Corsair Galleon 100 SD review

The best mechanical gaming keyboards are often those that offer a kind of purity. They have a focus, and that’s to provide the perfect interstitial layer between game and player, offering as little friction as possible so that your keypresses are swift and smooth.

Corsair has taken the mechanical keyboard—basically a metal frame full of switches plus some way of connecting it to a computer—and complicated it in the Galleon 100 SD. This mechanical keyboard has had a 12-key Stream Deck (and it’s important to notice that ‘r’—it’s Stream Deck and not Steam Deck) welded to its right-hand side.

It’s an expensive and specialised device that’s probably not going to find its way onto too many desktops, but it does have applications with applications that aren’t streaming applications. Do you need one? Probably not, but it’s fun to muck about with all the same.

The software does its best but is a bit fiddly. The Galleon shows up in Windows Settings as two different keyboards, and the bit that’s not a Stream Deck—looking rather like a K70 Core that’s received a cybernetic implant—is controlled by Corsair’s Web Hub rather than iCUE (the latter app wouldn’t recognise it).

Here you can choose colour layers, pick the polling speed (up to 8,000 Hz) and update the firmware. At one point, when switching between polling rates, the keyboard lost its connection to Web Hub and stopped working altogether until it was unplugged and reattached.

While I was testing, the keyboard was still only available for preorder, so it’s possible a launch-day firmware update will iron out any glitches.

There's full-key rollover and Corsair’s FlashTap SOCD, just like its high-end gaming keyboards, too.

The Elgato bit is configured using the Stream Deck app and that involves hours of messing about while you install plugins and assign them to buttons. The app is clever enough to nudge you to install missing plugins, but the installation process itself can be a little iffy: lots of plugins required two attempts, some as many as three.

Once they’re installed, you’ll need to choose exactly what they do and can customise the icon that appears on the Stream Deck key, along with its label. System monitoring plugins will display CPU usage, free RAM and, if you set up and connect to a local web server via Libre Hardware Monitor, things like CPU temperature and fan speeds.

You can also use it as a numpad, with pages for all the mathematical functions you could need. This ties in nicely with a Microsoft Excel plugin, and you’ll find them for other non-gaming apps too, such as Photoshop, though not the other Creative Cloud apps—a Premiere Pro one would have been nice. There's even a flight tracker.

The two rotary dials can be similarly fiddled with, from simple volume and brightness controls to switching between pages of deck shortcuts, and they both click in, acting as buttons. There's a (non-touch-sensitive, though we’re all so conditioned to tap and swipe these days that you’ll certainly try to use it that way at least once) LCD screen below the dials, offering information such as the weather or volume levels, as well as tying in with the dials. It’s a comprehensive package that can be tailored to a wide variety of uses.

But it’s gaming and streaming that are the natural home of the Stream Deck, and so you’ll find control plugins for OBS Studio, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Voicemod, various video calling apps, Rode microphones, smart home ecosystems and so much more. Elgato has been making Stream Decks for long enough now to have a broad and established software base, and once a plugin is installed it all seems stable enough, with simple dropdown menus to choose functionality.

The only problem is how many of them there are, and the amount of time it will take to wade through them all. You really only need the ones that support the software and hardware you’re using regularly.

The keyboard itself is up to Corsair’s usual standards—the hot-swappable MLX Pulse switches are five-pin, long pole, pre-lubricated models with an integrated fresnel lens to let the RGB backlighting shine through, a 2 mm actuation point, and a lifespan of up to 80 million keystrokes. They’re described as ‘thocky’, and that’s an apt word for the sound they make.

Six layers of sound deadening muffle, but don’t stop, the noise, and the amount of travel from the keys gives them a great feel. For my tastes they’re a little narrow at the top, but there's good separation between them.

A magnetic wrist rest comes in the package, and underneath the Galleon you’ll find two adjustable feet. The displays for the Stream Deck buttons are quite deeply recessed, so it’s quite possible to adjust the keyboard so you can’t quite see them properly, especially if you’ve labelled them below their icon—they best repay a position where you’re looking straight down into them from above, which naturally sets the rest of the keyboard off to the left. Using the keyboard every day you’ll learn to work around this, but a wider viewing angle might have been a good addition.

There are also some USB ports—all three of them Type-C—but don’t think you’re also buying a useful USB hub.

Get the keyboard out of the box and you’ll naturally expect that the prominent one at the right-hand side of the board is the one that connects it to your PC, but it’s not. That honour goes to one of the ports tucked under the edge in the centre, marked with a keyboard icon. The other two are for passthrough, but only run at USB 2.0 speeds, so are of questionable utility as most peripherals from that generation will have Type-A plugs.

A USB 3.2 SSD attached to the keyboard wasn’t picked up by the PC, nor was an older USB 3 flash drive. The ports are quite deeply recessed, so cables with thicker plugs may have problems, and the pair underneath are very close together, leading to cable clash with the PC connection cord.

The Corsair Galleon 100 SD feels like a natural evolution of the gaming keyboard. Having the customisable button array is useful even if you’re not a streamer, but it remains to be seen how many people will be prepared to pay $350/£310 for this amalgam when a Stream Deck Neo is only $90/£90 and you can pick up a perfectly good mechanical keyboard for about the same.