Nobody demands it, I know. But I got you to click on this crap so
I'm always looking for value and this combination of features seemed too good to pass up. 104 key, full RGB with 18 lighting modes, macro capability, metal construction. So where were the corners cut?
The keycaps are trash. The edges are jarringly sharp and it seems like the spacebar is the worst offender. When typing on this thing I have to remember to keep my thumb above parallel otherwise the bruising starts. Keep in mind, I'm a four-time Professional Thumb Wrestling World Champion as far as you know so I can deal with some thumb pain. This design, however, is just bad. The surfaces of the caps are glossy and while they seem durable they also seem very not durable. Like they're made well from crap material. They're doubleshot but somehow it feels like the lettering will wipe off if I tried. I think this is just down to the gloss finish feeling so cheap. I'm going to be replacing them as soon as possible.
Somewhere else corners may have been cut is the PCB. The one I'm typing on now is actually the second. It's a hot swap board and includes extra switches so you can experiment with them. Cool. So I swap a couple of keys out and... tilde through backspace died. Hwut? The switches worked, but I got no signal across the traces. I have no idea why this happened but Amazon swapped it out so whatever. This seems to be a known issue with a number of reviews talking about DOA keyboards or problems that cropped up after some use. If I have any issues with this replacement I'll come back and post it here but I don't really have a reason to think it's super common for these things to fail. No more so than any other low-price keyboard of dubious manufacture, that is. For all I know it was some sort of pilot error that killed the previous one.
Oh, the software is kind of incredibly lame as well. On my system it doesn't even fully load everything so I have minimal configurability. Eh. That's not why I bought it anyway. This may be a show-stopper for others. I don't care.
So what are the positives?
Let's start with this base. Holy hell. It's just a solid chunk of aluminum channel with some aluminum caps bolted to the ends and an aluminum top plate. It's solid as hell and by itself provides a solid start for building something much more interesting out of. It's nice and weighty. Flex? Nah. Not going to happen. Need to make a hasty exit through a window? Just throw this thing at it. It will win.
The switches are decent. They're Redragon branded MX-compatible browns. I've read in a couple of places that they're rebranded Outemu but can't comment on that one way or another. Compared to my CM Storm Stealth that has Cherry MX browns the Redragon feels a bit stiffer. The bump is more pronounced and happens earlier. Overall they come across like someone had the idea of Cherry MX browns described to them, they created what they thought that would feel like, and they got pretty close. They're not great, they're not terrible. Construction quality seems perfectly fine. Tolerances probably aren't as solid as Cherry branded switches and I have a feeling they won't last for tens of millions of keystrokes but who the hell has so few boards they'll put that many keystrokes into one? Just play the odds, you'll be fine.
For $60 you're obviously not getting a top quality board. So who should buy it? Noobs. Noobs should buy it. It's cheap enough that if you forget not to let the hot pokey thing sit too long on the black squarey thing you won't cry over it. The base alone is damn near worth the price of admission. Get some new keycaps, maybe get a couple cheap sets of MX-compatible switches to try out, and see if you want to jump full force into the insanity of this weirdass hobby. If you're already in the deep end you're not buying this board. It's as simple as that.
TL;DR: Hobby noobs rejoice.