Mechanical Keyboard Gaming Keyboard Brown Switch 68-Keys Mini Design (60%) Gaming Wired Keyboard White Magicforce by…

So. My original review of this was 5 stars, and I loved it! But my board had 3 switches go sour in the first 2 months of owning them. I used to play stepmania, so I thought this was due to my aggressive use of the board. So, I bought this board again. Within 2 months, again, 2 keys went sour. The first time it was z, x, and b. But the second time it was s and d. And I stopped playing games and hadn’t been typing that much anyway. Mostly just watching youtube and playing casual games. BOTH boards had the same issue. There are plenty of cheap boards, even cheaper than this, that held consistency for longer. I enjoyed the typing feel and sound extremely much, but the quality of the board was abysmal. The keycaps it comes with also feel like the cheapest and smoothest plastic money could buy, so it is almost mandatory to buy keycaps that doesn’t make your skin crawl. Just buy a different board.

This is a great mechanical keyboard! The switches feel excellent and don’t have any registration issues (e.g. doubling, etc.). I type for a living so my keyboard is very important to me. It’s replacing a QuickFire Rapid with Cherry Blue switches which just felt a little too stiff / heavy for me. The keys are ABS I assume but they can be replaced easily using the included key puller – Bring on the Spherical SA PBT doubleshot keycap obsession!Edit 11/24/2017: I bought these spherical PBT keycaps for it and they are great! The texture feels so much better than slippery ABS. (See pic: Thinkpad T520 running Arch Linux on ZFS with Cinnamon desktop 3.6.6)The form factor works great for me. Fits perfectly over my laptop – I have a Thinkpad T520 and it just sits on the speakers to each side of the laptop keyboard just high enough that it doesn’t register the laptop keys.The keyboard has helped reduce an issue I was having with my right thumb going numb from typing so much – the switches seem easier on my fingers than my laptop keys. Highly recommend!

I got mine yesterday and I put rubber rings on all the caps and it works great. It’s not super loud which I like but it’s still louder than chicklet keyboard by a lot. My biggest pet peeve about this keyboard right now is the space bar. Other than that there aren’t any large gripes, for a $40 keyboard it’s rather good. The Bad and then The Good.The Bad:- It’s angled in such a way that for me at least the edge of the space bar stabs my finger every time. If you look at the image you can sort of see what I’m saying. I just wish the angle of the space bar wasn’t so sharp. Probably going to have to buy a new keycap at least for the keyboard in the near future.- That and I wish they had a slightly more compact design like the whitefox so there isn’t that large of a blank space because I often find myself going to that part of the keyboard to use a key and there’s nothing there.- The caps lock light is obnoxious. I get that this isn’t backlit but still. It’s green and the light bleeds sooooo badly. It throws off the whole aethetic of the board. Would’ve been better to just use a white LED and I bet they’re cheaper.The Good:- The placement of the FN key in association with other function keys like the volume and end (there’s two, it can get confusing) is really good, that was one of the reasons why I chose this board over others. I use the end key a lot so I love the placement of the off-placed one on the ? key.- They switches work great so far, they make more noise than I’d like on the travel back but other than that they’re brown good switches.- It comes with a pretty thick and good white cable that’s 1.9m long and a keycap remover.- There’s nothing super wrong with this keyboard which is basically all you can ask for in a $40 keyboard. The switches work, slightly weird layout on the right side when you consider functionality, and the switches work fine.

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 I think what drives most people away from mechanical keyboards is some combination of high price for entry and sound. The tradeoff used to be that you could get a very quiet board, but not for cheap—or you could get a cheap board that rattled like crazy. The Magicforce was in the latter category. A 65% board meets most peoples’ needs who don’t want to have to give up arrow keys but like the custom look of a small keyboard, and the price is right. $40 leaves plenty of room in the budget to grab some nice-looking caps. The big problem was the awful rattle of stabilizers that sound like they’ve got a bag of empty cans inside them, creating a lot of noise—and the lack of a silent switch option without opting for backlighting and Cherry brand switches.I was willing to take the tradeoff and suffer the noise for the sake of my wallet. I’ve loved my first Magicforce so much that I want one for both at home and at the office, so I went ahead and got a second one. Folks, I don’t know what they’ve been doing to improve their manufacturing, but the stabilizers on this keyboard are basically silent. They seriously sound like well-lubricated stabilizers in custom keyboard builds. I keep pressing keys on my old board to see if there really is a difference—it’s night and day. Now of course the rest of the keys aren’t silent, and there is still a metal pinging with key returns (I’ve heard you can just open up the back and put some foam in to quiet that down but I haven’t tried it)—even so, this keyboard has a much better stock typing sound, and with O-rings, it’s positively pleasurable to listen to.The layout is (to me) almost perfect. The only thing I would change is to move the FN key to the far right side of the modifiers (who wants that key next to the spacebar?). This is especially obnoxious to me as a mac user who wants Command, Option, FN, but this is a pretty minor quibble considering much more expensive boards that come with a function key in the middle of those three keys, which is to me a worse tradeoff. Considering that it would be over 100 bucks to buy a board that comes stock with my ideal modifier situation (and much more to build my own board), I think I’d rather save my money and keep buying these boards.Yes, there is a logo—and you forget about it almost as soon as you start using it. Yes, it’s mini-USB—but there are decent braided mini-USB cables to be had for cheap. Unless someone manages to put the FN key in a sensible place in a 65% board under $50, I’m staying Magicforce all the way.

For a budget keyboard, this product as some useful features over other more expensive products. For example, the footprint of this keyboard is ridiculously small. One reason I bought this keyboard was because my G710 had a numerical keypad which got in the way when I switched between using my mouse and the keyboard. This keyboard drops the numerical keypad that I don’t use and reduces the distance between the keyboard and my mouse. I find this more comfortable for my shoulder because they don’t have to stretch as much when I use my computer.Unlike other stripped down keyboards, I can still access my normal keyboard shortcuts. For example, I can use use the keys FN+N or FN+M to increase or decrease volume. Essentially, Qisan managed to preserve many of the shortcuts found in a larger keyboard and mapped it has a secondary function on the keys. This makes working on a small keyboard very convenient.The feel of the Cherry MX Brown clones feels and sound great. I had blue switches on my G710 and they were way too loud. It found it very hard to concentrate on typing because of the click in the switches. Here there are no high-pitched clicking noises to distract my stream of thought.A good design feature on this keyboard is that the USB is detachable. A problem that I had with the G710 the joints in the cable deteriorated over time. With the replaceable cable, I can easily swap the cable with another MicroUSB cable if it does break.Overall, Qisan has built a product here that is not only cheap but actually have some advantages pricer options.