Ducky One 2 Horizon gaming keyboard evaluation: it’ll be simply this and the cockroaches left on the finish…

For all you peops that ever wished to know which keyboard will survive the approaching apocalypse we’ve gone and carried out the analysis for you. When the vista exterior your shattered window is all bleached earth and bleached bones, the one issues nonetheless functioning would be the cockroaches and these Ducky keyboards.

The Ducky One 2 Horizon is likely one of the most sturdy boards we’ve ever examined. It’s definitely not probably the most fancy, most feature-packed, and even probably the most brightly lit board round – hell, there are solely 4 LEDs on your entire factor – but when there’s one factor it undoubtedly is, it’s stable.

We first noticed the Horizon model of the One 2 out at Computex and fell a bit bit in love with the black and blue aesthetic, and much more so now with the on-brand SE7EN.WS orange highlights. The beautiful side-printed variations with the clean tops are usually not but obtainable, however this commonplace, non-backlit design is clear, stylish and constructed to final. But that doesn’t imply it’s the right board, I can do with out RGB LEDs, and tens of millions of macro keys, however there are some reasonably weird design choices which do give us pause for thought.

The $102 (£105) Ducky One 2 encompasses a new two-tone design to the chassis in addition to two-tone PBT double-shot keycaps. They’re probably the most sturdy keycaps you should buy, with the alpha-numerical particulars baked into the plastic, reasonably than printed on prime. They’re by no means going to rub clear, they’re by no means going to shatter, and the thickness of the plastic means you get a tonal change to their response. You get much less of a click on then and extra of a clack. That’s top-end technical keyboard terminology proper there.

You additionally get a number of further keycaps within the field too, with 10 randomly chosen caps. We obtained a number of additional orange ones so we needed to get these on show to maintain the Ducky board on model.

The One 2 additionally encompasses a dual-layer PCB inside it, which in addition to providing longer sturdiness itself, additionally ensures adequate sign stability to make sure the complete N-key rollover features it doesn’t matter what. It’s additionally the primary board I’ve examined that makes use of a USB Type-C cable for information; it’s nonetheless a comparatively commonplace 1,000Hz when it comes to the polling frequency however it does make it simpler plugging in.

And, after all, you get your choose of Cherry MX switches to make your mechanical life good. The One 2 comes with both Red, Blue, Brown, Speed, or my private favorite, Black switches. They’re the actually heavy linear switches, which will not be so fast for twitch gaming, however really feel actually good to kind on. I’m having a good time scripting this right here evaluation, for instance.

The One 2 additionally are available in a compact 80% dimension (TKL) design, which is de facto reasonably cute, and undoubtedly one which has to characteristic in our record of the most effective compact gaming keyboards. The simplistic Ducky design additionally makes extra sense if you’re trying on the restrictive footprint of a compact board; on a full-size board there may be virtually the sense Ducky is being much less restrained and extra miserly on the aesthetic facet.

But there are some oddities. The one that actually stands out is the caps lock key – on first inspection it might sound that there’s a lightweight behind it to point whether or not it’s toggled on or off, however what we mistakenly thought was an indicator is definitely only a dot baked into the plastic. The actual indicator is a tiny blue LED hidden behind the numpad. You really have to have your face immediately above the keyboard to have any probability of seeing any of the 4 indicator lights.

I’m additionally not a fan of the orientation of the toes because the flipped again design can have them folding up if you transfer your keyboard round. When the toes are absolutely deployed it’s not really that a lot of a problem, however, when you desire a shallower angle to kind on, the smaller toes fold underneath the stress virtually instantly.

Those are comparatively minor issues, nevertheless, and ones which don’t actually influence the principle focus of the Ducky One 2 – getting you tapping at these fantastically machined, sturdy keys. With the selection of switches obtainable you’ll be able to tailor the board to your individual gaming desire, so it may be as fast as you need for twitch gaming. And the no-fuss design is the right antidote to a few of the overly dramatic, overly ‘gamer’ boards that we’ve seen over the previous couple of years.

So when you’re after a easy, responsive gaming keyboard, that may survive every thing as much as and past a minor apocalypse, then you possibly can do quite a bit worse than the Ducky One 2.