Everyone knows MadCatz as one of the leading brands when it comes to peripherals across several platforms, with branches focusing on console peripherals (Tritton & MLG), PC peripherals (Eclipse & Saitek) and gaming peripherals (Cyborg), MadCatz are now even dabbling in console games themselves. Today, we will be taking a look at their most recent keyboard to hit the market, which there hasn’t been since the Cyborg V7, which was some time ago. Recently, we’ve seen a spate of high end gaming keyboards of the mechanical variety, but today we have something that is fairly unusual, and you’ll see why shortly.

When it comes to gaming, the keyboard plays a massive role in having a competitive edge. They can make all the difference between life and death, or even that extra kill. Mechanical keyboards are becoming much more popular despite the fairly big price, due to their durability and switch movement, plus also the fact that most of them are “no frills”, meaning you get just what you need with no extra features that get in the way. As we’ve already mentioned, today we have something a bit different to our usual high end keyboards, and that is the MadCatz S.T.R.I.K.E.7 keyboard with rubber dome switches – yes rubber dome! The reason we included an exclamation mark on the end of that last statement is because if you saw the price, you’d understand why. The S.T.R.I.K.E.7 features a price tag of around £249 RRP, you can see why, as it makes it the most expensive keyboard we’ve had in to review and it doesn’t even have mechanical switches!

The S.T.R.I.K.E.7 has been produced by MadCatz to fit in line with the Cyborg range of R.A.T. gaming mice, although it won’t be sporting the Cyborg name, as MadCatz have decided to move away from that name (already having too many) and are instead using the MadCatz name and logo – you’ll see later that the keyboard is already MadCatz branded, but the packing is not. So will this new top end keyboard out perform mechanical?