Photos and Features

The Lobera Supreme falls in between the crazy gaming mechanical keyboards and the cleaner enthusiast keyboards. The design is clean but there is still a focus on gaming with the macro keys. The overall shape does make the keyboard a little over an inch wider than a standard keyboard, this is mostly before of the wider bezels on the left and right sides. The purple trim might chance a few people off, I think a more neutral color might have been a better choice there. 

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Beyond the RGB backlighting, one of the other unique aspects of the Lobera Supreme are the three small macro keys below the space bar. They aren’t mechanical keys but it is a very interesting place for macro’s. I’ve complained many times in the past that putting macro keys an inch to the left of the rest of the keyboard really makes them hard to use, it’s always great to see companies trying new ideas. I will talk about how well they work when I get into performance testing. Also in the same photo we can see the weird almost diamond plate looking design molded into the wrist wrest area. In the second photo we can also see that same design in the purple area above the number pad. The rest of the keyboard has a finish that is exactly like what a machined aluminum would look like only the entire keyboard is made of plastic.

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Tesoro did go with a non-standard font on the Lobera. It is thicker and similar to both the old font on Cooler Master’s Quickfire keyboards and also Razer keyboards. If you aren’t particular then you won’t have a problem with it but given how vocal some people are about both the Razer and CM fonts I can expect some of the more particular people to be concerned with it. It does have the same problem that I had with those other boards, the W and M are exactly the same where a more standard font would have the W angled and the M with vertical bars, just like here on our website. Beyond the font the Lobera Supreme does make use of a function key to give you media controls in the F1-F6 keys. F8-F12 also let you hot swap between profiles should you need too. Using function with the 8 and the 2 over on the number pad lets you flip between four levels of brightness and then to two modes that light up WASD and other gaming related keys. Sadly you can’t set the gaming mode and lower the brightness.

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On the edge of the keyboard behind the number pad you will find all of the Lobera’s connections. For starters have to remove the warning label letting you know that the USB ports aren’t designed for changing, they are more for hooking up your USB devices. So of course you get two USB 2.0 connection. Next to them you have a small power connection to help support the power they draw, the keyboard itself pulls basically all of the power off of its single USB connection on the main cable. Speaking of the main cable, it has microphone and headphone connections that pass through to the two connections here on the back.

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To take advantage of the power plug and to fully utilize the built in USB hug Tesoro does include a USB cable that feeds additional power to the keyboard. This is actually a little surprising, a lot of keyboards have a power plug but you are on your own for actually finding a power cable.

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One of the Lobera Supreme’s unique features are the light bars on the sides of the keyboard. They match the lighting colors that you set the keys too and they will light up both sides of your keyboard. This is nice if you need a little light around your mouse especially.

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On the bottom in the center you have a sticker with the serial number and all of the CE and FCC logos. Over the rest of the bottom you have a total of five rubber feet, three on the front and two on the back. For those of you who prefer to angle your keyboard Tesoro did include flip out feet to angle the Lobera. In fact each side has a double foot design that gives you two height options. Both feet also have rubber on the end as well so you won’t lose any traction when using the feet.

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So our Lobera Supreme has brown switches, as I mentioned earlier. What I didn’t point out, Tesoro was careful to not mention Cherry at all on the packaging because they didn’t go with cherry switches for this model. This isn’t a huge shock, Corsair still has exclusivity with Cherry RGB keyswitches, so everyone else is left to design their own or use Kailh switches. This is the same company that makes Razers switches. Their MX switches have also been seen in a few other keyboards like the Poseidon Z from Thermaltake. Their switches share a very similar design to Cherrys included the same functionality for each color switch as well. That means you can expect these browns to still be tactile like Cherry browns. Is there a difference between Kailh switches over Cherrys? In my experience they have been a little looser side to side, but otherwise they do still get the same job done. Most people will never know or care about the differences honestly.

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What kind of keycaps do you get with the Lobera? Well they are made of ABS and are very similar to other keycaps on other backlit keyboards. They are molded in a transparent white for the backlighting and then coated in black. This does mean over time you can wear through the finish. This is on par with what we would see with all but the highest end keyboards though. As much as I would love to see doubleshots, this board just isn’t in that price range.

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The keys follow a standard key layout. The top two rows are the same keycap mold and then things angle down to the middle row and then angle up on the bottom two rows.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35806 31 Oct 2014 22:48
Today I take a look at our first RGB Mechanical keyboard, we have more sitting here so expect more reviews soon. The Lobera though looks like it will offer the cheapest entry into a mech RGB.
elguapo's Avatar
elguapo replied the topic: #35807 01 Nov 2014 18:27
I thought the polished aluminum looked fantastic until I saw the wrist guard and logo, I really think they missed an opportunity for some slick looking laser etching there.

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