Review: Asus ROG Falchion Ace HFX

Every gaming keyboard manufacturer seems to be jumping on the Hall effect bandwagon, and why wouldn’t they? The keyboard technology has been proven in both esports arenas and home office setups worldwide and offers countless advantages over standard mechanical keyboards, with no real performance compromises.

Hall effect keyboards have also arrived as countless other technologies enter the keyboard space: Everything from gasket-mounting to touchpads is now in mainstream keyboards. That also means I regularly see new products, mechanical and Hall effect, with features I’ve never even considered before. Case in point, the Asus ROG Falchion Ace HFX, a small keyboard with a large name and a lot of unusual features.

This $200 wired-only keyboard has Hall effect switches, an 8,000-Hz polling rate, multidevice connectivity with two USB-C ports, and a programmable touchpad on the back edge. Not to mention countless on-keyboard controls and a flipable lever to enable or disable the rapid trigger feature found on most Hall effect keyboards. While it does have some strange design decisions, it has a lot of really clever ones too.

Unique Switches

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The Falchion has one of the deepest typing sounds compared to other Hall effect keyboards. This is likely a combination of the keyboard’s unique HFX magnetic switches, one of the few I’ve tested that aren’t made by Gateron, and the sound dampening inside. It consists of multiple layers of foam, Poron, and silicone, and a sheet of small rubber domes.

The switches feel incredibly smooth, even when pressed slowly, with a consistent feel throughout the entire keypress. They use a polycarbonate top housing, a POM stem, and a POM bottom housing, contributing to the deeper typing sound and ensuring smoothness across the entire keystroke. Unlike most Hall effect switches, the HFX doesn’t have a hole in the center, instead, it moves the magnet to the front, where the metal contact leaf would typically be on a mechanical switch. This makes the Falchion incompatible with standard Hall effect switches, but likely improves the sound profile as well: Open-bottom switches tend to have a more hollow typing sound, which can be heard on competitors.

The springs are weighted to 55 grams of total force, which is 5 grams lighter than the Gateron Nebula dual-rail switches used by Keychron, and 10 grams lighter than the standard Cherry MX Red. There aren’t any other switches available for this keyboard, but because Hall effect switches are contactless, the existing switches can be removed without any desoldering or extensive disassembly.

I didn’t find myself wanting to change the switches, though—they have a poppy and deep sound that’s incredibly crisp, and they feel responsive and smooth, especially with rapid trigger enabled. My largest issue with the typing experience was the keycaps. They have a rough texture that, while grippy, felt noticeably coarse and unpleasant when typing. It comes down to preference, but I found them less enjoyable than smooth or lightly textured keycaps.

The stabilizers in this keyboard use an older, less-common design seen on a few Razer keyboards in the past, where the stems clip directly onto the internal wires. The stems can be pulled out from the top to apply additional lube without needing to disassemble the keyboard. From the factory, none of them rattled or clicked at all.

The typing experience can be adjusted in a few ways. The largest is the dust cover included with this keyboard; it's essentially a bigger version of the keyboard’s existing case lined with a layer of rubber. The keyboard can be placed inside it, creating a deeper, more rounded-out typing sound. When not in the cover, the keyboard’s typing angle can also be adjusted with flip-out feet. It sits flat at 3 degrees and can be adjusted to 6 or 9 degrees, all standard angles.

Simple, Intuitive, and Powerful

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The Falchion has top-of-the-line specs, but it stands out in how these features are implemented. Directly above the standard keys, there’s an RGB light bar with an indicator on each side. The left indicator is linked to the touchpad on the back edge of the keyboard and shows what it is currently set to adjust. The right indicator shows whether the rapid trigger is enabled. These indicators, and their respective settings, are adjusted using controls on the back of the keyboard. Windows key locking and Caps Lock are located on this LED bar, too.

The button on the back edge of the keyboard cycles the touchpad through multiple functions. These are controlled by swiping and/or double-tapping the touchbar, and they include media playback controls, RGB brightness adjustments, and—the most unique and useful setting—live adjustment of the switches’ actuation point, which makes adjustments more streamlined and reduces the need for using software. When adjusting the actuation point, the center light bar will fill in to indicate the adjustment: If it’s halfway full, the switches actuate at 2.0 millimeters; if it’s full, they actuate at 4.0 mm, and so on.

The lever on the right side, which activates rapid trigger, swaps between on and off with a satisfying click. Rapid trigger is a feature that’s become standard on most Hall effect keyboards today. It allows a switch to be pressed down a second time immediately after it’s released to register a second keypress, instead of waiting until the key returns to a neutral position. This allows for faster, rapid key presses and generally makes the keyboard feel more responsive, ideal for fast-paced games. It works perfectly on this keyboard, but is only set to work on the WASD keys by default. I had to go into Asus’ Armoury Crate software to enable rapid trigger across all the keys.

The software shocked me: Asus got it right in almost every way. Armoury Crate is simple, easy to use, and incredibly lightweight. Almost every setting includes a description or an information tool tip, and there are diagrams to demonstrate how to use specific settings.

An 8,000-Hz polling rate, while fantastic, is overkill for the average person. Unless you’re playing at incredibly high levels with no room for error, a keyboard this fast won’t make a tangible difference in your gameplay. Still, it’s always nice to have something excessively capable (until you can’t blame losing in a game on your keyboard).

Another detail that’s probably overkill but nice to have is the dual USB-C ports on either side of this keyboard. You can connect a device on each side and use the switch in the center to swap between them. If you’re one of the rare people with two PCs at a desk, or if you swap between a desktop and a laptop, this is a great feature and rare to find.

Strange Assembly

Photograph: Henri Robbins

While this keyboard’s switches, buttons, and touchpad all feel great, the build quality is pretty average. The Falchion uses a modified tray-mount assembly that, while effective, doesn’t bring anything special to the table. Typically, there are multiple posts that the printed circuit board (PCB) and plate screw onto, resulting in a singular, rigid piece without any softness or bounce when typing.

On the Falchion, these posts instead extend through the PCB and sit below the plate without making contact. The screws on top flare out from the posts to hold the plate in place. The internal assembly sits on top of the case’s sound insulation, which has multiple small rubber domes placed throughout. These domes can slightly compress when typed on, resulting in a bounciness similar to a gasket-mounted keyboard. The domes look nearly identical to Topre domes, albeit much smaller, and the stacked design feels reminiscent of Mode’s stack mount and lattice block mount designs, which both have the keyboard’s internal assembly sitting on top of a mounting material instead of being compressed by it.

All this to say, it's an improvement on a standard tray mount, but ultimately falls short of true gasket mounting. It has some bounce, which alleviates the “dead zones” that a tray mount has near the mounting posts, but doesn’t do much more. That said, not needing extra space for gaskets in the case makes the keyboard super compact.

The case is incredibly thin, and while this makes the keyboard more lightweight and portable, it also means it can easily be flexed by hand and will be more susceptible to cracking or damage during transport. The case uses metal screws that go directly into plastic, which could cause stripping or thread damage if you take this keyboard apart a few times to modify it, and the LED bar and buttons on top make it a bit difficult to remove the PCB without having to bend the case or risk breaking any of the screw posts. The LED bar creates further issues with how it is connected to the main PCB, using a mix of small JST connectors and ribbon cables that range from slightly annoying to nearly impossible to reconnect after a full disassembly.

There is one part of this keyboard that I can’t understand, though: The Falchion includes a dust cover that can also be used as a secondary case for the keyboard to sit in. It has an obvious purpose to repel dust, but I can’t understand why something like this was seen as a worthy inclusion on this keyboard. More than anything else, it seems like an extra piece of plastic to take up space, sit inside the box, or end up lost or thrown away a few years from now.

The Asus ROG Falchion Ace HFX is a solid keyboard. It has several great features that improve quality of life massively over other Hall effect keyboards: The controls at the top are practical and convenient, and the touchpad is novel and functional, especially with how well it is integrated into the LED light bar. The largest limitation is customizability: With proprietary switches and a complicated internal design, the Falchion doesn’t have the same modification potential as many of its competitors from Wooting, Keychron, or even SteelSeries.

I prefer seeing a company take big swings, even if it means some misses alongside some hits, rather than play it safe and create something boring. The Falchion Ace HFX is a big swing, bringing some great new ideas to the table while still being a solid keyboard underneath.