a depth of 3.9cm. The last small keyboard I reviewed from Logitech was G410 many years ago, but it had a set of arrow keys and the nine keys above that. With the Pro X 60 LIGHTSPEED, all you have is the main keyboard itself; no numpad, arrow keys, home, page up, page down, etc. Logitech worked on this keyboard for 18 months consulting over 60 pro players going through over 30 different prototypes to get where they are with the Pro X 60. This is a very compact Esports keyboard that offers performance in a very small package.

The Logitech Pro X 60 LIGHTSPEED features Logitech’s GX Optical switches that utilize the disruption of light rather than a physical contact to activate a switch. There are two flavors of these switches that will be available for the Pro X 60. You can choose a tactile switch which gives a small subtle feedback when pressed or a linear switch which delivers one smooth motion on a press. Logitech provided one with linear switches for this review.

This is my first time using Logitech GX Optical switches on a keyboard and I have to say I’m a fan of the linear switches. The actuation is very smooth and doesn’t take too much pressure to press down. Logitech states that the actuation point is at 1.8mm and you need 50g of force to achieve this with a total travel distance of 4.0mm. Logitech has also stated that they have tested these switches with upwards of 50 million key presses so you can be confident that these keys should last a long time. The sound of the press is very satisfying and not too loud. As one who enjoys mechanical keys, the linear optical switches of the Pro X 60 feel great and I didn’t notice any missed presses or multiple presses when using it in games or typing normally.

And I’m sure people will be wondering, you technically could replace the switches, but it’s not supported. Logitech said as long as you get the same type of optical switch, you can swap it out, but if you’re going to purchase this keyboard, know that swapping out switches isn’t an official feature that this keyboard supports.

The keys and internals are housed in a combination of aluminum frame that’s surrounded by a plastic shell. The plastic has a smooth finish to it and feels pretty premium. With the aluminum internals, it has a really solid feel to it and no flex. Not that there’s many places to put my hands on to try and bend the keyboard, but picking it up you can tell the construction is pretty high quality.

Each key is individually lit allowing you to see the keys more easily. You can utilize LIGHTSYNC RGB Lighting to synchronize with any other Logitech RGB products you have or create an effect just for the keyboard itself. When you get it out of the box, it will light up blue when you turn it on and that’s by design. Logitech surveyed Esports players and they prefer a non-distracting effect and a solid blue was chosen as the most non-distracting color. The lighting on each key is bright and glows with a nice luminance of color. The color is pretty consistent for the most part with just a few keys that have long text like Shift and Caps having small parts on either side not being lit. It’s a minor nitpick and overall, I found the lighting to be solid.

On the left side is a nice volume dial that feels buttery smooth when turning and can be easily reached with your pinky. During a meeting about the Pro X 60, Logitech said they wanted to place the dial there where it’s easily accessible so that gamers can quickly adjust the volume whether they need to turn it down to hear what’s around them or turn it up to be immersed into the game. I do enjoy the location and feel of the dial and found it to be well positioned and responsive when adjusting the volume. In my testing, my windows volume adjusted in steps of 2 from 0 to 100 and vice versa allowing it to easily change in small increments as well as quickly adjust to a larger value with just a few flicks of the pinky finger.

On the right side of the keyboard sits a nice hardware switch to turn on or off the gaming mode. In this mode, keys like the Windows key and the Menu key are disabled so you don’t press them accidentally while gaming. It does take a little effort to slide the switch from one side to the other and Logitech deliberately made it this way so you wouldn’t easily and accidentally switch it when you didn’t want to. The switch is also recessed a little bit to help prevent accidental adjustments and it’s small touches like these that show Logitech is really trying to design a keyboard with gamers in mind.

While you can lay the keyboard flat with a 4.5 degree incline, there are two small extendable feet that will tilt the keyboard up just a tad. You’ll add an additional 3.5 degrees making it a total of 8 degrees of incline, which is the range of most keyboards researched. There is no wrist rest here, so you’ll have to go with a third party solution should you want something under your palm/wrist area.

The Pro X 60 allows you to wirelessly connect the computer in two modes: 2.4GHz LIGHTSPEED wireless or Bluetooth. That means you can connect this keyboard to multiple devices using different connections. There are two buttons on the front of the keyboard to let you switch between the connection types. If you’re going to be gaming, you’ll want to use the included dongle to connect to your PC at LIGHTSPEED. It’s made for gaming with virtually the lowest latency possible and is made to work in environments where there’s a lot of interference. While I can’t test this claim at home, I am lucky enough to be attending a state finals for Esports this coming weekend so I’m going to bring this along to see how well it performs and if I find anything out of the ordinary, I’ll be sure to update this review.

For a wireless gaming keyboard, I tend not to put much weight on range, but Logitech says you can go about 10 meters or around 32 feet with the Pro X 60. Just as a quick test, I stood across the room and typed which was about 20 feet and I was able to accurately type on the keyboard without any issues. Seeing as most home setups have the PC near them, the keyboard’s range is probably not something that people will consider when picking one up, but it’s good to know that it should be pretty good wherever your PC is in the room.

You’re going to get about 2 and three quarters days worth of charge giving you plenty of time to play between charging it. That’s with everything on, such as the RGB. Turning that off will net you even more gaming time. Connection to a charging source is done with a USB-C cable and the one included with the Pro X 60 has a nice length to it, six feet to be exact. If you’re completely dead and want to use the keyboard, connecting the keyboard with a USB-C cable will also allow you to use it wired so you’re not going to be completely down should the battery be at 0%. Speaking of the battery, it’s not user replaceable, but Logitech says it should last about 10 years of regular charging.

The Pro X 60 feels solid and has great feeling keys, but what really sets the keyboard apart from others is the software. Logitech has produced a UI that really lets you customize the Pro X 60 and by that I mean you can set what they call layers, of which there are three. Each layer can be accessed differently.

The base layer is just your normal everyday keyboard. A second layer, the FN layer, is accessed only when the function key is pressed. And finally, there is the G-Shift Layer, which is accessed when holding down an assigned G-Shift button. For my test, I tied one of the many mouse buttons to the G-Shift function and used that to access this layer on the Pro X 60.

Now, with each assignable key, and there are a few ones in certain situations where you can’t change it, you can assign up to five functions to the key. You practically have the entire keyboard to customize and you can do a combination of key presses to activate the assigned function such as pressing Alt, Control, or Shift for example. There’s also events such as holding down, pressing, or releasing a button or combination of buttons as well. With all that combined, you have a humongous amount of possibilities in tailoring the keyboard to your liking.

Since the keyboard is lacking arrow keys, I decided to use the G-Layer and map the WASD keys to the arrow keys. Using the software was pretty easy and intuitive. As I stated earlier, I mapped one of my extra mouse buttons as the G-Shift button and within a few minutes on my first try, I am able to just hold down the mouse button and press A to send a left arrow command, W for an up arrow, D for a right arrow, and S for a down arrow. So even though there’s no arrow key area, I was quickly able to set one up using the Logitech G-Hub software and the Pro X 60’s ability to map the keys of my choice.

Of course you can do more than just keys as there are actions, commands, and various system functionalities to also remap to. If you need something even more intricate, macros are also supported so a string of keys could be assigned to just one key event. For example, if you want to easily call in a stratagem in Helldivers 2 without having to go through the arrow key combination, you’ll be able to program one of the many keys to do this automatically. The Pro X 60 is not only about quality feel, but about customizability as well and Logitech has done a great job in giving the users the ability to just make the keyboard work exactly how they want it to work.

If you plan on traveling a lot with the keyboard, Logitech includes a very nice semi hard carrying case with the room to not only hold the keyboard, but the USB cable and USB dongle as well. Oh, you can also place the USB dongle in a cubby on the underside of the keyboard to stow it away.

The Logitech Pro X 60 will retail for $179.99 and come in pink, black or white. It’s a great feeling Esport keyboard with a ton of customization options and solid wireless performance along with great battery life. We’ll see how well it works in a busy environment this weekend, but if it’s like recent Logitech products that I’ve experienced at these events, it should have no problems.