I Tried Over 40 Keyboards Last Year... (So You Don't Have to.)

I tried over 40 keyboards last year so you don't have to why so you don't have to well do you really want to be the guy that tried over 40 keyboards I mean just look at that closet now you might be wondering well if you've tried 40 keyboards what keyboard do I buy well howdy hey I'm hip yo Tech and let me take you back through the last year of videos that I made to answer that question I'll be walking you through some of my favorite keyboards I've checked out all year you know what as a bonus I'll also show you my favorite switches and keycaps and my least favorite but first let's set some rules in order to respect your time I'm only going to show you keyboards that are either in stock right now or shortly and I'll have everything in this video linked down in the description now with somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 videos uploaded last year not counting shorts you might be wondering where am I gonna start well first I'm going to start by showing you some of my most basic recommendations then I'll get into stuff like switches and keycaps and then finally I'll show you the budget Kings speaking of Kings if you find this video helpful at all then be a king and hit that subscribe button you can always unsubscribe later if you're an avid viewer of the hippiotech channel you might see key crown on the screen and go hipio really again well I started off 2022 by checking out the kikron cube too and almost a year later kikron boards are still one of the most good enough options for keyboards you thought I was going to say the best there well no key Crown is not the best however what keycon does offer with their q line of keyboards is a really consistent base to start building your first keyboard off of if you're just getting into custom keyboards or you stumbled upon this video by an accident then kikron probably has a keyboard that fits your ideal layout starting around 170 dollars fully assembled they're on the pricier side but listening to that they can sound really good once you mod them now as I mentioned before these are by no means the best and I'll talk about that later now if you just want a keyboard that works keychron is pretty good but they have an even cheaper offering that I'll be saving for later in this video we'll talk about it soon now I get this question a lot hippie of the GM MK Pro is it good well I built a gmmk pro last year it was a custom and it's fine and it's really overpriced and you should probably cross it off your list it's not really worth your time now speaking of things that are worth your time these are my honorable mentions like a dad going out for milk these may or may not be in stock um wait we left that in anyways the first board is the Bakken Echo 65. I checked this out earlier in this year and I even tried out my favorite mod ever on it this board has a lot of potential and if you see it on sale it is definitely worth picking up but it's out of stock almost all the time like it's it's out of stock a lot but listen to it pretty good now some of you might know me as the guy that fills keyboards with random things and 2022 was no stranger to that I failed a keyboard with sand yes sand the Nova 65. it's a decent enough keyboard and they made a second version of it but it's not necessarily worth getting unless you want to fill it with sand now you're probably thinking hipio why is this keyboard's unique characteristic that you can fill it with sand well it actually has to do with the back also it's kinetic sand uh it's a good video by the way you should go watch that video after the this video okay so the back plate is transparent so when you flip it over you can see the sand that is all also it sounds really good next we have the zoom 65 and you could also group in the qk65 with it they're both incredibly good boards that serve an incredible value for where they're at when it's in stock the zoom 65 starts at 159 US Dollars and I heard they're running around too if it's out I'll leave it linked below an even better value is the zoom tkl that comes in at 179 us and beats out the keychron Q Whatever by a mile if you don't know much about custom keyboards then these are like the high-end keyboards at a mid-range price which is pretty good they aren't perfect by any means but if they happen to be in stock when you're watching this video then they're worth checking out this is just an honorable mention I also built a marble keyboard last year and filled it with succulents by the way the succulents are doing really good now I might have tried 40 keyboards last year but I tried a lot more than 40 switches now you might think all keyboard switches are the same there's no difference between any of them well you're kind of right but you're also very wrong keyboard switches come in all different shapes and colors not really sizes though and let's talk about my favorite wujay switches now you may or may not have heard of the process of lubing switches where you manually brush Lube on switches to make them sound and feel better what I discovered last year is that it can frequently be a waste of time now we're seeing a lot more Factory Loop switches like the wuche studio switch line which I'll have linked down below full disclosure they are a sponsor of mine but these have quickly become one of my favorite switches for anything well here's why a lot of switches just end up scratchy and spring pingy out of the box when they're not Factory looped I've tried many many different batches from wuche and they always end up incredibly consistently lubed and really good I've honestly never needed to lube one of these by hand and I've use them in many different builds over the last year whether it be their Reds or their tactiles another strong Contender is some of the echo CS switches that are pre-looped they're incredibly affordable and if you do decide to lube them they can sound incredibly thoughty now I haven't checked out a lot of echo keyboards in the past but I'll be checking one out next week so make sure you subscribed for that but what I will say is overall if you want to lube switches then you really can't go wrong with most stuff once you put in the effort to lube a switch it ends up good enough if you do want to Loop switches then my personal favorite are The Gather on hippos these aren't my switch at all but I like them a lot because they're hippos again they aren't my switch but they sound great I love them oh yeah no now you might be wondering hippo why would I ever want to watch a segment on keyboards that I shouldn't buy well I'm gonna tell you why you shouldn't buy them and what to look out for in other boards the winner of worst keyboards of last year goes to NZXT their function lineup was incredibly unuser friendly and just ended up leaving me incredibly mad don't believe me well just watch this little segment of how mad I was you glued the wires I'm done I quit keyboards canceled another keyboard not worth buying is the cyberboard it's incredibly beautiful but incredibly expensive and really just not worth it but what I did learn last year is that 100 thieves can make a better keyboard but they're still not worth and that even if a keyboard is 35 that doesn't really mean that you should buy it I upgraded one of the cheapest keyboards on Amazon and it just didn't turn out that great [Music] now I can't go through literally every keyboard that I've ever looked at but you can just assume that some of them aren't the best I don't care about plastic now I've literally made a whole entire music video about how I hate keyboard group buys and keycaps mostly because they're always out of stock and you can never buy the nicest ones they're also really expensive well for around 25 bucks you can get these B keycaps they look amazingly cute they're a flat profile and I really like them or for around 40 to 100 depending on the sale you can get these really tall profile Iron Man keycaps one thing that's definitely gotten better in the last year is that if you've ever heard of gmk keycaps they're like the quote-unquote most popular well they're now frequently in stock at drop.com but if a hundred dollars plus is too much for you then you can get these Idabel blue cat keycaps for only 50 bucks which is a really good value they sound amazing now drop used to run a thing called the keycap club I have no idea if they do but they do just have a ton of install keycaps so that's probably your best place to look first for example gmk Serenity pictured here incredibly beautiful and in stock there's also offerings from Echo that you can end up getting for quite cheap although some of them are clones which is a little bit cringe basically with keycaps just get something that you like and is relatively affordable which would probably not be the ceramic keycaps that I looked at earlier they are incredibly cool and sound brilliantly amazing but they're also very expensive and Incredibly Niche but I really hope we get more creative keycap materials in the future as this was definitely a very cool experiment that is practical too it looks amazing with RGB just look at that that's like epic gamer time to the max now if you're ready for my incredibly biased opinion I think the best keycaps you could possibly get right now are polycaps hippo this is in fact my keycap set and you can get it for 79.99 from kinetic labs this is a die sub PBT set that I worked very hard to bring to fruition so obviously the best keycaps are mine and there are no other better keycaps that is a joke that is a joke now I liked all those other keyboards I checked out earlier but these are some of my most favorite first let's start with the nj80 I built this keyboard with my friend Jeremy who was amazingly awesome now it's incredibly similar to the kikron V1 which we'll talk about later but I kind of just like the look a lot better it's also just a great Bare Bones build speaking of a great Bare Bones build as I mentioned before the zoom tkl is definitely my primary winner of the year as far as boards that I've looked at now it's not necessarily my favorite layout but if you're looking for a tkl and it's in stock check out the zoom tkl and check out my cat Nola I got a cat last year also some of my other favorite keyboards are the wooden keyboards from bear creative pictured here is the wooden kl90 now he didn't cut down the trees with his hands but I did build this keyboard for settled who has like 99 wood cutting or something I also built the world's most cursed keyboard for urban Rescue Ranch ah it's brilliant for some reason this video didn't get pushed to anyone's algorithm so you definitely missed this one definitely missed it now we started this video with keychron and we'll end this video with kikron you remember earlier when I mentioned there was a cheaper better option well the kikron V Series has expanded so much this year that they have coverage in almost every single layout for a disturbingly cheap price starting at 64 for Bare Bones the v-series definitely blew me away like just listen to this this is totally stuck now are there better keyboards most definitely but if you're super budget conscious then it's kind of hard to go wrong with one of these it covers all the basics and is a really good entry point into the hobby even more so than the Q Series and now that it's expanded into more layouts the kikron V series is my winner of the Year overall but what was my favorite keyboard that I used every single day well that's a bit more interesting I cracked my Knuckles there I don't know if you could hear it the keyboard I used every day was an electro capacitive keyboard that was built on the bare bones of a niz micro 84. this type of keyboard is incredibly subjective although I really just love the feel of it and the sound it's so mushy and wonderful um just like me please go comment hippo you're mushy and wonderful thank you wait I just realized that's kind of weird don't comment that and here's a quick little sound test it sounds and feels a bit mushy but honestly I just like the feel of the non-mechanical switches from time to time but I hope you like the feel of this video as I got to go back and reminisce on all my old past videos if anything I hope this makes you realize that there's a million different options out there and one isn't necessarily the best for you but I hope you two find your dream keyboard and I hope you have a great rest of your year

Channel: Hipyo Tech

Views: 623,669

Keywords: keyboard, mechanical keyboard, mechanical, switch, switch review, novel keys, keys, gateron, kalih, sound test, switch sound test, keyboard sound test, keyboard asmr, asmr, typing asmr, mech keyboard, aesthetic, wholesome, reddit, id80, panda, alpacas, krytox 205, krytox, type, test, keyboard mod, keyboard asmr mod, TKL keyboard, red, 65%, 60%, RGB 65%, taehatypes, :3ildcat, 3ildcat, tech, MKBHD, Linus tech tips, Taeha Types, Tech Review, Banggood Review

Id: 4RYD_rbO_fw

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/chill-hai-yaar]

i hate hipyo so much ngl. dunno why so many keeb youtubers are so judgemental and annoying, and talk like their judgement is the final verdict. i like switch and click, consumer tech review, but this guy and his fake voice just might be the worst fucking thing on keeb yt

[u/M108Falcon]

Ik this is off topic but watch Scott K of Keybored and/or Clackbait, the production quality, content and vibe are much much better

[u/SpectralVoodoo]

Oh god no, this man annoys me to my very bones