Help me find my keyboard

[nashogon]

Hello everyone,

Thank you for reading this.

I want to purchase a mechanical keyboard, I always had a $5 dollars keyboard and now want to do a big upgrade, I'm looking for a Mechanical Keyboard that meets this criteria:

- Black color. (+RGB, it would be awesome if I had RGB too but not mandatory)
- Size of 80%.
- Red/Brown switches preferably, I heard they are the best for gaming.
- The back of the keyboard to be made of metal/inox if possible.

Looking forward to your suggestions, my budget is 100-150$ but I can go higher, shoot anything at me:)

[Sup]

you won't find a aluminium TKL for 150 dollars its more at the 300 mark and that is the ones that where available but yeah out of stock. Just look for Leopold TKL or Varmilo for the RGB.

[envyy24]

You can look into this:

XD87 pcb: $37, cheaper if you can wait for a few more days
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32892540743.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000013.3.7b9951fae3FD2N&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreThisSeller&scm=1007.14977.166124.0&scm_id=1007.14977.166124.0&scm-url=1007.14977.166124.0&pvid=c6aff3c1-6556-4b72-8b07-a92918ee1fd6&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreThisSeller,scm-url:1007.14977.166124.0,pvid:c6aff3c1-6556-4b72-8b07-a92918ee1fd6,tpp_buckets:668%230%23131923%239_668%23808%235965%23334_668%23888%233325%2315

Bent stainless steel case: $47
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001667438.html?spm=2114.12057483.0.0.6e05234aRTvr5b

Stab is expected to be about $10 more

Gateron red is cheap, 90 of them is around $35 or more (I think). The rest of the money can be thrown in some set of keycaps.

[rxc92]

you won't find a aluminium TKL for 150 dollars its more at the 300 mark and that is the ones that where available but yeah out of stock.

 
That's completely wrong. You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180 (https://kbdfans.com/collections/fully-assembled-keyboard/products/fully-assembled-kdb75-mechanical-keyboard). 
 

[Sup]

you won't find a aluminium TKL for 150 dollars its more at the 300 mark and that is the ones that where available but yeah out of stock.

 
That's completely wrong. You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180 (https://kbdfans.com/collections/fully-assembled-keyboard/products/fully-assembled-kdb75-mechanical-keyboard).

Talking about a 80% not 75%

[Leslieann]

You can look into this:
XD87 pcb: $37, cheaper if you can wait for a few more days
Stab is expected to be about $10 more
Gateron red is cheap, 90 of them is around $35 or more (I think). The rest of the money can be thrown in some set of keycaps.

This is about the closest you can come to the price asked and still comes closer to the $200 mark.
Unfortunately almost every part on it is the cheapest you can get.

I'm not saying it's a bad board, but it's really working hard to just make it work. It's like buying the cheapest stripped down base model Mercedes just to say you have a Mercedes when you could have had a really nice Honda or even a Lexus.

That's completely wrong. You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180 (https://kbdfans.com/collections/fully-assembled-keyboard/products/fully-assembled-kdb75-mechanical-keyboard).

That $190 doesn't include switches, which adds another $18 (minimum) and then you have caps and shipping. You are WELL over $200 at that point even if you get some very cheap caps.

[envyy24]

Ha ha yes, because op asked for metal in his board so I suggested it. But yeah there is the wait and the assembly. Otherwise, just go with leopold like Sup suggested, solid choice.

[rxc92]

That's completely wrong. You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180 (https://kbdfans.com/collections/fully-assembled-keyboard/products/fully-assembled-kdb75-mechanical-keyboard).

That $190 doesn't include switches, which adds another $18 (minimum) and then you have caps and shipping. You are WELL over $200 at that point even if you get some very cheap caps.

 
 
It literally does, it includes Gateron browns at no extra cost. So it adds $0 minimum, and shipping is extremely cheap (on the range of $8-10). I had mine fitted with Hakos and the total cost, shipping included was $190 (despite Hakos being much more expensive than their default switches). With standard Gateron switches and a cheap set of ABS caps it'd cost somewhere around $220 shipping included; it's much cheaper to buy off of taobao than their English site.

[Sup]

That's completely wrong. You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180 (https://kbdfans.com/collections/fully-assembled-keyboard/products/fully-assembled-kdb75-mechanical-keyboard).

That $190 doesn't include switches, which adds another $18 (minimum) and then you have caps and shipping. You are WELL over $200 at that point even if you get some very cheap caps.

 
 
It literally does, it includes Gateron browns at no extra cost. So it adds $0 minimum, and shipping is extremely cheap (on the range of $8-10). I had mine fitted with Hakos and the total cost, shipping included was $190 (despite Hakos being much more expensive than their default switches). With standard Gateron switches and a cheap set of ABS caps it'd cost somewhere around $220 shipping included; it's much cheaper to buy off of taobao than their English site.

Still doesn't make it a TKL

[Leslieann]

It literally does, it includes Gateron browns at no extra cost. So it adds $0 minimum, and shipping is extremely cheap (on the range of $8-10). I had mine fitted with Hakos and the total cost, shipping included was $190 (despite Hakos being much more expensive than their default switches). With standard Gateron switches and a cheap set of ABS caps it'd cost somewhere around $220 shipping included; it's much cheaper to buy off of taobao than their English site.

Blah, I missed that, what a terrible product page.

It still doesn't come with caps and yes, you can get some cheap ones, but I'll refer back to what I said earlier, you're short changing yourself just to make it work and biting you later. If you want other switches it means a complete desolder, spending $20 on cheap caps now is money you will not get back. Sure, it;s $20 but it's also 10% of your cost and for what, to say you have a custom?

When building a high end, premium keyboard of your dreams you don't short change the most important parts of it (switches, stabs and caps). You're just setting yourself up for disapointment.

[rxc92]

It literally does, it includes Gateron browns at no extra cost. So it adds $0 minimum, and shipping is extremely cheap (on the range of $8-10). I had mine fitted with Hakos and the total cost, shipping included was $190 (despite Hakos being much more expensive than their default switches). With standard Gateron switches and a cheap set of ABS caps it'd cost somewhere around $220 shipping included; it's much cheaper to buy off of taobao than their English site.

Blah, I missed that, what a terrible product page.

It still doesn't come with caps and yes, you can get some cheap ones, but I'll refer back to what I said earlier, you're short changing yourself just to make it work and biting you later. If you want other switches it means a complete desolder, spending $20 on cheap caps now is money you will not get back. Sure, it;s $20 but it's also 10% of your cost and for what, to say you have a custom?

When building a high end, premium keyboard of your dreams you don't short change the most important parts of it (switches, stabs and caps). You're just setting yourself up for disapointment.

 
 
I don't get what you're trying to say. Nobody was talking about getting a custom, and I specifically said that it was a prebuilt? My post consisted of these words: "You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180" You're putting words in my mouth here. 
It's just a good aluminum keyboard with my choice of switches (and nice RGB as an extra). It's obviously not going to be as fancy as a prebuilt, but it's far more economical and you get 90% of the features for 30-40% of the price, which is good for people such as myself who'd rather not part with $500+ for a custom that you have to build yourself that will inevitably be done worse than if it were by a professional, take often several months to over a year to come in, and carry the risk of getting completely shafted out of your money.

[Leslieann]

I don't get what you're trying to say. Nobody was talking about getting a custom, and I specifically said that it was a prebuilt? My post consisted of these words: "You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180" You're putting words in my mouth here. 
It's just a good aluminum keyboard with my choice of switches (and nice RGB as an extra). It's obviously not going to be as fancy as a prebuilt, but it's far more economical and you get 90% of the features for 30-40% of the price, which is good for people such as myself who'd rather not part with $500+ for a custom that you have to build yourself that will inevitably be done worse than if it were by a professional, take often several months to over a year to come in, and carry the risk of getting completely shafted out of your money.

You don't understand because you're confused about terminology.
KBDfans is a Chinese custom, it's not a prebuilt, they are the designer, they are the manufacturer and they are built to order.

Anyone with half decent soldering skills, which is not hard to acquire, will turn out a decent assembly. You don't even need to be that good to make a working keyboard, switches are pretty darn easy to do, you can watch a Youtube tutorial and use a $5 iron from the dollar store and pull it off. If you know anyone who can solder (attend a hackerspace), they can teach you in 5 minutes.

[rxc92]

I don't get what you're trying to say. Nobody was talking about getting a custom, and I specifically said that it was a prebuilt? My post consisted of these words: "You can get a full aluminum prebuilt with diffuser/RGB from KBDfans for $180" You're putting words in my mouth here. 
It's just a good aluminum keyboard with my choice of switches (and nice RGB as an extra). It's obviously not going to be as fancy as a prebuilt, but it's far more economical and you get 90% of the features for 30-40% of the price, which is good for people such as myself who'd rather not part with $500+ for a custom that you have to build yourself that will inevitably be done worse than if it were by a professional, take often several months to over a year to come in, and carry the risk of getting completely shafted out of your money.

You don't understand because you're confused about terminology.
KBDfans is a Chinese custom, it's not a prebuilt, they are the designer, they are the manufacturer and they are built to order.

Anyone with half decent soldering skills, which is not hard to acquire, will turn out a decent assembly. You don't even need to be that good to make a working keyboard, switches are pretty darn easy to do, you can watch a Youtube tutorial and use a $5 iron from the dollar store and pull it off. If you know anyone who can solder (attend a hackerspace), they can teach you in 5 minutes.

 
 
Again, you're arguing with someone who doesn't exist. KBDfans boards are 'custom' in the same way that a Corsair K keyboard is 'custom'; your only choice is the model (like Tofu, Tina, whatever) and switch. If that's what a 'custom' is to you (since there's no official terminology), then sure, that's a custom. To me that's just a prebuilt, albeit the one doing the building is an expert who probably makes thousands of keyboards per year and would result in significantly better quality than me using a "Youtube tutorial and... $5 iron". 
 
I really, really don't see what you're arguing with or about.

[Maledicted]

People are going to hate me for this but ... boom:

CORSAIR K65 LUX RGB Compact Mechanical Keyboard - USB Passthrough & Media Controls - Linear & Quiet - Cherry MX Red - RGB LED Backlit

It ticks literally all boxes, with other nice goodies like some volume keys (if you like those, I do). These also sell like hotcakes too, so you might be able to find a used one on Ebay, Craigslist, etc ... for significantly less than retail. I have purchased multiple non-RGB K65s for $25-50 each.

Caps will be the weak point, as they're relatively thin and probably laser ablated or something. Corsair sells PBT doubleshots as well, if you want them down the road. Other options will be limited as the bottom row does not follow standard cap sizes/spacing.

People seem to really like to hate on Corsair, but I have used two separate K70s almost daily, completely stock, for 5-6+ years straight now (one at work and one for gaming at home), and I have had 0 problems with them. I recently swapped some box navies into a K65 and that's now a really fun keyboard as well.

[Leslieann]

Again, you're arguing with someone who doesn't exist. KBDfans boards are 'custom' in the same way that a Corsair K keyboard is 'custom'; your only choice is the model (like Tofu, Tina, whatever) and switch. If that's what a 'custom' is to you (since there's no official terminology), then sure, that's a custom. To me that's just a prebuilt, albeit the one doing the building is an expert who probably makes thousands of keyboards per year and would result in significantly better quality than me using a "Youtube tutorial and... $5 iron". 

Corsair orders 500 or 5000 pf each in 4 or 5 switch combinations from a company in China who assembles, tests and the sends them on a pallet, boxed and ready for shipping to stores, that's about 25,000 items, but only 5 variations or product skus.

KBDfans has a few frames of each color (that they designed and probably manufacturered in house) and boxes of parts that you pick and choose which are then assembled to your specs, that is the very definition of custom or bespoke.

And switch only?
Tofu comes in 12 colors, 2 plates, 2 stabs and 60 some switches, that is around 3000 different combinations and product skus. That's a logistical nightmare if you were to prebuild and pre-package them like Corsair does with theirs, not to mention insanely expensive since there are minimum order quantities when you do this in bulk. Then you have the fact that some combinations may never get sold at all and will just be taking up warehouse space.


As for soldering switches, take it down from that pedestal.
You don't need a prayer to Cthulhu, 5 years training and daily practice to solder switches. There's lots of reasons people hire a professional to install switches, but it's not required in order to have a nice keyboard. Switches are pathetically easy to do into a fresh pcb, one of the easiest things in electronics quite frankly.

People seem to really like to hate on Corsair

They just happened to be one of the first names that came to mind.

[Maledicted]

As for soldering switches, take it down from that pedestal.
You don't need a prayer to Cthulhu, 5 years training and daily practice to solder switches. There's lots of reasons people hire a professional to install switches, but it's not required in order to have a nice keyboard. Switches are pathetically easy to do into a fresh pcb, one of the easiest things in electronics quite frankly.

Agreed. Soldering keyboard switches is one of the easiest things I have ever done in regard to soldering. Literally anybody could do it with a decent 5 minute Youtube tutorial and some cheap hardware store supplies, and with moderate attention to detail and just a tiny bit of practice, they're probably going to do a lot better job than most factories will.

People seem to really like to hate on Corsair

They just happened to be one of the first names that came to mind.

I meant in general, I didn't factor in the fact that Corsair's K series had already come up in this thread. There seem to be a lot of reports of problems with them, from everything from the cap legends wearing, to LEDs burning out, to dead switches.

Oddly enough, I can't seem to find a single case of that ever actually happening out of the 7-8+ Corsair boards I have purchased, mostly used and/or used by myself for many years straight. It makes me think some people just have a vendetta against them.

[Leslieann]

Oddly enough, I can't seem to find a single case of that ever actually happening out of the 7-8+ Corsair boards I have purchased, mostly used and/or used by myself for many years straight. It makes me think some people just have a vendetta against them.

Unhappy people make the most noise.
It may be only a small percentage so odds of you getting one are slim, but multiplied by thousands of boards you have quite a few, angry and vocal people complaining.

This was something I saw when I was doing Android roms, you would get 18 who said it worked perfect and 6 people angry it didn't work on theirs and start asking why I wasn't paying more attention to their claims, since 25% are complaining. Sure, six people had a problem but I had thousands using it, is it really the rom or was it something they did that caused it, my money is on them. With some investigating we almost always got them working and it was almost always user error.

I saw this at the dotcom I worked at as well, we saw one product coming back again and again, it made up probably 80% of our returns (despite hundreds of products), when we asked the owner why he hadn't pulled them he actually laughed and said it was because we had no idea the sheer number we were selling. Turns out the failure rate was below probably less than 5% (on a part known for high failure) and it was our best selling product.

[Maledicted]

Unhappy people make the most noise.
It may be only a small percentage so odds of you getting one are slim, but multiplied by thousands of boards you have quite a few, angry and vocal people complaining.

Yeah, that makes sense. Who knows how many of the things Corsair has sold.

This was something I saw when I was doing Android roms, you would get 18 who said it worked perfect and 6 people angry it didn't work on theirs and start asking why I wasn't paying more attention to their claims, since 25% are complaining. Sure, six people had a problem but I had thousands using it, is it really the rom or was it something they did that caused it, my money is on them. With some investigating we almost always got them working and it was almost always user error.

Flashing Android ROMs is definitely not for people who ignore the directions. What sort of ROMs did you make? I have been running Cyanogenmod/LineageOS on various devices forever.

[envyy24]

People seem to really like to hate on Corsair, but I have used two separate K70s almost daily, completely stock, for 5-6+ years straight now (one at work and one for gaming at home), and I have had 0 problems with them. I recently swapped some box navies into a K65 and that's now a really fun keyboard as well.

Their quality is not really the problem. It is how much they charge for such quality.

[Maledicted]

People seem to really like to hate on Corsair, but I have used two separate K70s almost daily, completely stock, for 5-6+ years straight now (one at work and one for gaming at home), and I have had 0 problems with them. I recently swapped some box navies into a K65 and that's now a really fun keyboard as well.

Their quality is not really the problem. It is how much they charge for such quality.

Is their price unwarranted if they're constructed of thick aluminum and will last just as long as any other board that may cost twice as much, or more? It would be nice if they dropped Cherry and brought their prices down, but it seems like they're wed to them. As mentioned before, the sheer number of these things that are spit out means you can get some really nice boards for pretty cheap on the secondhand market, if you don't mind not being able to always use standard caps.

[Leslieann]

Flashing Android ROMs is definitely not for people who ignore the directions. What sort of ROMs did you make? I have been running Cyanogenmod/LineageOS on various devices forever.

I was modding stock roms as well as Cyanogenmod and stopped a couple years ago. At peak, I think I was supporting over a dozen roms for 6 or 7 phones. I still mess with them occasionally, but I don't release them to the public anymore.

Last phone had Lineage/Resurection which I tweaked a little, current is just a stock S9 but lots of software tweaks without rooting. It's the first Android I've had that lasted more than a week before I rooted it, but that's only because Google wised up and they found ways to use Knox instead of fighting it. I almost did it the other day though.  Facebook can go, well, I'm sure you know where that statement leads.

[envyy24]

Is their price unwarranted if they're constructed of thick aluminum and will last just as long as any other board that may cost twice as much, or more? It would be nice if they dropped Cherry and brought their prices down, but it seems like they're wed to them. As mentioned before, the sheer number of these things that are spit out means you can get some really nice boards for pretty cheap on the secondhand market, if you don't mind not being able to always use standard caps.

Yeah could be but they are very comfortable with where they are now. they know their keyboards are for gamers who want gaming brand. Don't think it is their intention to be appealing to these coders-typists bunch in geekhack. Not saying we do not game, but I think we prioritize comfort in working first then gaming second.

[Maledicted]

Is their price unwarranted if they're constructed of thick aluminum and will last just as long as any other board that may cost twice as much, or more? It would be nice if they dropped Cherry and brought their prices down, but it seems like they're wed to them. As mentioned before, the sheer number of these things that are spit out means you can get some really nice boards for pretty cheap on the secondhand market, if you don't mind not being able to always use standard caps.

Yeah could be but they are very comfortable with where they are now. they know their keyboards are for gamers who want gaming brand. Don't think it is their intention to be appealing to these coders-typists bunch in geekhack. Not saying we do not game, but I think we prioritize comfort in working first then gaming second.

Yes, agreed. I absolutely love the industrial look of their boards though. Just like how I still really want to ATX mod an XPS 700 series desktop for the same aesthetic reasons.