Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Mechanical Keyboard

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Mechanical Keyboard

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)
Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Mechanical Keyboard - Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Mechanical Keyboard
US Street Price$249.99
  • Pros

    • Very comfortable low-profile key switches. Wireless without lag. Handy media, macro, and profile keys. Handsome. Good battery life.
  • Cons

    • Wildly expensive. No built-in dongle storage. Low-profile switches are an acquired taste.
  • Bottom Line

    Swift and stylish, the Logitech G915 Lightspeed has it all—it sets a new benchmark in gaming keyboards. Only its super-steep price keeps it from snagging an Editors' Choice.

Even the best gaming keyboards aren't for everyone. While I enjoy the longer travel of mechanical keys and the bold (not to say eccentric) stylings of most gaming keyboards, some people would prefer something more subdued, with a typing feel more akin to what they'd find on their laptops. Logitech's G915 Lightspeed ($249.99) offers the best of both worlds. It's a low-profile mechanical keyboard, so it has a shorter press, but one that's still more comfortable and satisfying than your laptop's scissor switches. Its sleek, light body has a professional look—RGB lighting notwithstanding—that can fit in at an office as well as a gamer's battle station. Oh, and did I mention it's wireless? If you can bear its high price, the G915 offers almost everything you could want in a modern gaming keyboard.

Keys and Buttons, and Buttons and Keys

The G915 has a lot of inputs. It's a full-size board with five extra macro buttons (G1 through G5) on the left side plus a dozen additional buttons—dedicated media controls, keys for swapping among onboard profiles, a "game mode" button to disable the Windows key and other keys of your choice, and controls for adjusting backlight brightness and switching between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (what Logitech calls Lightspeed) wireless connections. It also has a snazzy-looking aluminum volume roller at top right, near the media keys.

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Keyboard Angle with Dongle

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Keyboard Media Keys

It's surprising to me how few high-end keyboards have extra macro keys. Function keys are fine, but most apps and games take advantage of them; having additional keys dedicated to macros or other essential actions always feels like a game-changing bonus to me. To be sure, you have to shift your left hand a bit to get used to the G1 through G5 column, but the adjustment is worth it.

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Keyboard Macro Keys

For the G915 (and its wired cousin, the $199.99 G815 Lightsync), Logitech has created a new set of proprietary low-profile mechanical switches. The Logitech GL switches come in tactile, clicky, or linear flavors. (This review is based on a keyboard with linear switches, but I've tried all three.)

According to Logitech, all three versions have similar actuation points and complete travel distance of 1.5mm and 2.7mm respectively. If you haven't used a low-profile mechanical switch before, it's an intriguing middle ground between the longer, smoother typing strokes of a standard mechanical keyboard and the relatively quick, hard tapping of most laptop keyboards. There's enough give to make it more comfortable than a notebook keyboard, but it's not as easy on the hands as a mechanical keyboard with the usual 4mm travel.

Does that translate into quicker hands while gaming? I'd say it depends on what you're playing. The lower travel means your fingers naturally rebound a little faster than on a standard mechanical keyboard. For the twitchiest games, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I found I was already so focused on moving as fast as possible that I was actively lifting my fingers hurriedly. In games such as XCOM 2, where I use the keyboard a lot but at my own pace, I felt I was indeed going faster. In other words, I noticed the difference most when I wasn't consciously trying to play fast.

Of course, a quicker, more competitively minded player might find that a lower actuation leads to more speedy actions. Maybe it's telling that the biggest difference I noticed was in my typing, which felt snappier if not actually faster.

Sleek as Well as Swift

At 0.75 by 18.7 by 6 inches, the G915 looks and feels thin and tight. Once again, if you turn off the RGB lighting or set it to white, the Lightspeed does not look like a gaming keyboard. Its dark aluminum top plate gives it a polished, smart look. Even with the lighting on, it still looks very dapper. In fact, the dark but shiny metal makes the colorful lights pop, even in a well-lit room.

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Keyboard Cross Shot

The keyboard feels a little heavier (2.24 pounds) than it looks, which you might see as an issue for a wireless board since you may want to put it on your lap or simply carry it from place to place. I found that typing with the G915 on my lap generally felt fine; its length and relative heft actually helped it feel balanced. Still, I wouldn't call it a great keyboard to carry around—it's very long, which makes it hard to secure in a bag, and there's no onboard storage for the Lightspeed dongle, so the possibility of losing it is higher than I'd like.

Speaking of moving around, let's talk about the wireless. Like most of Logitech's 2019 wireless gaming gear, the G915 features both Bluetooth and the company's dongle-based, 2.4GHz connection, Lightspeed. Both work well, though Lightspeed is preferable. Bluetooth adds a small amount of input lag, but the Wi-Fi connection consistently achieves 1,000Hz polling, which makes lag imperceptible.

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Keyboard Lightspeed Badge

The keyboard also gets decent battery life. Logitech claims you should get 30 hours of use with the lighting set to max brightness. (The G915 will automatically dim or douse the backlight after an adjustable period of inactivity, which helps stretch out the time between charges.) In practice, I needed to recharge using the micro-USB port at the top of the board after 10 or 11 days. (Pro tip: You can extend that by turning the keyboard off when you power down your PC.) As mentioned, users who don't care about having a cordless keyboard can opt for the $50-cheaper (but still mighty expensive) G815 Lightsync, which adds a USB pass-through.

Business at the G Hub

The G915 supports Logitech's gaming peripheral software, G Hub, which has become one of my favorite configuration programs. It's clear and clean in design, and it makes doing everything from recording macros to setting preset and custom lighting patterns a breeze. I'm particularly fond of G Hub because its design always puts the focus on whatever you're doing instead of cluttering your view with other options.

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming keyboard macro key assignment settings

The Lightspeed can store three profiles in onboard memory and an infinite number of profiles per device, which you can tie to specific apps so your game-specific profiles are automatically set when you launch each game.

Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming keyboard software profile screen

One hiccup concerning profiles: You need to set and activate the onboard profile using the keyboard settings menu, rather than the profiles menu. That feels counterintuitive, since there's also a way to switch and view your onboard profiles in the profile configuration menu. As a result, it would be pretty easy to set your profiles, then disconnect the keyboard assuming they're stored.

You Can Have It All...You'll Just Pay for It

Simply put, the Logitech G915 has pretty much everything I'm looking for in a wireless keyboard. Everything from the primary keys to the macro buttons to the media controls looks and feels great. It being cordless without compromising performance is the icing on the cake.

As someone who plays a ton of video games and can crack every last joint in his hands, I can respect that some mechanical-keyboard purists may not love the low-profile feel. For people who are looking for a quicker press, however, or who simply like shallower typing, the Lightspeed is one of the best mechanical options I've used.

Surprising absolutely no one, the best also happens to be one of the most expensive. At a whopping $249.99, the G915 towers above most of the choices on our best-gaming-keyboards list. Then again, it's brilliantly engineered, has all the trimmings, looks gorgeous, and types well. Start saving up for it.