I think the quickfire has a mini-usb to usb cable with a usb to ps/2 adapter. I've seen a few reviews and I recall them coming with some red wasd keys and a keycap puller, too.

I'm not familiar with the quickfire keyboards, but you can get a keycap puller and red WASD keys aftermarket from NewEgg.

Some USB keyboards support both PS/2 and USB protocol, so that's what's happening with the adapter here. Not all keyboards support both, for cost efficiency, I guess. Hence why some cheaper keyboards wouldn't work in this instance.

So it's safe to assume that this will work with all keyboards that include a ps/2 adapter?

Yeah, I've been loving it

Geekhack's been a bit flakey the past few days (I think there's been some site maintenance) so I figured I'd make a thread here first since it's more chip related. I think the quickfire has a mini-usb to usb cable with a usb to ps/2 adapter. I've seen a few reviews and I recall them coming with some red wasd keys and a keycap puller, too.

I'm not a complete expert on this, but essentially one of the huge selling points of a high-end PS/2 keyboard is that using the PS/2 bus allows for what keyboard nerds call "N-key Rollover;" this means that you can never cause ghost strokes or keys to stop registering by hitting too many keys too fast—this is a limitation that USB keyboards will always have.

Anyway, I don't really know about how the specifics for the USB & PS/2 system work on high end keyboards like that. It has a mini-USB port in the back of they keyboard and you plug whichever cable you want into it, right? This is a complete shot in the dark, but I would guess that they are all true PS/2 keyboards with what is essentially a single PS/2 port replicator built right into them as a means of gaining full USB support.

If any of you are really interested in completely nerding the hell out about keyboards, I can recommend the fine folks over at the GeekHack forums. Things you will never have imagined wanting to know about keyboards will be made clear and fascinating there. This is also where I learned how to paint keyboards.

I was thinking about going for a CMStorm Quickfire Rapid with red key switches and getting some nice custom keycaps. There are a lot more customization options for mech keyboards with cherry mx switches, and linear switches would make it a bit more pleasant. I think the latency issue is negligable and I'd love to see if anyone else would be interested in trying this out.