Cooler Master SK650 overview: probably the most stunning, intensely irritating gaming keyboard ever made

I’ve been ready for Cooler Master’s new vary of low profile gaming keyboards to launch since first laying eyes on them at Computex final yr. In the sweltering Taipei warmth the SK-series keyboards have been simply the best issues on present. Using the most recent low-profile Cherry MX mechanical swap, with a gorgeous chiclet-style, and a few slick RGB LED implementation, they made each different gaming keyboard on present appear like some Fisher Price, Baby’s First Keyboard form of garbage.

But that was June, and it’s taken till nicely after the CES showpiece in January to get the boards lastly out of the factories and into our palms. But has the wait been price it, do these fashionable new gaming boards ship a brand new form of peripheral expertise? The solutions aren’t any and sure respectively. Neither one a constructive response…

What we are able to say is that the fashion of the SK650 nonetheless blows us away. It’s not simply me both, the whole PCGamesN workplace is as enamoured with the clear, easy, stripped-back aesthetic of the most recent Cooler Master boards as I. But they’re borderline unusable. The keyboards not the remainder of our employees.

As anb exanmpkl, thiws ius me being very sluggish and delivbbnerfatg abiot usibngn tgheb new keyhboard wityhout utilizing the backspace key for jksutgy a sibnfglwe sentence,.

That, by the way in which is the brand new peripheral expertise I used to be referring to earlier.

The drawback is that as stunning because the flat-fronted keys on the SK650 look, they’re far too shut collectively to keep away from the miss-strikes which are inevitable when utilizing such a board. Ergonomics have been completely compromised simply to get the clear chiclet impact of the flat keys, and that in any other case beautiful, tight compact board design.

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There’s a purpose that on all different boards the keys both taper up from a broader base to a narrower entrance, or there’s a higher distance between the keys themselves. With such a small hole between the keys it’s extremely simple to jam down at the least two, possibly three, and typically 4 different keys when you’re typing. It’s turning into an more and more irritating expertise simply typing this overview, however after I was pushing deadline just lately to get a brand new graphics card overview written for embargo I needed to ditch this board and swap to the ever-reliable Ducky One 2 Horizon as a substitute.

And that’s simply typing the place a miss-struck secret’s only a bit annoying and means your backspace key will get extra use than some other in your board. In-game, nevertheless, it may be a matter of life or dying. Well, that’s possibly a bit over-dramatic, it’s nonetheless simply annoying and never truly deadly to anybody however an anthropomorphised bundle of pixels. But while you’re gaming and your character flips somebody off as they’re dual-wielding shotguns in your face, while you truly meant to chop them down with a lead-based nose-piercing, it may possibly simply find yourself with you burying the keyboard accountable in your display with excessive prejudice.

That’s extremely irritating, not simply from an experiential standpoint, however as a result of the SK650 is a beautiful board simply let down by a basic lack of ergonomics. And no, it’s not due to my fats fingers, the slender digits of Jacob and Caroline discovered it virtually unimaginable to sort a sentence with out Google underlining each different phrase with a purple squiggle.

From a technological standpoint, nevertheless, the SK650 is nice. Those low profile Cherry MX switches are wonderful, even when they’re not the fast response model Corsair has put in in its K70 RGB MK.2 Low Profile board. And the lighting is beautiful too – we would joke in regards to the utter irrelevance of RGB LEDs more often than not, however after they’re this nicely utilised they genuinely do add to the aesthetic.

From the low-level glow across the underside of the keycaps, to the skinny line ringing the whole board, they appear gorgeous. And it’s all simply managed from the board itself too.

If solely there was just a little further distance between the keys… it could have made the board chunk larger, however at the least it will have been a much more usable machine. As it’s I’m going to right away ditch Cooler Master’s SK650 as quickly as I’ve hit the ultimate full cease of this piece, and I’m counting down the characters proper now.