New USB keyboard doesn't work in BIOS, but other USB keyboards do

So my brother got a new mechanical keyboard, a budget one from Amazon (E-Element Mechanical Eagle Z-77 RGB).
While it's a very nice keyboard for the price and everything is great about it, his hacked together HP z400 build I put together for him required pressing F1 to boot up every time because I didn't ground all the sense pins. This wasn't an issue since the computer was kept on sleep most of the time and pressing F1 to boot every now and then was fine. But now he has to plug in his old keyboard to press F1 during reboots, then after windows loads the new mechanical one works fine.

Not sure what to make of this. Any ideas?

the corsair mechanical keyboards have a switch that you can change to get the buttons that dont work to work. not sure if the one you bought has that, but some mech keyboards buttons just dont work in bios. I had the thermaltake posieden Z that some didnt work

Interesting. Next time I'm at his place I'll have a better look for myself.

I know it might sound stupid, But maybe the keyboard doesnt have legacy support?..

M@rk said:

I know it might sound stupid, But maybe the keyboard doesnt have legacy support?..

Click to expand...

Good chance it's a BIOS issue. I have yet to see any stuff like that on an Asus. But, the Gigabyte GA-970A-D3P (at least with version 1.0) has this kind of issue... I had to plug in a PS/2 keyboard from 1996, LOL...

Actually the issue I had likely affected all USB keyboards, thanks a lot, Gigabyte... OTOH, I have yet to see that kind of issue with their FM2+ motherboards...

So i researched the keyboard and found what i thought was a key combo to toggle NKRO and figured that'll do it.

Nope. Nothing i tried could get it to work. The locked down BIOS in the HP Z400 motherboard doesn't help, no USB device options, however i doubt thats really the problem considering any other USB keyboard i try works in the same exact situation. So now a spare keyboard is required when booting up due to having to press F1 to boot because the sense pins on the board aren't grounded. I mean, i could do that and i offered to do that for my brother but he declined. So i better not hear him complaining he has to always plug in an old keyboard to press F1 when rebooting...

fortunately he just sleeps the PC most of the time.