We use every resource at our disposal to find the best gaming keyboards and test them for your benefit. This started with diving deep into product ratings, user reviews, and word-of-mouth from the passionate gaming community. After narrowing it down to fewer than 20 of the most popular gaming keyboards, we bought the products ourselves and developed an exhaustive testing process that evaluates six key metrics: Performance, comfort, hardware options, typing noise, type experience, and lighting.
Performance
Gamers want to game, and they want to do it well. They want it to be a fun and responsive experience, with no added frustrations or hardware limitations holding them back. That's why performance is the most important metric for gaming keyboards and the one we weighed most heavily in our evaluations. To arrive at an objective performance score for each product, we precisely measured latency, polling/scan rates, and key rollover limitations.
We test the latency of a keyboard using a specialized rig consisting of two computers, a solenoid, a latency test box, and connective wires attached via copper tape. With this method, we can determine how long it takes for our inputs to register down to the millisecond. The fastest keyboards tend to have a mere 2ms delay, but even 20ms would be imperceptibly fast for the vast majority of users. Even so, a difference of milliseconds can mean life or death in an FPS shootout.
The polling rate of a keyboard refers to how often it sends information to the connected device, while the scan rate refers to how often the keyboard itself scans for new inputs. As a rule of thumb, gaming keyboards should register polling/scan rates of 1,000 Hz. Hardcore rhythm game players may have a need for polling/scan rates up to 8,000 Hz. We verify this metric using dedicated keyboard inspection software.
Key rollover refers to the number of keys you can press simultaneously without any conflicts. A poor-performing keyboard will only accept a few inputs at once and will fail to accept any more keystrokes beyond that rollover amount. This is unacceptable for gaming, as many scenarios demand you to perform many concurrent actions such as moving your character and camera, activating abilities, and inputting other multi-key commands, all at once. That is why we use dedicated software to check keyboard rollover capabilities, with the ideal being that the best gaming keyboards will have an indefinite “N-key” rollover.
Comfort
When we evaluate comfort for gaming keyboards, we consider how easy it is to reach every key on the board. Ideally, there should be adjustable angles to accommodate various preferences and hand sizes. We also pay special attention to the possibility of strain in the hand, wrist, or fingers. To test this, we put each keyboard to extensive use through hours of actual gaming and typing. We firmly believe that a quality palm rest is an essential comfort feature, so we score highly for products that include a rest by default.
Hardware Options
In the hardware options category, we primarily consider the number of switch options provided by the manufacturer at checkout. There is hardly an objectively superior choice when it comes to switches — some gamers like smooth-feeling linear switches, some like the feedback of tactile switches, and others enjoy the sounds of clicky switches. More options is always a plus in this regard. We also add points if the keyboard comes in other sizes, such as full-sized, tenkeyless, or 60% variants. Lastly, we consider how customizable the hardware is by checking if the switches and keycaps are easily hot-swappable.
Typing Noise
There are two reasons to evaluate a gaming keyboard's typing noise: The volume can affect your own enjoyment and its usability in shared spaces, and the sound profile can be a determining factor for gamers with discerning ears. To test this metric, we precisely measured the average volume of the keys using a decibel reader. We individually tested various keys across each board, keeping in mind that spacebars, backspace keys, and other differently shaped areas can produce different sounds. To help us accurately describe the sound profile of each board as either “creamy,” "clacky," “thocky,” or somewhere in between, we exposed each keyboard to multiple testers so we could gather various impartial opinions.
Type Experience
To communicate what it's like to play or type on these gaming keyboards, we collected objective data that helps us communicate our own impressions. We did this using a MecMesin force-displacement tester that accurately determines where the actuation point of a key is in millimeters, as well as the distance to that point and the overall travel distance of an entire stroke. The device also measures the average operating force and bottoming-out force by units of gram force (gf). This tells us how much effort it takes to use a keyboard, which translates to either a smooth or burdensome gameplay experience.
Other, more subjective factors contributed to our final evaluation of typing experience. We took notes on how much the individual keys wobbled. We also considered how the spacing between keys and the lightness of their pressing contributed to typos or misclicks. All of these factors come together to determine whether the keyboard feels like an extension of the gamer's skills or a source of frustration that impedes gameplay.
Lighting
Lighting is a factor that clearly has no bearing on gameplay, but it's a vital source of aesthetic appeal and self-expression for many gamers. As such, we take our evaluation of lighting customization very seriously. We took a deep dive into any accompanying software to how robust the personalization options are and how easy it is to navigate. We also took a close look at the keyboards' LEDs themselves to gauge their brightness and the accuracy of the colors. The best gaming keyboards we tested had excellent color accuracy, intuitive software, and lighting customization on a per-key basis.