To start this mini-review off, I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year! Hopefully you started your 2015 off right. I was lucky enough to head back to my hometown to spend time with my family and puppy. I also want to give a shoutout to nubbinator who loaned me this board so I could try it out. The pictures I took were awful so I will be borrowing nubbinator’s pictures of this board. All pictures here his work.
Anyways, I think that it’s safe to say that
one of 2014’s biggest announcement was the advent of MX clone switches. There
has been quite a few threads discussing Kailh and other clones. If you’re curious, I also wrote two reviews covering Kailh switches. The first was a
Keycool 87 with Kailh Blues. The second was a
Nixeus Moda with Kailh Browns.
Both of those reviews were positive. Turns out that just because they’re clones or compatible switches, doesn’t mean that they’re bad. But there is an undercurrent of distrust among the community that there are bad clones out there. I found the bad clones. I was seriously so excited to have found the worst MX switch I have ever tried, that I called HoffmanMyster and had a twenty minute phone call sharing the moment with him. To quote Louis CK “And it feels good, it feels good to have found bottom. And there’s a comfort in knowing that I’ve tried the worst MX-esque switches of my life.” These are awful switches. Terrible switches. They are everything the community was afraid of. What switches are they?
Cherry MX clones from TaoBao: Pink MX Stems.
So the setup for this board:
- FaceW PCB
- Abo Studio White Tops
- GMK Dolch, Purple Mods, and Cyan Spacebar
- Chinese/TaoBao Pink MX Clone Stems with 68g Gold Springs
Pros: The stems were in fact pink; just as they were advertised.
Cons: Everything else.
Supposedly the stems are supposed to be somewhere between MX Browns and MX Clears. For starters, regardless of the switch location, all of the switches feel gritty. It’s like someone rolled the stems in the street. Afterwards they reassembled the switch and sprinkled gravel inside. Seriously, the switches felt gritty with a lot of friction. I have written in my notes that they felt “grindy”; as if the switches didn’t want to actuate at all. When the switches did work, they seemed to hover between Browns and 68g Linears. By far the worst offenders on this board were the modifiers. They would have two bottom outs: one was a stop halfway down which was very hard, the other was the proper bottom out.
I hated these switches. I hated them so much I messaged nubbinator in advance to ask him if I should post anything since these switches were so bad. He actually agreed that they were terrible and that he needed to change them out. So if you were thinking of trying these out? Don’t bother.
Thanks again to nubbinator for loaning these boards and taking these pictures. They’re obviously all his handiwork and I’m borrowing them since I took awful potato pictures.