The best gaming keyboards can bring a greater sense of comfort and control to your PC play time, whether you’re luxuriating with a lengthy RPG or sweating through an online shooter. While they don’t always feel as premium for typing as a good custom mechanical keyboard, they’re usually a nice upgrade over a typical membrane model. To help those looking to upgrade, I’ve spent more time researching gaming keyboards than any person reasonably should, testing dozens of well-reviewed options along the way. Whether you want something mini, analog, wireless or just plain cheap, these are the best I’ve found.
What to look for in a gaming keyboard
To be clear, any keyboard can be a “gaming keyboard.” If you play lots of video games today and have never sighed to yourself, “man, this keyboard is holding me back,” congratulations, you probably don’t need to pay extra for a new one. Self-proclaimed gaming keyboards often come at a premium, and while the best offer high-quality designs, snazzy RGB lighting and a few genuinely worthwhile features, none of them will give you god-like skill, nor will they suddenly turn bad games into good ones.
Mechanical vs non-mechanical
Now that we’ve touched grass, I did prioritize some features while researching this guide. First, I mostly stuck to mechanical keyboards, not laptop-style membrane models. They can be loud, but they’re more durable, customizable and broadly satisfying to press — all positive traits for a product you may use for hours-long gaming sessions.
Size
Next, I preferred tenkeyless (TKL) or smaller layouts. It’s totally fine to use a full-size board if you really want a number pad, but a compact model gives you more space to flick your mouse around. It also lets you keep your mouse closer to your body, which can reduce the tension placed on your arms and shoulders.
From top to bottom: A 96 percent keyboard, an 80 percent (or tenkeyless) keyboard and a 60 percent keyboard.
Switches, keycaps and build quality
Linear switches, which are often branded as “red,” are generally favored by gamers. These give keystrokes a smooth feel from top to bottom, with no tactile “bump” that could make fast, repeated presses less consistent. They usually require little force to actuate, and they tend to be quiet. However, if you prefer the feel and/or sound of a more tactile or clicky switch, get one of those instead. You might lose some speed in esports-style games, but nothing is more important than your comfort.
Some gaming keyboards are based on different mechanisms entirely. Optical switches, for instance, use a beam of light to register keystrokes, while Hall effect switches use magnets. These often feel linear, but they can allow for a more versatile set of gaming-friendly features, such as the ability to set custom actuation points. (You can read more about how this works below.) In general, they’re faster and more durable too. But keyboards with those extra features typically aren’t cheap.
Regardless, you want a frame that doesn’t flex under pressure, keys that don’t wobble and stabilizers that don’t rattle when you hit larger keys like the spacebar. I prefer double-shot PBT (polybutylene terephthalate) keycaps over those that use cheaper ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) plastic, as they won’t develop a greasy shine over time and their icons won’t fade. A hot-swappable PCB (printed circuit board) that makes it easy to change switches if the mood arises is ideal, as are dedicated media keys.
For the sake of simplicity, I only considered prebuilt gaming keyboards for this guide, though many of the picks below allow for customization down the line. If you (and your bank account) really want to go wild, check out our guide to building a custom keyboard.
Software, connectivity and RGB
If a keyboard has companion software, it should let you program macros and custom key bindings for games without frustration. For convenience, a wired keyboard should connect through a detachable USB-C cable. A good wireless keyboard won’t add serious lag, but only if it uses a USB receiver, not Bluetooth. (It’ll probably cost more as well.) Some gaming keyboards advertise super-high polling rates — i.e., the speed at which a keyboard reports to a computer — to reduce latency, but unless your monitor has an especially fast refresh rate, the usual standard of 1,000Hz should be fine. And while nobody needs RGB lighting, it’s fun. Consumer tech could use more of that, so the cleaner and more customizable the RGB is, the better.
How we tested
The best way to evaluate a keyboard is to just… use it, so that’s what I did. To cover a variety of use cases and design styles, I’ve researched dozens of keyboards over the past several months that’ve broadly received high marks from professional reviewers and users alike. I’ve then used each model I’ve brought in as my daily driver for numerous days. Since I write for a living, this gave me enough time to get a strong sense of each keyboard’s typing experience.
For gaming, I give special focus to each keyboard’s responsiveness in fast, reaction-based online shooters such as Halo Infinite, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Valorant, Overwatch 2 and (more recently) XDefiant, as many would-be gaming keyboard buyers get one in the hopes that it’ll help with that genre in particular. I made sure each keyboard felt comfortable with other types of games, though, such as Baldur’s Gate 3 (a turn-based RPG), Hi-Fi Rush (an action game with an emphasis on timing and rhythm) and Forza Horizon 5 (an arcade racing game). I used the latter to better evaluate the pressure-sensitive features of the analog keyboards I tested.
If a keyboard could be configured with multiple switch types, I got the linear model. Upon receiving each keyboard, I removed several keycaps to ensure none were chipped or broken. I noted whether any keys felt wobbly, whether the case flexes under pressure, whether the texture and finish of the keycaps changes after use and whether larger keys like the spacebar felt particularly rattly or hollow. I typed on each keyboard in quick succession in a quiet room to get a sense of where they ranked in terms of noise. For wireless models, I checked whether the battery drain at 50 percent RGB brightness aligned with a manufacturer’s estimate. I looked to results from sites like Rtings to ensure nothing was out of order with latency. I did my own testing on a 144Hz monitor with my personal rig, which includes a 10th-gen Core i9 CPU and an RTX 3080 GPU.
This helped me ensure each keyboard met a baseline of overall quality, but to reiterate, so much of this process is subjective. I can tell you if a keyboard is loud based on how I slam my keys, for instance, but you may have a lighter touch. What my tastes find “comfortable,” “pleasing,” or even “useful,” you may dislike. As I’ve written before, keyboards are like food or art in that way. So, keep an open mind.
Honorable mentions
Other gaming keyboards we tested
The ASUS ROG Azoth.
ASUS ROG Azoth
The ASUS ROG Azoth is like a smaller version of the ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless with a few more enthusiast touches, such as a gasket-mounted design — which gives keystrokes a softer feel — a programmable OLED display and a toolkit for lubing switches in the box. It’s exceptionally well-made by any standard, not just “for a gaming keyboard.” But its feature set still isn’t as flexible as the Wooting 60HE or SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL Wireless, which makes its $250 price tag a tough ask.
Keychron C3 Pro
The tenkeyless Keychron C3 Pro is the top budget pick in our mechanical keyboard guide, and it remains a great stand-in for the G.Skill KM250 RGB if you want to stay under $50. With its gasket mount design, internal foam and pre-lubed switches, it feels and sounds fuller to press. The base version we tested lacks hot-swappable switches and only has a red backlight, but Keychron recently released revised models that address that and add full RGB. That said, their ABS keycaps feel cheaper and can develop a shine over time, plus there’s no volume knob. Some may find KM250’s smaller size more convenient for gaming, too.
The Keychron C3 Pro.
NZXT Function 2 and Function 2 MiniTKL
The full-size NZXT Function 2 and tenkeyless Function 2 MiniTKL are totally solid midrange options with fast optical switches and the ability to swap between two universal actuation points, but they’re let down by mediocre stabilizers on the larger keys.
Razer Huntsman V3 Pro
The Razer Huntsman V3 Pro is a line of wired analog keyboards that comes in 60 percent, TKL and full-size options. They have just about all the features we like on the Wooting 60HE+, but their optical switches are noisier and more hollow-feeling.
Razer Huntsman Mini
The Razer Huntsman Mini is a fine choice if you want a 60 percent keyboard and don’t need Wooting-style software tricks, with textured PBT keycaps, a sturdy aluminum top plate and the same fast optical switches we praised with the Huntsman V2 TKL. The 60HE+ is much more versatile, though, while the KM250 RGB is a more appealing value.
Corsair K70 Max
The Corsair K70 Max is another one with magnetic switches, but trying to program its more advanced features through Corsair’s iCue software was a pain.
Corsair K70 RGB TKL
The Corsair K70 RGB TKL is a decent if basic midrange model, but it’s also on the noisy side compared to the Huntsman V2 TKL, and it’s saddled with middling software.
The Logitech G Pro X 60.
Logitech G Pro X TKL and G Pro X 60
The wireless Logitech G Pro X TKL and G Pro X 60 are built well but too expensive to lack hot-swappable switches and the analog features of devices like the Wooting 60HE+. There isn’t much sound-dampening foam in either board, too, so they don’t sound great.
Logitech G915 TKL
The Logitech G915 TKL is a wireless low-profile keyboard with a metal frame, but its thin ABS keycaps feel too cheap for something that’s usually priced around $180. Logitech released a new wireless low-profile model called the G515 Lightspeed TKL in late June; we secured a review unit just before our latest update was published, so we’ll include our thoughts in the next refresh to this guide.
Recent updates
June 2024: We updated this guide with a new “traditional mechanical keyboard” pick, the Keychron V3 Max, plus a couple new honorable mentions and more notes on other gaming keyboards we’ve tried. Note that we’ve tested — and will continue to test — several other keyboards that aren’t explicitly marketed toward gaming, but we’ll direct you to our general mechanical keyboard buying guide for more info on those.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-gaming-keyboard-140019954.html?src=rss
